Whether you are promoting a book or promoting a company, you need to give people incentive to buy. Just making it easy isn’t quite enough (although it is an important component). Not only must the purchase process be easy, it must be urgent. You create urgency through the use of promotions, discounts, or other incentives.
One of our competitors does this very well. They inflate their prices to $13,000 so they can offer a $7000 discount. Do authors fall for this? Of course. It looks great on a Flash banner; and it is a savvy person who can look past the flash — pun intended — and identify the true value, or lack thereof.
Books sell better with incentive, too. The most typical incentive is a discount or a “sales price” and in the majority of the cases, this type of promotion is handled by the retailer rather than the author herself. Amazon does discounting very well. They discount books in a variety of ways. Not only will they often discount a single book by eating into their own margin, but they also pair similar books together and then offer discounts if the customer orders BOTH books. My book Sell Your Book on Amazon discusses how authors can use this functionality of Amazon to their advantage.
President of Outskirts Press 