As of October 1, 2024, Hungary will introduce a new law regulating the pricing of newly released books. It applies to all formats, including printed books, audiobooks and ebooks.
Under the new law, books published after October 1, 2024 will have price restrictions in place for the first 365 days following their release. During this period, authors, publishers and retailers are limited to offering a maximum discount of 10% on these titles. Once the one year is over, any discount can be applied.
It’s important to note that this law does not affect books that were released before October 1, 2024. These older titles can continue to be discounted freely.
How does this new law affect books distributed through PublishDrive?
To help our authors promote their books, we offer two tools for applying discounts: Price Promotion and Sales Events.
Sales Events is not affected by this restriction, because as of right now, it only changes the prices of the submitted books in the following currencies: USD, CAD, EUR, MYR and MXN.
However, let’s recall in what stores the Price Promotion can discount books: Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo and Barnes & Noble. Out of these five stores, two have Hungarian marketplaces, namely Apple Books and Google Play.
If you answered with a “Yes” to the “Do you have worldwide rights to this title” question during the upload process of your book, then it was also published in the Hungarian marketplaces of the above mentioned stores.
Because of this, if you decide to schedule a price promotion for your book that has a release date after October 1, 2024, you need to be a little bit careful. After selecting the book and the dates for your campaign, under the “Pricing” section, please do not enter a discounted price for Hungary.
If you use the “Pretty price for all” button to apply the discount in all territories, please make sure to delete the price change next to Hungary’s currency, HUF.
Thanks to this step, the discount will not be applied in the Hungarian marketplaces.
Important! Changing the digital list price is also seen as giving a discount on a book. If you are planning on promoting your newly released title with a lower price, we recommend scheduling it with our Price Promotion tool, instead of opening your book for editing.
If you want to learn more about our Price Promotion tool, please check out this detailed, step-by-step guide.