Scribl

On the contrary, we are more than happy to address all of these questions and are proud of our unique solutions to these problems. We have no record of receiving this e-mail from anyone named Jan or Jan* with a last initial D, nor do we have any books posted by any authors with that name, so this post is a bit odd to us. Any user or author can post any question on our support page at any time for a quick response from our support team at https://www.scribl.com/support.

To the specific questions raised:
1. After how many sales do they actually decide to increase the price?

CrowdPricing ranks all books based on the relative performance compared with similar titles, where the determination for “similar titles” is based on Story Elements for Stories or general subject matter for Knowledge Books (nonfiction, excluding stories). The top performing books will be priced similarly to a bestseller, with lower-performing books priced at lower prices to attract customers. There are 7 price tiers for every book type, where the tier prices vary depending on the content type. Novels, for example, start at $. 29 for the first tier, then $. 49, for the second, up through $6.99 for the 6th, and finally $9.99 for the handful of novels that make it all the way to the 7th (top tier). Short stories, on the other hand, range from $. 25 for Tier 1 to only $2.99 for the top Tier 7 titles. CrowdPricing optimizes revenue at all price points and ensures fair pricing, because prices are set based on purchase patterns of customers, which in turn builds customer trust and helps elevate sales of all CrowdPriced books. While not all books see such a huge increase, we have authors who credit Scribl with 10x-100x increase in sales after moving their books to Scribl. All books start as free to help attract initial downloads and generate ratings and reviews. Titles could remain free for as long as 7.5 weeks, but more popular title will quickly move out of the free tier into one of the paid tiers.

2. A higher price means the book has higher demand and a better book as decided by the 'çrowd'. But do they give any stat on how the books are selling and at which point they considered that the book has 'higher demand'? NO

False. Every author can see all of their books sales and even free downloads in the Author Dashboard. This is a feature we added in early 2019. Before that, sales data was still available, but was admittedly tougher to read and it didn't include listings of free downloads. Perhaps this complaint is based on experiences before 2019, but even then all sales data were available.

3. My books that are priced in the top tier never sold at all as per their sales report! So how did it move higher?

There is no author on Scribl.com with this name, so I have limited ability to address this, but if this post is from an author who used our site just under a different name, I don’t believe this that author’s book reached a top tier. While we love all our authors, we obviously go out of our way even further to cherish those very top authors whose books reach the top tier and know them all well. We are absolutely dedicated to support our wonderful authors. It pains us to hear any complaints. We want every interaction with Scribl to be wonderful for both authors and customers. As noted above, books move algorithmically based on performance relative to other similar books.

4. The sales reports don't give any details on how many copies sold, through which outlet, when, and so on. Everything is vague. In such case, how can the author trust what they are saying?

False, but see #2 above. Maybe this is based on an experience much earlier in our history, before the detailed Author Dashboard was available.

5. Since the prices seem to be going up and down artificially without any relation to the sales, are they not cheating the authors as well as the readers?

Sales move due to our patent-pending CrowdPricing system. It is the most ethical and fair way to price books, ensuring both optimized revenue to authors and fair-pricing to customers.

6. Why do they have a lock in period of 9 months when nobody else has such a restriction? Even KDP select does not lock you and allows you to remove the book anytime.

There is no lock-in to post a book to Scribl.com. *IF* an author wants Scribl to distribute the book (entirely up to the author and only occurs if the author specifically chooses to opt-in to our distribution program, which is an additional option over and above posting the book to Scribl.com) across our network of over 1,000 outlets, including Amazon, Kobo, B&N, Google, Apple, etc., then, in order to avoid collisions where the same book is posted to the same site from multiple sources, we require a period of 9 month distribution exclusivity. For those not familiar, the problems with collisions can include the outlets removing all copies of the book, pricing problems, split sales between the two versions so each appears lower on the charts, etc. It is in everyone’s interest to avoid this. Our 9 month period is much shorter than the four+ years many self-publishing sites claim. 9 months gives a relatively brief period to ensure we can distribute the book cleanly without any conflicts. Further, because it’s purely to avoid those collisions, the “exclusivity” is only for our partners. If an author wants to put the book on his or her own site or any other site where we don’t distribute, that’s always fine. Our goal is help every author and title reach its full potential, so we NEVER stand in the way of a book selling if an author wants to sell it somewhere we can’t offer it.