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Saturday, April 28, 2018

Not Sure if the NRA TV Interview Yesterday is Why...

But the Amazon sales numbers are going from horrifying to mildly disappointing:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #81,830 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Why is the book so hideously priced?  Two reasons:

1. Small print run, until you know there's a market for it.

2. I was whining about the price to Dave Kopel at a symposium recently.  Praeger Press recently published a book by him, and he noticed that Praeger did a far better job on editing than trade publishers that have published books.  I am currently reading R.S. Bray's Armies of Pestilence: The Impact of Disease on History published by Barnes & Noble and while informative, it is a mess.  Lots of punctuation errors; some typos; many sentences that run to 60 or 70 words; some grammatical defects; in desperate need of some condensation. 

Solution to the pricing: buy the book; read it; donate it to your local library; take the entire list price as a charitable donation on your Schedule A.

2 comments:

  1. It might be a cultural issue. Fewer people than ever buy and read paper anything. Bibliophiles are a small cross-section of any market, and maybe even smaller within the firearm culture.
    The "Fuds" are a dying breed, and both mil-vets, the young, and females are mostly uninterested in history. (And the cover art is limiting; it immediately excludes those whose interest is in more modern types of firearms. This might have been intentional, but it still has that effect.) The current crop of hoplophiles have what they enjoy, and stocks are plastic, locks are striker-fired or drop-in moodular, and barrels can be graphite with a steel liner.

    Combine that with the fact that this is in the educational/historical genre and your potential customer base shrinks even more. So now you are appealing to a small market segment, with the occasional buyer who might buy for simple entertainment purposes, and you are more positioned in the textbook area of books. If it were me, I would try one of two things:

    1. Reprice the book much higher; in the $100 to $125 dollar range that is commensurate with college level texts. That lends it the appearance of equivalency of that genre. (And probably deservedly so.)

    2. Cut the price to fire-sale levels to attract the fence sitters.

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  2. I wish I could help; but that price is way out of my range.

    The only thing I can do is mention it to my library, but here in California I don't know if they'll be interested. They bought about 20 copies of Hillary's "What Happened," but I doubt gun rights or history is of much interest to them.

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