Kindle Bestsellers Top 100 - Average Daily Price
The uplift from the 2nd bounce - when the Sunshine Deals promotion ended - held on well for over a week afterward. Average price of the list on 6/23 was $8.38 - still well north of the $7.75 number early June 1 as the program was just starting but ultimately came down to $7.81 on 6/24, possibly signaling the return to 'normalcy'.
Speculation time...if there really are two distinct groups of buyers as I have theorized in the past - one that shops for value and one that shops for brand - then we may have seen a lingering effect of the value buyers still reading through a glut of content purchased at discount during the program. There are a lot of copies of 'My Horizontal Life' that have to get read before the next group of summer books gets looked at. This may have created a week-long 'hangover' effect for these books.
On the other hand, since there was no incentive to purchase extra titles at the higher price points, those sales probably continue at a normal pace, which has given them a rankings bump over the presumably depressed discount books. If this is at least partly true, it may indicate that while the market can be significantly impacted in the short term by these type of promotions, that there is a certain resilience and tendency to revert to normal.
So that seems like good news for publishers and authors who are trying to sell content at the higher price points. But there may yet be a dark lining.
What happens if Amazon makes the Sunshine pricing permanent and rotates 100-200 titles through every week (like supermarket shelves)? They could create a permanent change in the distribution of titles in the top-100 that would be hard to combat. Since position on that list has 'value', that would be harmful to the publishing community. Just one more thing to keep on the radar.
Dan Lubart can be reached at dan@iobyte.com.
You can follow him on Twitter at @ebook_mktview
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