Way back in February, I did an informal market survey of various authors' ebooks and rankings (noting the price of each ebook, since I thought that might be a significant factor with respect to generating sales). For four weeks, I kept track of the rankings of the bestselling book by three unidentified authors (adding in a New York Times bestselling author at week #4, just for kicks).
You may also recall that Author Y believed that there were three major criteria for achieving ebook success: 1) have a good-looking cover, 2) set the right price ($1.99, at that time) and 3) have "an established reputation . . . as a writer."
You can read the original post for the details about the different authors, but to put it in a nutshell, Author X is traditionally published and has a highly respectable industry track record (in terms of reviews, etc.), Author Y is a relatively well-known author (respected within the industry) who markets like crazy and Author Z is a new, relatively unknown indie author with good to great reader reviews who markets like super-crazy (and priced the book at 99 cents). (Author A is the New York Times bestseller. A-list. Ha ha. Okay.)
I decided to do another study of these same authors. Now, here's where it gets interesting. At week #3, Author X lowered the ebook's price by a dollar. Probably (I'm guessing) to boost sales and rankings. At week #4, Author Y put up a new book cover. One (it was hoped) that would encourage more people to buy the book.
Oh, and Author A's ebook is a recent bestseller priced at $7.99.
Let's take a look at the results (again, comparing average ranks over the course of four weeks):
Week 1 Avg. Rank: Author X #52,383 - Author Y #645 - Author Z #457 - Author A #15,615
Week 2 Avg. Rank: Author X #72,370 - Author Y #460 - Author Z #436 - Author A #17,104
Author X lowers ebook price by $1.00.
Week 3 Avg. Rank: Author X #46,030 - Author Y #581 - Author Z #449 - Author A #15,740
Author Y changes cover.
Week 4 Avg. Rank: Author X #45,293 - Author Y #943 - Author Z #349 - Author A #11,087
Wow. The drop in price appears to have improved Author X's sales, but not by much. And the cover change to Author Y's book was, oddly enough, followed by a marked drop in rank.
In the interest of fairness, I figured the rank may have dropped due to some strange intangible factor associated with changing covers. I decided to wait a few weeks and check again. Here's what I found:
Week 5 Avg. Rank: Author X #57,543 - Author Y #1,439 - Author Z #304 - Author A #5,427
Okay, it looks as though matters have deteriorated further for Author Y with the new cover. Weird. It could be that there's no connection between the cover and sales at all. Which leads me to believe that the emphasis on cover is misplaced, along with reputation and traditional publishing record.
Author A is doing relatively well with the $7.99 ebook, but this IS a New York Times bestseller and something of an outlier, anyway. Even so, at least at this point, Author Z is cleaning everyone's clock.
Bottom line on ebooks: worry more about the quality of your content than the look of your cover; lower prices sell more books; strong marketing/promotion and happy readers (i.e., good word of mouth) trump traditional publishing track records.
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