The Price is Right: What to charge for App Books

I've been watching the slow but steady erosion of app book prices especially in the children's book area. It's not unusual to see really excellent app books for kids selling as low as $1.99 or even 99 cents. It's hard to imagine how anyone can create a decent product that will retail at 99 cents and net about 70 cents after Apple takes its 30% cut. Oceanhouse Media sells its Dr. Seuss titles for $3.99 and other tiles (e.g. Berenstain Bears) for even less. In my opinion titles by Dr. Seuss should sell for at least $4.99. So why are they so cheap? It's simple supply and demand. A Dr. Seuss title at $4.99 might sell 50 copies a day while the same title at $3.99 would sell 100 copies. It makes sense to lower the price and to gain more sales, but in the long run its deminshing the brand. Short term benefits are hard to resist in an industry as competitive as the app book market.

This is one reason I prefer publishing adult and young adult titles to children books. The assumption is generally that children books, because they are shorter, are easier to produce but its my experience that that is not true at all. With children books you have to have far more effects to maintain a child's interest. With Adult and Young Adult books you can get away with less effects in favor of higher-quality content. LEVEL 26: Dark Prophosy, which I reviewed a week ago, is an excellent example. It retails for $12.99 and is currently listed in the New and Notworthy on the App Store. Although it has an hour of complementary video it has far fewer effects than you would find in one of the Dr. Suess titles. That said, according to an interview with its creator the app book cost a million dollars to produce. No small potatoes.

Other titles such as Mrs. Spider by Callaway, which retails at $7.99 and is beautifully produced, seems more reasonable - I'll bet it cost at least $50k to produce that book. The Elements and The Planets by Touch Press retail at $13.99 which is a bargain considering the quality. In the end the adult titles will continue to be priced higher because adult books in general have a higher price point. However, the cost of creating adult books need not exceed the price of creating really good children books.

As the prices of children app books erode the quality will also fall. Only organizations like Oceanhouse Media which are experienced and very process driven will be able to compete at that level. You just can't make a living on children's books at the prices they are selling today unless you can produce one every 10 days and get them all sell in the top 100. That's not me making up numbers - its based on months of analysis and real word experience. Children books for start-ups is largely a dead market unless you can really distinguish yourself in the way that Loud Crow has done with its Peter Rabbit title. And as far as I can tell very few publisher are producing works at that level (see my list the best of the best publishers).

In the end the future of App Books is not in the children's market. It's in the adult fiction and non-fiction market. That's where we'll see the most profits and the great innovation because unlike the children book market the price points are higher and so companies can afford to take more risk and put more into the production of these books.