99 is the magic number

Sandra Parshall

Why would a writer offer the product of a year’s work for a mere 99 cents?

Some people are appalled to see authors “giving away” their work, but many who have self-published their new and out-of-print novels as e-books are tapping into the magical allure of the 99 cent price tag. 

 

Savvy marketers know they can sell almost anything for that

price. To the buyer, it’s a bargain, whatever “it” is, because it costs mere pennies. Move the price up to $1 and the sale will become harder to make. Sure, it’s all in our heads, a perceived difference rather than a real one, but moving the price down from dollars to cents is guaranteed to increase sales.

Steve Jobs, never a slouch in business matters, recognized the attraction of the 99 cent price. When Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003 (following the crackdown on internet music piracy), Jobs decreed that each single music track sold would cost 99 cents. Even consumers who had grown used to getting music for free (illegally) were willing to pay mere pennies for songs. The prices have since gone up – new singles are now $1.29 – but the phenomenal success of iTunes was built on the 99 cent price tag.

Even when a product costs considerably more than pennies, merchants still draw on the attraction of the 99 cent price by attaching it to the dollar amount. A new refrigerator won’t be advertised for $900. It will be sold for $899.99, which somehow seems like a lot less. A variation, 95 cents, is used in the prices of printed books, clothing, and a few other types of merchandise. We seldom see a tag bearing a rounded-off dollar amount.

E-book authors know what they’re doing when they offer new work or have a limited-time special sale of older work for 99 cents. Readers will buy a lot of books at that price. It’s such a small amount of money that the buyer won’t feel cheated if she doesn’t like a book and deletes it from her reader without finishing it. If she loves it, she’ll be back for more by that writer – at higher prices. (Those higher prices, too, will usually be a dollar amount with .99 at the end.) Writers like C.J. Lyons, J.A. Konrath, and Debbi Mack have quickly built large e-book readerships by using one of the oldest marketing tactics known to American commerce.

Everybody loves a bargain, even when it’s something intangible like a chunk of text that exists only in electronic form. Which proves, once again, that the more things change, the more they remain the same.