Set & validate initial price

Lit-X Set & validate initial price provides you with a comprehensive transparency over any and all prices in the German and United States book markets. This includes all book formats, e.g., also eBooks.

Lit-X Set & validate initial price allows you to define an optimal starting price for any book publication. You can use the detailed and transparent price distribution for a highly relevant comparison group based on titles, authors, or publishers for this. You can use the same analysis to monitor your competition: who is pricing their titles how and in which segment? Consequently, you can use what you learned to define your own pricing strategy for each genre, author, or title: go for exclusivity with the top price (e.g., because your author is famous), swim with the market with the median price (e.g., mass-market needs volume), or go for penetration and market share gain with the bottom price (e.g., new, but promising author).

You can get multiple tasks done with the same use case

Using the tool is simple, you get your results easily & fast

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Just book an introduction and we explain everything step-by-step and at your pace. We provide details and background, dive into the methodology and technology, share implementation best practices and support you along the way towards AI- and data-driven working.

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This is how the use case looks like

  • The full Set & validated initial price dashboard allows you to get full transparency over the prices of any, individually defined, comparison group. Thus, it enables you to strategically set an optimal price for any title you are about to publish.

  • You can filter the underlying data by up to three genre levels, for children's books also by reading age, most importantly by product variant, and several numeric filters, such as price ranges, months on the market, number of pages, or length of audiobooks.

  • In the next step, you create 1) your focus group, and 2) your comparison group. The focus group ought to represent the relevant share of your current portfolio. The comparison group ought to represent a relevant competitor group. Both can be defined through publisher, author, or title selection.

  • As a result, you get two, comparable graphs with price distributions, using a box plot visualization.

    You can use the focus group visualization to determine how your portfolio is currently priced, and where, in this price distribution, the new title should be priced.

    The comparison group visualization shows a similar price distribution for your defined competitor reference frame. You can use this to combine it with the focus group's view and determine an optimal price point that fits into your own portfolio, yet also differentiates from your competition.

    Common considerations about where to position a title in the distribution are based on how famous the author is, how much marketing budget is intended to be spent, etc.

The tool offers convenient features to save time

Save different views

Once set filters can be saved in individual views. This allows you to define various applications for yourself which you can easily access with one click. You can jump between views, e.g., "Find German TikTok bookfluencers in Romance" and "Find American Youtube bookfluencers in Young Adult"

Subscribe to updates

You can define e-mail subscriptions for any view you saved. The e-mail contains a PDF or screenshot of the dashboard with your selected view. You can choose how often you want to receive those subscription e-mails and manage them at any time. This helps you to get a quick overview "has anything changed"? And if so, jump into the tool to dive deeper.

Share with colleagues

You can share any saved view with other licensed colleagues to collaborate on a project. Start a data-driven conversation, provide argumentation for a request or help them out with their own assignments.

The use case provides you with everything you need

Data scope

We constantly extend our data scope. Depending on the data type, the scope may vary marginally. Currently, we cover the following data scope: 

  • Countries: Germany, United States
  • Titles: All titles generally available
  • Authors: All authors generally available
  • Genres: Children's, Crime, Literature & Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Teen & Young Adult, Thriller; all genres are limited to story-telling sub-genres, excluding, e.g., educational materials
  • Genres hierarchy: We provide a three-level genre hierarchy that is adjusted to industry standards across providers and can be individualized in a Custom use case: 
    • Level 1, e.g., "Thrillers"
    • Level 2, e.g., "Thrillers - Supernatural"
    • Level 3, e.g., "Thrillers - Supernatural - Vampires"
  • Data types: Publisher, author, author gender, title, topic, various success metrics, ratings, reviews, price, product variants, popularity (custom use cases include many additional data types depending on individual request)
  • Sources: We collect data from dozens of sources including but not limited to major online shops, review communities, agent communities, individual publishers, distributors, agent and author pages, social media platforms, text aggregators, and industry associations. 
  • Updates: Data is generally updated once per month. Social Media data is updated continuously, aiming for weekly updates. 

    Data quality

    Our data runs through an extensive quality control process. We capture all potential issues in an automated and reliable way. Issues addressed are constantly being updated, since we continuously increase our data quality further, dive deeper into the data and explore more use cases.

    Common issues include misspellings (e.g., Stefen King), different ways of writing names (e.g., H. P. Lovecraft vs. HP Lovecraft), data gaps in our input sources (e.g., no price available), wrong data in our input sources (e.g., miss categorized: "The Gift" in "Gift books" instead of "Thriller"), and many more.  

        Data visualization

        To give access to our data and visualize it, we use a tool called "Tableau"

        Tableau is a well-established tool for precisely our purpose; it focuses on easy handling, a self-explanatory user experience, and provides a lot of helpful material. 

        We guarantee that everyone who can use a computer can use and understand Tableau. 

        Should you struggle - we are here to help, just shoot us a message. 

        Also, there is a lot of guided courses ranging from general introductions to solutions to specific problems available: 

              Updates

              • Updates are generally done on a monthly basis
              • Updates imply a data pull from all available sources
              • Updated data doesn't overwrite previous data but is appended to it, building a transparent timeline and adding value to the data
              • Social media data is continuously updated, aiming for a weekly update circle

                  Success definition

                  We define "success" as a multi-layered metric that is user-centric and consists of two main aspects:
                  • It includes a reader perception component that measures how well a book is received by the readership based on ratings and reviews
                  • It includes an approximation of actual sales based on price, number and value of ratings, reviews, bestseller list entries, and more

                        Start benefitting now, personally, and as publisher

                        • Increased profits

                          Start increasing your profits by optimizing prices.

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                          Stop guessing the right price for a newly published title. Stop relying on your 20-year industry veteran to apply his gut feeling to find the right price every time and again. Stop keeping the same price for the same title over the years.

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                          Start setting competitive initial prices, particularly, when you can only change it again with the next edition. Start adjusting prices suitable to the life-cycle of the title and only do so, if you have seen that your competitors are successful in doing so.

                        • Robust decisions

                          Talk facts not fragmented and individual perceptions.

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                          Stop relying on individual opinions about the right price that are based on experience and perception only. Stop making business decisions based on brick-and-mortar-store sales only, or the 5% of information you can manually collect online.

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                          Start creating your own competitive comparison group based on publishers, authors, or titles, to set the right benchmark for any new publication. Start using 100% of actual data, form an educated opinion, and then make robust decisions.

                        • Time saving

                          Use Lit-X for 15 minutes instead of discussing for hours.

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                          Stop trying to manually collect enough data to understand price developments of the competition. Stop discussing individual opinions to no end. Stop not caring enough about pricing and therefore just taking the same price as last time.

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                          Start working with tailored data that helps you to answer your questions. And then apply your industry expertise to draft a data-driven pricing strategy per genre, author or title.

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