product-pricing's actually a nonlinear problem:
WHY did Apple insist that it wasn't offering any tune for more than $0.99?
Because more profit was harvested at that price than at ANY higher price.
With physical-books, you have a choice: either target marketshare, keeping your price low, XOR target class-exclusivity, keeping most people from being able to afford it.
( the absurd prices charged for many "professional" books is that, btw. )
Somebody did an experiment, many years ago, on slashdot: they priced the SAME book at 2 different prices, to see what the profit-source was, in pricing ebooks..
They made 2x the profit when they had it priced low, than when they had it high.
Market-saturation wins, so long as you're getting the same royalty-rates, see?
So, e.g, if you're pricing your ebook on a platform which allows you 70% royalties IF you price it between $2.99 & $9.99, THEN you'll make more earnings by pricing it at $2.99.
MUCH more.
The book "The 1-Page Marketing Plan" was originally priced at $9.99.
I wrote a review pointing this principle out, & the author tried listing it at $2.99.
You can see, online, that it's still listed at that low price.
Allan Dib did the experiment and the results moved them to lock their book to that price, apparently on all platforms.
( excellent book for anybody wanting to make their product/service succeed, in the market, btw!
GET that book, if you're doing any app you want to succeed! : )
So, the algorithm seems to be
- find where the high-royalty-rate zone is, for EVERY platform you're offering it on, so as to keep your prices coherent, globally
- price so that you're at the low-end of that allowed-high-rate-range, & find, within the low-end of that range where your optimum is, but
- keep in mind that marketshare, aka "herd-size" is critical to long-term viability: there is some minimum-critical-mass required for each genre/type/kind of work.
A final boost for anybody working on any such thing:
PLEASE invest in Truby's "The Anatomy of Genre", right now, & understand the 14 categories-of-story, & what each category-of-story does, before anything else.
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-anatomy-of-genres
It'll open your mind about your product's meaning, fersure.
( there are 2 mistakes Truby makes, which are his-culture specific:
- he holds that the root of humor is "the drop", which is specific to put-down culture. Hoffstadter's "Godel Escher Bach" book identified that the true root of humor is the moebius-strip: you are walked 'round a "circle", but now you're upside-down, somehow??
- he mistakes the US's Wild West Village for the archetypal Village, which is incomprehensible to outsiders: THE Archetypal Village, is the Tribal Mother Village.
Otherwise, his book is simply 1 of the most-important psychology books around. )
Next please invest in Truby's "The Anatomy of Story", to understand how to make the vignettes in your work, work as stories, which some games do, but others don't, & the market-traction difference between the 2 categories is significant.
Shawn Coyne's "The Story Grid" is also required, if you want your work to come up to the proper editing standard.
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-story-grid
Weissman's "Presenting to Win" is also required: if your game needs information to be presented competently, OR INCOMPETENTLY, then Weissman's book will clarify how to do that, so you can make the work work at multiple-levels.
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/presenting-to-win-updated-and-expanded-edition-2
( 1 game-review I read said that the second time they played it, all the clues/keys they'd not-understood were significant, all of them became obvious..
That was successful layering.
Weissman's book can help with layering, within a story/movie/game.
It can also, of course, help you win at GDC, if you want to present, there. )
No, I'm not an "affiliate" of any corporation or business: those links are only for you to SEE what I'm pointing-at, is all.
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