Picture this. It’s the mid-Noughties and you’ve found yourself in your local WHSmith. You certainly don’t need any more books – there are plenty waiting for you, unread, on your shelf at home – but an intriguing-looking spine catches your eye. The book is reduced to clear, labelled at under half the RRP. You’ve never heard of the author, and by the looks of it, it’s way more commercial than what you’d usually pick. But you fancy an easy read, and it really is a bargain. The book comes home with you.
In 2025, times have changed. More and more shopping is done online, and the book market in particular is dominated by one internet behemoth: Amazon. Maybe you don’t even read physical books anymore. Now, you’re more likely to be browsing the Kindle e-book store. When you’re there, you are highly likely to land on the Kindle 99p list. It is here that you’ll stray across titles you wouldn’t typically seek out, and, tempted by the price, you might give them a go.
You might think, then, that Kindle’s 99p list is the modern-day equivalent of the bargain bin – books that aren’t selling slashed in price to entice ambivalent readers. But the reality is more complicated. It’s curated according to Amazon’s mysterious algorithms, and its selection can heavily impact sales. The stakes are high – so how does it all work?
The publishing industry moves in mysterious ways. The first rule about Hollywood, the screenwriter William Goldman famously said, is that “nobody knows anything”. “I think publishing is similar,” says the bestselling science writer Adam Rutherford when I ask him what he knows about the 99p e-book phenomenon.
Several of Rutherford’s books, including A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (2016) and How To Argue With a Racist (2020), have been included in the deal. In his experience, his publisher will bid for a book to be included just before the paperback edition comes out. “The sense is that this generates interest so that you subsequently shift a lot of printed copies, and therefore generate profit,” he says.
He remembers one of his books selling about 10,000 99p e-copies – but the primary purpose of the offer is not to boost profit. It’s instead “a marketing, promotional-type deal”, he explains, raising the profile of a book so as to boost sales elsewhere. And has his 99p success converted into full-price sales, I ask Rutherford? “I don’t know. You’re tapping on a black box door.”
My attempts to find out the intricacies of the process didn’t yield great results. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. I also wrote to 11 publishers – including the UK’s “big five” houses – to ask how the 99p Kindle offer, which has been running for more than a decade, works. Just one publishing professional, a non-fiction editor who asked not to be named, agreed to speak.
The editor explains that Amazon doesn’t just choose any book to be in the deal – it goes for those that are already selling well and receiving good reviews. “Amazon won’t select e-books that it doesn’t think will be popular” even with a hefty discount, they say, “so in my experience at least, it’s beneficial for boosting existing steady sellers rather than changing the fortunes of a quiet book.” In this sense, it works in an opposite fashion to the bargain bin, which was a way to rid a shop of slow sellers.
Despite this mystery, the feeling is that having your book selected for a 99p offer is a “coup”, says Clare Chambers, whose bestselling novels include Small Pleasures (2021) and Shy Creatures (2024). Her publisher presents it “as good news. I trust that they have the data, that they know it causes an uplift”.
Unsurprisingly, books selected for a 99p deal are primed to shoot up the Amazon charts – if they weren’t there already. “The top 10 Kindle books chart is dominated by 99p deals,” observes George Mahood, a self-declared “reluctant self-publisher” who writes travel and humour books.
Mahood has taken advantage of the different 99p e-book deals that Amazon grants self-published authors. “I say yes to every one they offer me, because having any additional backing from Amazon seems like a no-brainer.”
His 2015 book Operation Ironman was part of the Kindle daily deal. The resultant sales catapulted the book into ninth place in the Kindle charts, which itself had a ripple effect because “there’s a lot of book browsers who will only ever look in the top ten or 20 books, so you’re attracting new readers”, he says.
But over the past couple of years, things have changed. “The power of those [offers] has definitely gone down. Self-publishing has got so much easier, so the competition is so much more, and the market is saturated.”
These charts don’t mean anything concrete outside Amazon – e-book sales don’t contribute to the metric that sets the Sunday Times bestseller list, for example. But the assumption is that it has a different kind of influence, perhaps on readers who browse the Amazon charts before visiting a bookshop, or indeed buying a hard copy from Amazon. The non-fiction editor refers to this as the “halo effect”.
For readers, “there are so many pros” to the 99p deal, says Bex from Wiltshire, who blogs about books as Bookaholic Bex. “We’re in a cost of living crisis. If you read voraciously – I get through two or three books a week – it’s an expensive hobby.” Hardbacks can be over £20, while paperbacks are about half that. “So 99p is an exciting deal.”
Lucy from Swindon – another blogger, who writes as Bookworm Blogger – says she “always has a peruse” of what’s included, buying four or five 99p e-books each month. She says it has “definitely made a lot more authors accessible to me” and has encouraged her to buy books she might otherwise not have tried.
And Amazon’s e-book algorithms work hard, much like Spotify pushing you more sad-girl music after an evening listening to Phoebe Bridgers, or Netflix suggesting yet another true-crime documentary.
Lucy welcomes Amazon doing the same via its 99p deal. “If I’ve enjoyed a book and someone said to me, ‘Here’s 10 others that are similar,’ I’d see it as a recommendation,” she says.
Bex is more sceptical. She has fond memories of going shopping to browse for books as a child. “I feel sad for children who don’t get to do that today, who just go online and get fed algorithms.”
For authors, there’s also a more philosophical question. Is 99p a fair price for a book? And, given what we know about Amazon’s tax avoidance, underpaying of staff, and hammering of the high street book trade, wouldn’t it be better to encourage readers to visit their local library or bookshop?
“It’s good that there are ways for people to access books more cheaply,” says Chambers, “but I figure libraries are there for that.”
“Amazon is a giant and it uses its muscle in a way that impacts booksellers,” she adds. “But I can’t stand up and start flicking a wet tea towel at Amazon – I take their royalties.”
Rutherford feels similarly. “I’d much rather people bought copies from their local, independent bookshop. But at the same time, I want to be read, and therefore Amazon is a necessary evil.”
The exact machinations of the 99p e-book deal remain a mystery, but so long as it remains part of Amazon’s bookselling project, it seems authors will want to take part, and their readers will be waiting. Clearly, the deal is not quite the contemporary equivalent of a bookshop bargain bin. We now expect so much more to be sold so cheaply – not just the titles that have been gathering dust for months. That is the real sign of the times.