Quality Speaks

I was checking out a friend's book on Amazon and I noticed something new. Amazon was claiming that for the ebook price: You Save: $13.00 (81%)

Huh? Save $13? On an ebook that was 2.99 and is now still 2.99?

Well, guess what, this is false advertising because you're not saving money on the same product, i.e. the paper book version.

They're comparing different products and claiming a savings? Tell me how that's logical.

Guess what. People aren't buying ebooks because they're embracing new technology, a big reason is because someone has artificially forced a lower price on ebooks in order to destroy the marketability of paper books. Do you seriously think that people would continue to buy more ebooks than paper if the prices where somewhat realistic and not priced like dollar store products?



Has anyone checked out the books on the Amazon Best Seller ranking? Curious. When I looked at it a couple of weeks ago, it was full of books that were priced .99-2.99. That tells me the a great deal about the value of the Amazon Best Seller rankings. It reflects people love buying cheap stuff.

Just look at the plethora of dollar stores and how well they do. But does anyone value dollar store products or think they're of high quality? Try buying a nail clipper where the metal is so weak that it bends when you try to use it. I made the mistake of getting one. I will never buy another one from there again. I want at least a minimal quality in my products.

I checked out the Amazon Bestseller rankings today, expecting more chuckles and surprise, surprise (I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me and I had to check that I didn't accidentally pull up the paper book rankings) the majority of the books were priced around 9.99 and most were from named authors and known publishers. Yes, there are still some cheaper 2.99 or less books on there (20 less than 1.99, 13 2.00-2.00= 33 out of 100 top Kindle books). This is a far cry from a few weeks ago when the majority were cheaply priced books.

Not that cheaply priced means crap, but honestly, there is a lot of cheap garbage out there.

One telling indicator of a good writer is the number of reviews. If a book is high on the Rankings and has supposedly sold hundreds, even thousands of books, but only a miniscule percentage, less than .1 percent actually like or hate it enough to bother to leave a review, it makes me wonder. Especially if the sale of one book doesn't translate to sales of other books from that author because like it or not, readers are loyal to the authors they like and tend to buy books from them because they know the quality they're going to get.

This proves my point that eventually people get tired of the novelty of cheap and go back to true quality products regardless of price.