2600 and counting

I've always said I won't give my books away for free, unless they are for reviewers or some hand-picked people I want to give the books to.
Now I have been hearing good things about the Amazon KPD select programme -- something to get your books out there, your face and your writing known. Let me explain in short: you are exclusive with Amazon for 90 days in which you are  not allowed to sell e-copies of the enrolled book elsewhere. During that time you are allowed (you don't have to) give away your book for free for five days. You can do them all in one go or split them.
I've enrolled Excuse me, where is the exit? and also my new book Candlelight Sinner, which I both unpublished and removed from Smashwords since I never really made money there. Amazon is my main sales outlet.
Now my sales weren't too bad, but not very good either. Roughly about 150 in the past months, slowly going up again, but that's not enough to rectify the hard work I put into writing and promoting them.
With the promotion -- both books are free over the weekend -- I had over 2700 downloads since yesterday. To be honest I'm still in shock about the vast amount of downloads. It seems that my short stories do really well in the humour genre (position 3 as I type), yes even in the overall free charts (position 19). Candlelight Sinner has taken off on Amazon.com.
I wonder if that mirrors the 'buying' patterns of readers. I will admit that downloading freebies is addictive as I have downloaded about 20 books myself in the past two days. I only downloaded what I would buy in a shop, based on the pitch and I know I will give all of them a try, hopefully finding one or the other gem.

But with books on promotion for free on a daily basis, I'm a little worried that readers might rather download free books than paying for them, especially if they are by new Indie authors.
Many authors who have enrolled their books have reported an improvement on sales and it better when I think of the amounts of books given away. I expected only a couple of hundred downloads, but the actual figures make this one author dizzy. By the way, since starting this post about fifteen minutes ago, I had another 100 downloads. If only that would happen every day, with readers paying for the books. :-)

Minefield e-book pricing

Since I'm going to release a new novel soon, I'm once again faced with the decision of how to price the book. I normally start with a low introduction price for a limited period of time, then go up to $3.49 which is about �2.50 give or take. And even that is awfully low compared to the work I put in. Whatever I do, I'll win and lose readers.

On the Amazon forum I read that many don't even bother with 'cheap' books anymore, because to them cheap=bad quality. They seem to have had some negative experiences.
Then you have readers who say they won't buy a book from a new and unknown author if it's not under a dollar or pound, which puts us self-published authors into an awkward position: we just can't win, but we want to. Readers, that is.

I'm beginning to think sites like smashwords or Project Gutenberg, where readers can download thousands of free e-books, has done the Indie market more harm than good; yes even the low pricing somehow doesn't seem right. For many authors the book took at least a year, for some even years to write, so it's not really fair to expect a low price. I know quite a few authors who have put a great deal of time and effort into their books before publishing them; they meet the standards of traditionally published books and I think these authors should be rewarded.

To be clear: I think having a book for free for a short period -- like the recent Amazon promotion -- is a great marketing tool, but handing out your book for free is like going to the office every day and not getting paid. I personally will leave the short stories on a low price, but will sell my novels for a more reasonable amount.

Since e-books seem to be the future, I think maybe it's time for us Indie authors to take action and set the prices higher, but also make sure we release good quality novels so the gap between traditionally published books and ours will close over time.

Are you self-published or a reader? What is your opinion?