Pricing

[IW Ferguson]

I'm pricing my first book, and I was wondering if folks could recommend any sources of either info or opinions on this topic. It's a 99k word coming of age epic fantasy, first in a series of 3 or 4 or 5. I'm seeing a lot of trad-pubbed paperbacks at $16, and some at $12, but their ebook prices are so crazy high that I wonder if I should pay attention to their paperback prices.

I've tried looking up other books like mine on Amazon, but they don't have check boxes for "indie" "debut" "first in series" etc. Even their categories are so full of noise it's hard to feel like I've actually found a representative sample.

[TimothyEllis]

Are you looking for paperback prices or eBook prices. 2 very different things.

What do you want? Maximum profit (as someone put it recently) or maximum sales?

[NathanBurrows]

It’s a different genre, but after tweaking up and down for a while I’ve found $4.99 / £3.99 to be a sweet spot for ebooks of a similar length. The problem with print pricing is the profit margin - the longer the book, the higher the cost. Every time someone buys one of my paperbacks at £8.99 I’m surprised - I wouldn’t spend that on a paperback!

[IW Ferguson]

Timothy: Good questions. I need to price both, but I've narrowed down the range for my ebook price to 3.99 or 4.99 US$. My partner, who has seen what I've put into it, wants 4.99, but I'm leaning towards the lower.

I want neither maximum profit or sales, but somewhere in between. I'm thinking I probably won't get tons of either until book 2 when I can start running promos on a discounted book 1, but I want to set the tone. I've got a sweet Jeff Brown cover, paid for 2 rounds of editing, bought Scrivener and Vellum, endured/enjoyed feedback from almost 20 beta readers, and spent 3.5 years on the project, so I feel like I want some return, but I know none of the aforementioned makes my book particularly special or unusual.

Nathan: that's great that $4.99 is working. Do you think it might work for an unknown author's debut novel? Or perhaps it would be better as a goal?

[RPatton]

For print, I usually pick 3 times the cost of printing and round up so it ends with a .95. (mass-markets and pockets will end in .99, but trades usually end in .95).

[NathanBurrows]

Nathan: that's great that $4.99 is working. Do you think it might work for an unknown author's debut novel? Or perhaps it would be better as a goal?

Well, I’ve only got 2 books out at the moment (and a third with an editor) so I’m pretty much an unknown debut author. I’m doing better than I thought I would be at this stage with both books at $4.99. I’ve not noticed a difference in between $4.99 and $3.99 in terms of sales. They remained fairly consistent at both prices, so I’m taking the extra dollar

[Lex]

I need to price both, but I've narrowed down the range for my ebook price to 3.99 or 4.99 US$. My partner, who has seen what I've put into it, wants 4.99, but I'm leaning towards the lower.

I would start with $3.99 for the ebook, and consider upping it down the line to see how it does at $4.99. You can always change it back, but I've seen a lot of people report that sales stayed the same (or even increased) at a higher price point.

I usually price my paperbacks to give me roughly the same royalty as the ebook, so in the $2.70-$3.00 range for an ebook priced at $3.99.

[Bill Hiatt]

Pricing is nearly always an experiment. Customers don't always react in a predictable way. Some people have reported sales stay the same as prices increase, though I've found that increasing prices tends to lower sales.

Ebook pricing also depends a little on whether you are in Select or distributing wide. Amazon audiences tend to be more oriented to bargains, while wide audiences tend to be more willing to pay higher prices. (The fact that promos tend to focus on discounts and that many promo companies focus on Amazon is probably one reason. Amazon readers are more accustomed to being flooded with bargain offers.

Paperback are even more dependent on strategy. In my (limited) experience, lower prices lead to more sales, but pricing too low, as Julie will perhaps point out when she visits this thread, is a mistake if you are trying to get your book into bookstores. That's because pricing too low doesn't give bookstores much margin and leaves them no latitude to discount if they want to. It's hard getting into bookstores anyway, but if that's one of your goals, you don't want to make it harder for yourself.

[guest642]

Timothy: Good questions. I need to price both, but I've narrowed down the range for my ebook price to 3.99 or 4.99 US$. My partner, who has seen what I've put into it, wants 4.99, but I'm leaning towards the lower.

Don't take this the wrong way, but the brutal truth is, readers don't care what you put into your book or how long it took you to write it, or how much it cost to produce. So it's best if you take that emotional part out of the equation when pricing.

People will tell you that best practice is to look at what your fellow indies in the same genre are pricing, and try to match them. You don't want to be too cheap OR too expensive.

Look, I get it, you've worked hard and slaved and sweat blood and tears on that book. READERS DON'T CARE. Don't let your emotions keep you from selling books. As a debut author that no one has ever heard of, your job is to get an audience that will THEN buy more books in the series for gradually higher prices.

Good luck.

P.S. Don't sweat the paperback prices. You will move so few of that it's not even worth the headache of trying to figure out pricing. Just set it and forget it, then maybe come back to it if you find out you're selling a ton of copies (which you probably won't, as an indie).

[Tom Wood]

It's my understanding that Indie trade paperbacks should be priced so that you end up making $2.00 on the sale. At IngramSpark, if you price a 90,000+- word novel at $14.95 and apply the standard 55% discount, you'll end up close to $2.00.

For ebooks, there is authorearnings.com to look to:



From: http://authorearnings.com/report/january-2018-report-us-online-book-sales-q2-q4-2017/