Pricing

I've been doing a marketing course in B-school. It is definitely
interesting stuff, although I can see the challenges of applying it to
the book business though, especially as a micro-marketer. You've got
all sorts of categorizations (it's a very Aristotelian art) and you
try to place yourself and the marketplace in the right ones to
identify what you should do. Of course, a plethora of judgements are
made along the way. Naturally, I read all this stuff through the eye
of Suckerfish. What are it's strengths, weakness etc... How does it
handle the four Ps (product, place, promotion, price)?

My basic analysis to this point is simple. For Grobar, there are
hundreds of thousands of competitors. You can narrow it down very
specifically demographically and still have tens of thousands of
competitors. It is a distinct product in many ways, but the
competition is intense. Interestingly, though, despite intense
competition there is no price competition. Aside from old classics
nobody is trying to do it cheaper. From my reading, they release a
book at full-price - fail to sell all the copies - and then discount
the remainder. It used to be that they'd release a hard-cover first,
and then a cheaper softcover and then the discounting would start.

Suckerfish has no advantages aside from its product. The book is
strong and I've done the market research to back that up. Not
everybody likes it, but those who do LOVE it. And that's enough. So
how do you back that up from a marketing perspective? As a little guy,
distribution is tough and you can only use yourself for promotion. An
author can do a lot to kickstart things, but there are very real
limits. But as an indy publisher, Suckerfish can play with price.

Now, the automatic thought when playing with price is "if people see a
cheap book, they'll assume its crap." Or, "You don't sell any more
books at a lower price point, so why bother trying."

Well, I'm thinking I might just want to try. But not in the usual way.
My book have loving adherents who can sell on. My goal, from the
starting gate, should be to get as many of those people as possible. I
don't want the book to look cheap, I don't want it to look like a
remainder, but I want it to be quite affordable. So I thought, "Why
not an introductory price?" Just put a sticker on the books and sell
it for 20% off. Right off the bat, the book looks like a bargain - but
because the price will be rising it doesn't look cheap. You move lots
of copies early this way and then you remove the introductory offer.
If the book is well received by readers, then the people they tell
about it will come and buy the book at full-price. Having been
referred by word-of-mouth, they'll be willing to swallow a higher
price. You bring in the trend setters with the introductory offer and
you sell to the followers at full price.

This flips the traditional approach on its head - and it's probably
been tried before unsuccessfully. But I think it just might be
interesting. The question is just how to set things up so it works.

Happiness,

Joseph