bargain basement

The next day, boom: it sold 13,071 copies.

“Gone, Baby, Gone” had been designated as a Kindle Daily Deal on Amazon, and hundreds of thousands of readers had received an e-mail notifying them of a 24-hour price cut, to $1.99 from $6.99. The instant bargain lit a fire under a dormant title.

Flash sales like that one have taken hold in the book business, a concept popularized by the designer fashion site Gilt.com. Consumers accustomed to snapping up instant deals for items like vintage glassware on One Kings Lane or baby clothes on Zulily are now buying books the same way — and helping older books soar from the backlist to the best-seller list.

“It’s the Groupon of books,” said Dominique Raccah, the publisher of Sourcebooks. “For the consumer, it’s new, it’s interesting. It’s a deal and there isn’t much risk. And it works.”

Finding a book used to mean scouring the shelves at a bookstore, asking a bookseller for guidance or relying on recommendations from friends.

But bookstores are dwindling, leaving publishers with a deep worry about the future of the business: with fewer brick-and-mortar options, how will readers discover books?

One-day discounts are part of the answer. Promotions like the Kindle Daily Deal from Amazon and the Nook Daily Find from Barnes Noble have produced extraordinary sales bumps for e-books, the kind that usually happen as a result of glowing book reviews or an author’s prominent television appearances.

Web sites like BookBub.com, founded last year, track and aggregate bargain-basement deals on e-books, alerting consumers about temporary discounts from retailers like Amazon, Apple, Kobo and Barnes Noble.

“It makes it almost irresistible,” said Liz Perl, Simon Schuster’s senior vice president for marketing. “We’re lowering the bar for you to sample somebody new.”

E-books are especially ripe for price experimentation. Without the list price stamped on the flap like their print counterparts, e-books have freed publishers to mix up prices and change them frequently. Some newly released e-books cost $14.99, others $9.99 and still others $1.99.

Consumers are flocking to flash sales, said Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president for Kindle content, because the deals whittle down the vast number of choices for reading and other forms of entertainment.

“In a world of abundance and lots of choice, how do we help people cut through?” Mr. Grandinetti said. “People are looking for ways to offer their authors a megaphone, and we’re looking to build more megaphones.”

Mr. Grandinetti said one book, “1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die,” was selling, on average, less than one e-book a day on Amazon. After it was listed as a Kindle Daily Deal last year, it sold 10,000 copies in less than 24 hours.

Some titles have tripled that number: on a single day in December, nearly 30,000 people snapped up digital copies of “Under the Dome,” by Stephen King, a novel originally published in 2009 by Scribner. For publishers and authors, having a book chosen by a retailer as a daily deal can be like winning the lottery, an instant windfall of sales and exposure.

In February, a crime novel by the little-known author Lorena McCourtney, released by the Christian publishing imprint Revell, was selected as a Nook Daily Find. The sales from that promotion alone were enough to propel it onto The New York Times best-seller list.

At HarperCollins, executives said they have seen books designated as daily deals go from 11 copies sold in one day, to 11,000 copies the next.

Not all of them take off, though. One publisher said some books fizzle out quickly, attracting only several hundred downloads in a day. Another publisher said he is hesitant to discount that steeply, fearing that consumers will eventually resist paying more than a few dollars for a book.

But part of the allure of flash sales is what can happen afterward: a ripple effect that increases sales on an author’s other work.

If one book in a series is offered in a one-day promotion, readers who liked it will often buy others in the series.

“We’ve found that one of the key opportunities with it is the halo effect,” said David Steinberger, the chief executive of Perseus Books Group. “It’s hard for it to be highly successful economically at these very low prices, even if the volume goes up for a single day. But if you create awareness for the book, it can make a lot of sense for the author.”

The book that is discounted often sells at a higher level after the daily deal than it did before, even though it has returned to the regular price.

“Food Inc.,” the companion book to the documentary film, sold hundreds of copies each month before a one-day promotion on Amazon. On the day of the promotion, it sold thousands of copies; afterward, the book sold steadily at twice the level before the promotion, Mr. Steinberger said.

Tim Lavalli, a writer in Berkeley, Calif., said he reads at least two books a week, receiving almost all his recommendations from BookBub or Ereader News Today, another daily-deal aggregator.

It takes little time — and hardly any money — to download e-books when they are on sale, Mr. Lavalli said, making it easier to give up on a book if it does not keep his interest.

“You can read the first few chapters and say, this guy can’t write,” he said. “Then you throw it away.”

Jim Hilt, the vice president for e-books at Barnes Noble’s Nook unit, said sales generally peak on Wednesday and Thursday, when customers start planning for the weekend and thinking about which books they are going to read.

“Those are really good days to get the right piece of content in front of someone,” he said.

Ms. McCourtney, based in southern Oregon, said she was shocked to learn from her publisher in February that her most recent book, “Dying to Read,” was a best seller.

Ms. McCourtney, who has published 42 novels, said it was a career first.

“I had never made The New York Times best-seller list before, so I was delighted,” she said. “It certainly felt good.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/business/media/daily-deals-propel-older-e-books-to-popularity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Though it is too soon to gauge any longer-term benefits, the move, by the European Central Bank, could be a turning point in the Continent’s debt crisis — a cascading problem that for nearly two years has plagued financial markets around the world and now threatens global economic growth.

American officials and global economists have long urged the Europe’s central bank to take just such an aggressive stance — even as European political leaders have repeatedly failed to devise concrete near-term plans to address Europe’s debt problems and deteriorating finances.

Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at the consulting firm High Frequency Economics and a professed bear on the European outlook, said he was stunned by the size of the monetary operation, saying it suggested that Europe’s central bank had “shown a path toward averting catastrophic collapse in Europe.”

Indeed, some analysts suggest the central bank’s new lending program represents a kind of back door to the easy-money policy pursued by the Federal Reserve after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which is widely credited with averting a broader economic disaster.

The three-year loans the central bank made Wednesday come with a bargain-basement interest rate of 1 percent, providing the region’s financial institutions with the kind of cheap financing they can no longer get from the market. Among other requirements, Europe’s banks need the money to refinance about a trillion dollars in loans that mature in 2012. Wednesday’s infusion could also help reduce the pressure on beleaguered government borrowers on the periphery of the Continent, most significantly Italy and Spain. Those countries have not been able to directly tap European Central Bank funds, even as investors are increasingly reluctant to finance those countries’ debt by buying their bonds.

Now, though, by lending to commercial banks at such low rates for three years, the central bank might induce them to use some of the newly available money to buy shorter-term government bonds, which have higher yields, or interest rates. Spain’s two-year government bond, for example, is currently yielding 3.64 percent.

Mario Draghi, the central bank’s new president, has resisted calls to stand directly behind debtor governments by buying their bonds as necessary, without limit. But the volume of money pumped into the system on Wednesday suggested that Mr. Draghi was prepared to indirectly support those governments through their nation’s commercial banks.

“This is exactly what happened in the United States with the Fed in 2008,” said Mr. Weinberg, the economist. By buying up bad loans and other impaired assets, and lending money to the banks, government officials in the United States were able to buy time for American banks to strengthen their depleted balance sheets.

But in the current case, European officials confront an even trickier situation. Not only must the banks borrow, but indebted European governments have huge borrowing needs of their own, totaling 1.1 trillion euros ($1.4 trillion) in 2012.

Despite those twin threats, German political leaders have opposed any outright bailout either for the banking system or for troubled government borrowers like Italy and Spain, whose free-spending ways have long irked voters in Germany, Europe’s largest economy and a principal financier of any bailouts.

If it works, the quiet virtue of the European Central Bank’s new lending program will be that it helped buttress banks while easing the pressure on governments — without the appearance of a direct rescue.

Although the program did not take effect until this week, it was announced on Dec. 8 as part of a broader series of European Central Bank efforts to stabilize anxious credit markets. The central bank said it would offer three-year loans — rather than the one-year limit it had previously imposed — and would accept a wider variety of financial assets as collateral, to make it easier for banks to qualify for the loans.

The central bank is accepting the banks’ outstanding loans as security, a measure meant to help smaller community banks that might lack conventional forms of collateral like bonds.

Jack Ewing contributed reporting from Frankfurt.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a19f5db2d33acd2680d08238118f5983

Daily Deals Propel Older E-Books to Popularity

Central Bank Loans May Ease Europe’s Crisis

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