From Rags to Riches on the Kindle: What's the right price for an e-book?

By Mike Jastrzebski

The question of what is the right price for an e-book has been on my mind a lot

lately. The general consensus among indie writers is that the sweet spot for

e-books is $2.99 while the traditional publishers seem to think that

$10.99-$14.99 is the right price for new books and $7.99-$9.99 for books that

are currently available as paperbacks. If this is right then why is it that as

I'm writing this post 40 of the top sellers on the Kindle bestseller list are

.99 cents?

I personally find the $10.99-$14.99 price to be too high and I have stopped

reading many of my favorite writers because of these prices. That's not to say

I will never buy a book at $14.99, but there are so many other books out there

priced lower that I have more than enough to read for the next several years.

As for the indie price of $2.99, I think it's a fair price and have had both of my

books set at this price since last summer when they came out, but that has

changed as of this past Wednesday. After reading Joe Konrath's blog on his

pricing experiment for his book , The List, I made the decision to

drop the price of my first book, The Storm Killer, to .99 cents through the month of April while leaving Key Lime Blues (A Wes Darling Mystery) at $2.99.

Was this a good decision? So far no. I was selling about 10 copies a day of The

Storm Killer prior to this move and I have been averaging only about 35 sales a

day since then. I've calculated that I have to sell 60 books a day at .99 cents to make the

same amount as I was making with 10 sales a day at the $2.99 price. The reason

for this is that at $2.99 I make about $2.00 a book and at .99 cents I only

make .35 cents a book.

The other thing I've noticed is that I've had a slight decline in the number of

copies of Key Lime Blues sold since Wednesday. Because of

these figures my first inclination was to put the price back up for The Storm

Killer, but I'm not going to do that. I have an ad running in The Kindle

Nation Daily today and tomorrow and since I've had good luck with these ads

I expect to see a significant jump in sales for the next few days.

Will it be enough to make this price change worthwhile? I don't know, but I'm going to

let this experiment play out for the next month and I'll be blogging about the

results right here for the next couple of Mondays, so stay tuned, and if you've

been thinking of buying The Storm Killer how can you pass it up at this

price? It's also available at B&N for the Nook at .99 cents. Here's the B&N link: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Storm-Killer/Mike-Jastrzebski/e/9781452462646/?itm=2&USRI=the+storm+kille

And the Amazon Links:

Share on Facebook