Mistake Authors Make: #27 - Doing an Ebook Only
According to Forbes Magazine 19.5% of all books sold in the United States are Kindle titles. That’s a lot of ebooks! Further, ebooks now make up about 30% of all book sales, of which Amazon has a 65% share within that category.
USA Today reports that the number of ebooks sold last year grew by only 43%. Why do they say “only”? Because in previous years ebook growth was measured in triple digits. American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group show that 457 million ebooks were sold last year. That's up 4456% since 2008, when just 10 million ebooks were sold.
Other sources have reported that ebook sales have surpassed physical book sales, so sometimes it’s hard to know who to believe. But, in either scenario, there’s no arguing that there has been massive growth in the sales of ebooks over the last few years.
So, obviously, one needs to be putting their books out in ebook format. The rush to the digital world is immense, with Kindles, Nooks, iPads and other ebook reading devices selling in the millions of units per year. Many people consume books only in electronic format these days and the lack of an ebook version of your title would be a mistake.
But a far bigger mistake in our opinion is offering your book only in digital format. Let’s take a closer look at those numbers above. If what Forbes says is accurate, with 30% of the books sold being ebooks that means that 70% of the books sold are still old fashioned hardcover or softcover printed books. In fact, according to USA Today, last year there were 557 million hardcover books sold, which surpasses by itself the sales quantity of eBooks. By the time you add in paperback sales the difference is even more significant in the volume of physical vs. ebook sales.
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“70% of books sold are still hardcover or softcover printed books”
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Michael Pietsch, CEO of the Hachette Book Group, says, "In all the talk about ebooks, we often lose track of the fact that more than three out of four books sold in the U.S. are still printed ones." He also cites a survey from last year that found that half of all readers had no interest in buying ebooks and that the vast majority of people who buy ebooks continue to buy print books as well.
With the significant growth of ebooks over the last several years we find a lot of authors who want to dive into what we call the digital-only pond. In the information-marketing world we’ve seen many influential marketers make the move to a digital only platform, sometimes with disastrous results. Here are a couple of case studies to illustrate the impact having a physical version of an information product had on the sales and the stick rate of that product.
A well-known marketer was selling a home-study course that consisted of a manual and a set of CDs for $497. She decided to convert that product to digital delivery only at that same $497 price. Yet, she had the foresight to continue to offer a physical version of her product, albeit it at a higher price—$697. An amazing 80% of her customers were willing to spend the additional $200 to receive a physical version of the product. They still wanted something tangible they could hold in their hands.
Another example—a pair of marketers were selling a high priced program ($3000) on how to create information products. This was for a digital only version of the product. For an additional $500—or $3500 total—you could also receive a physical version of this product. In this case 40% of their customers were willing to spend an extra $500 to get a physical version. Not as impressive as the 80% in our first example but still very impressive nonetheless.
But what was even more eye-opening to us was the impact that it had on the stick rate of the product. People that purchased the digital only version of this product requested a refund at the rate of 22%. Those that opted for the physical version in addition refunded at a rate of just 8%. So even after their hard costs of producing and getting this product into the hands of their customers they put a lot more money in their pocket and kept their product into the hands of more customers by having a physical version.
Should you offer a digital version of your book? Undoubtedly. Should you offer only a digital version of your book? No, no, no, no, and no. There’s an illusion that the move to digital only would be much more profitable for publishers of books and information products. After all, if you don’t have the hard costs of printing and the delivery costs to put the product into the hands of your customers you’ll make more money, won’t you?
A few years ago a number of newsletter publishers got caught up in this dive into the digital only pond. They converted their physical newsletters to digital only delivery because they believed they would make more money. The result? Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. People still wanted a physical newsletter. They’d been “trained” that the deliverable was a physical item and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. Most of those publishers have returned to the physical format for their newsletters.
We do think it’s a good idea that if someone buys your book from you that they receive both a physical and digital version of your book for one price. That way they get the immediate deliverable in addition to the physical goods. Remember, people don’t want to buy a book. They want to buy a solution to the problem they have. So, if your book is, for example, about curing some health issue they might have they want that information now. So the digital/physical combination offers them the best of both worlds.
Ebooks will continue to have a massive impact on the book-publishing world. Just remember that so much of your potential audience would still prefer to curl up on the couch with a good old-fashioned physical book and turn the pages, one at a time.
Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from the Amazon bestseller "Mistakes Authors Make" by Rick Frishman, Bret Ridgway and Bryan Hane. Can't wait to get it a chapter at a time? Pick up your own copy today at your favorite online bookstore.