This is a process that baffles many authors and there is a lot of self talk that happens in this space. If you are a self-published author, your approach to pricing may be based on your impression of your experience and your knowledge of how you perceive traditionally published books, But the true pricing lies with a combination of your goals as an author and the research in the market.
Goals
So let’s look a little at what your goals are. Goals can be divided into visibility and revenue goals
In the early days when your primary goal should be to increase your visibility. This consists of improving your newsletter sign ups and getting reviews. As your reputation grows as an author, you can start pricing your book at a higher rate.
If you are already a respected figure in your industry, for example, an actor, doctor, trainer, pastor, etc, you can start pricing your book in a way that reflects your brand. For the most part, new authors want visibility. This means that you may have to sacrifice some revenue in the beginning to get those first fans.
Lower pricing will initially get you more visibility and the higher pricing will get you more revenue. As you go along, you will need to test what pricing is going to work best for your book.
TIP: Alway make sure that you have a newsletter option at the back of your ebooks, so that you can build your mailing list.
Amazon Royalty Structure
Before you start, it is important to know what royalty structure Amazon Offers.
The Amazon royalty structure is:
35% Royalty Option:
Minimum price: $0.99
Maximum price: $200
70% Royalty Option:
Minimum price: $2.99
Maximum price: $9.99.
A Researched Based Approach to Price Setting
What is best for you? Let’s start at the Top 100 chart for a genre. If you look at your genre or indeed your subgenre and look at the price for competing books. You will also see a maximum price that you don’t want to exceed.
In this section I have looked at the top 100 for a number of different genres to help you with some examples of pricing in the market.
Pricing Examples
In this section, we have taken three book categories and checked the Amazon top 100 paid books. There is a separate free section, but our goal is to find a good price for our book . As the first page of the search cuts off at 50 titles, we will limit the prices listed to the top 50.
In this example we took the top 50 on the top 100 books of the category Best Sellers in Romantic Suspense
Lowest Price: S 1.14
Highest Price: $ 14.99
Average Price: $ 5.56
Top seller in this category at the time of this article.
Keeper of the Bride (Her Protector) by Tess Gerritsen
Price: (at the time of this article) $ 2.29 on Kindle
1,183 ratings
Average rating: 4.2 out of 5
In this example we took the top 50 on the top 100 books of the category Best Sellers in Spiritual Growth Self-Help.
Lowest Price: S 0.49
Highest Price: $ 14.99
Average Price: $ 8. 54
Top seller in this category at the time of this article.
Greenlights: Raucous stories and outlaw wisdom from the Academy Award-winning actor by Matthew McConaughey
Price: (at the time of this article) $ 13.58 on Kindle
37,292
Average rating: 4.7 out of 5
When a celebrity prices a book, then the weight of their name is an influencer in setting the price.
In this example we took the top 50 on the Top 100 books of the category Best Sellers in Christian Fantasy.
Lowest Price: S 0.99
Highest Price: $ 14.99
Average Price: $ 4.29
The top seller in this category on Amazon at the time of this article iis
Montrose Paranormal Academy, Book 1: The Nexis Secret: by author Barbara Hartzler
It is important to note that the best seller ranking changes on a daily basis and is affected by various aspects. An author may have a sale or be running a current promotion, so these stats need to be seen as a guide.
Testing Your Price
The beauty of self publishing is that you can test various pricing levels to see what will influence your sales.
Once you have divided on your goals and new price follow a systematic approach to gaining data about the effectiveness of your new pricing. Choose two or three prices to text on Amazon. Then is to track and test pricing for a two to four week period. At this point, do not change your cover or blurb or anything else that may affect sales.
The “best” price is often the price that creates the greatest total revenue (sum of revenue from all purchases). A lower price might lead to more sales vs. a higher price. But a higher price means more revenue per sale. So it’s about finding the right mix.
Practical Example
A lower price may equal more visibility but less revenue. Whereas a higher price will equal less visibility but more revenue.
Disclaimer: The research in this article was conducted via Amazon. The author can not vouch for the content of the books mentioned in this article. The authors have achieved their ranking at the time of this article via Amazon Algorithm selection.
Copyright: Write Learn and Earn 2021
