No worries for either camp. I want to start by telling you what a wonderful feeling this thread is giving me. It's great having people telling you that your stuff is worth more than your selling if for. Here is some comments to make you not worry about the implications of this thread:
1) I'm not going to raise the price on those who think PDFs should be cheep.
2) I'm not purposely selling my products short.
Pricing theory:
Billy Joe Jive hit on exactly the issue here. I'm not trying to sell products to people who KNOW they're good. If you like it, you'll buy it. I try to WRITE for you, so you don't stop buying, but I'm not selling at you, because that's usually just annoying. Who I am selling at are people who will think "it's a good buy for something I wasn't sure about and didn't know if I would even use." My goal is to pick up a slew of new customer's with every product and if you know who I am, you're probably buying anyway, so the new customera are likely people who don't know me from Adam.
I dream of a day when I can charge for products based on what they're actually worth. <Sigh> Right now, I'm building the business and the first product did VERY well, so I THINK it's working. We'll see. The price implications of the second product worry me some. I'd like to price it below the minimum buy on RPGnow, but I think that would actually hurt sales.
This all stemmed from a conversation with my expartner (we didn't part on bad terms, he just couldn't contribute to the company like he wanted) where he was remarking on the fact that he can get PDFs of all the books he uses in his business for free, and he thinks that game PDFs are vastly overpriced considering how little overhead an e-publishing firm has (it's actually a lot more than he thought, but I managed to do everything for as little as he thought I would because people have donated a lot of time and services to the cause.) He remarked that if he saw a product for 2.99, he'd buy it regardless of whether or not he thought he'd use it, that 2.99 was worth satisfying his curiosity alone.
Anyway, that pricepoint didn't work out because of the mimum checkout price, and RPGNow is where I'm getting ALL my new customers, but we're still experimenting with pricing. If you look at the full price of any of my products, that's how much I think the PDF is worth (Usually about half of the real book fee with some bonus pages thrown in). I charge half that betting that I will make twice the sales at half the price. I'm relatively certain the first product proved that out at 9.99. I earned promotion off the small press site in the first week (which I think is unheard of) and while a lot of marketing hoo ha went into that, when it was done, people who didn't play RM and so likely didn't know my name were buying my books. The question is will that hold true for product 2? The price seems . . . awkward to me, but if I didn't stick to my guns for at least one product, I'd always wonder if I made a mistake.
Anyway, that's behind the curtain on pricing. Basically, I write to take care of existing customers and price to compete for new customers. Feel free to post many review on RPGNow where you call me all sorts of variation of "imbecile" for how low the price is. That would almost certainly help sales.
