Over the years I have picked up all kinds of great ebooks for super-cheap prices. Indeed, one of the reasons I started writing my monthly Robert’s Roundup is simply to share the great ebook deals I have come across.
My cost-saving techniques are not that secret, and yes, they involve some extra time. Some of my tips are Amazon-specific, though of course it’s best for everyone if you find ebooks from different sources — and don’t just use Amazon.
Also, keep in mind that indie ebooks are generally pretty damn cheap as it is. Also, they are discounted often (they have to compensate for the greater difficulty promoting them). If you like the author and want to show your support, buy the ebook when it is $2.99 or higher. Authors earn a substantially lower percent of sale price when the ebook is priced at less than $2.99.
That said, publishers and authors who discount their titles below that are fine with the lower percentages. Perhaps they need more reviews for the ebook or maybe they hope that you’ll buy other titles by the same author at a higher price. Over the last few years, the big publishers have started to discount older titles more frequently. That’s really good news for the book lover. Often an author writes one bestseller, but then finds that their later titles don’t get the amount of publicity or praise that their bestseller received. The funny thing is, often an author’s later ebooks are often just as good as than their best known title — maybe even better. Often these overlooked ebooks are heavily discounted for that reason.
Before I begin sharing my tips, I should stress one thing: don’t be afraid to take a chance on an ebook with a smaller number of reviews. Often the number of reviews for a book may have nothing to do with actual quality; they may just reflect the limited resources of a publisher or the fact that the book was originally published decades ago. Common sense would tell you to read books loved by critics or with a 100+ Amazon reviews, but that common sense would be completely wrong. So many wonderful books are out there which are overlooked; their inability to appeal to a wide audience may in fact make the work more special. Sure, glance over the reviews or the blurbs and the author bio, but ultimately you should use your own literary antenna rather than rely on those of others.
Finally, using some of these tricks for finding low cost ebooks may in fact reveal lots of titles and authors (and genres) previously unknown to you. So you can view it as another way to discover new books.
- On Amazon, many public domain titles are low-cost, but they can already be found for free on Project Gutenberg and Fadedpage.com Be careful that low-cost titles on Amazon are not already available on public domain sites.
- Be very careful not to buy digital shorts (which can often be less than 20 pages, but often appear like an ordinary ebook). Unfortunately, Amazon makes it hard to tell how long an ebook really is.
- Amazon has a tricky way of listing prices for Kindle Unlimited ebooks. Be extra careful not to mistake the 0.00 Kindle Unlimited price for the actual price.
Saving Search Queries (Amazon.com US Store Only)
Over the years I’ve noticed that some Big 5 publishers or imprints will rotate their promotions every week or two. They have deep catalogs going back several decades. Slowly they have been digitizing their back catalogs, and frankly some of their older titles have no reviews on Amazon (even though the book might have received some pre-Internet reviews).
Some of these publishers have been working with ebook newsletters to promote their stuff, especially with Open Road Media (which includes Early Bird Books, the Portalist, A Love So True, etc. ) Early Bird Books generally promotes ebooks for 1.99 or 2.99, but these deals run out very quickly in a day or so.
I’ve noticed that several publishers are doing heavy discounts on their backlist titles on Amazon. They usually discount 0-10 different ebooks a week. That includes
- Mariner Books,
- Open Road Media, Watch out for public domain titles which you can just as easily find on PG.
- Little Brown and Company
- Overlook Press,
- Grove Press, ,
- Harper Collins Ebooks,
- Farrar, Strauss & Giroux,
- Picador,
- University of Chicago Press, Not just academic titles.
- FSG Originals,
- Milkweed Editions, Lots of great poetry titles.
- Europa Editions
- Simon & Schuster. They used to discount a lot, but in the last few years they don’t discount often. You can subscribe to S&S newsletter which provides a once or twice a week 1.99 deals — which sometimes can be good.
- Flatiron Books (an imprint of MacMillan). Lots of interesting nonfiction. Mostly priced 2.99 and above, but some budget prices as well.
These search queries are not that sophisticated. I merely searched Kindle ebooks by the name of the press or publishing imprint, selected the Literature & Fiction department (on the right) and then chose SORT BY: Price Low to High in the top left dropdown box. You can make your own Search Query. For example, maybe if you want to search for low price on a particular imprint (like Riverhead Press), it’s easy to do. But imprints don’t discount often, and I like my queries to cast as wide a net as possible. Later I’ll cover some techniques to identify price drops with smaller publishers. Tip: I sometimes will choose another department below Literature & Fiction to filter out some of the public domain titles. For example, Contemporary Fiction, Short Stories, American Literature or World Literature.
Although I sorted them by price, in fact search results often display in mixed order. Often the two or three titles at the top of search results and the two or three at the bottom may be full-priced, but the rest of the search results are listed by price. It’s a good idea to scroll to the 2nd page of search results — just to make sure that an out-of-place search result won’t escape your insight.
Here’s a list of search queries that worked well in the past, but no longer. Simon & Schuster
It’s worth noting that several of the major imprints use Open Road Media to promote ebooks, so there’s a good chance the same deals will appear on their newsletters. Sometimes, in addition to promoting a publisher’s title, Open Road Media will simply digitize the ebook themselves; that means you can usually find it
Queries for Other Publishing Houses (Sorted by Price)
It occurs to me that it might be useful to keep search queries for other quality publishers — even if the prices are not discounted heavily:
Arcadia Press — European, political, everything is less than 2.99
NYROB — rarely discounted, usually 10-13$
Dzanc — republishing of literary titles.
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