I track several things on the Amazon page for Hurricane Baby–sales rank, number of reviews, some sales numbers. Until recently, I didn’t think much about price.
I would see the price occasionally dip to $18, $17.99, $16.50–small changes from the cover price of $20.95, but nothing to really wonder about–until after the first of this year.
Then I noticed the price dropped to $8.50 for the paperback version. (The Kindle version is $9.99.) I thought that was odd but assumed it would be short-lived. Next thing I knew, the price was $8.48. Then $8.12.
I really started to pay attention then. It kept dropping until it reached $7.99 a few weeks ago.
I wrote my publisher asking if she had any insight as to why this had happened, Her answer was “not a clue”.
Hm.
So I turned to Google for answers. I input “Why did Amazon discount my book”. I got various websites proffering reasons that largely fell into three camps:
A) The book is selling really, really well and they discount it to sell more, or
B) It’s a completely algorithmic decision, or
C) it may be a case of setting your book up as a “loss leader”, hoping that a low price will cause shoppers to buy even more products than just the one book.
Another possible reason is Amazon may have ordered too many, and they want them out of their warehouse. That doesn’t sound likely since my book is print-on-demand–the book is assembled in response to the number of orders.
I was glad to find out it wasn’t necessarily a case of Amazon being ready to remainder the book and selling copies at fire-sale prices to get rid of them, which had been my first thought.
So we will see what happens in the future for my Hurricane Baby, the little book who could. Hope everyone has a good week!
PS 3/24/2025–I posted this last night, and then I looked at Amazon and found that the book has gone back up to regular price! That’s an interesting coincidence!
Julie Liddell Whitehead 