9 Months of Indie Publishing – Ebook Pricing Addendum

My post from Wednesday disclosed my sales numbers over my first 9 months of indie publishing. Today's post talks about my evolving ebook pricing strategy.
 
When I released my first ebook, "Nostalgia", I priced it at $1.29. I came to this number based on the word count. I had come up with a word-count-based scale for short stories that looked workable to me at the time. Something like $.99 for anything up to 5000 words, and then increasing by $.10 per 1000 words. Or something like that.
 
That scheme lasted about a month. Then, with no sales of "Nostalgia", and a sudden urge to standardize pricing, I changed "Nostalgia" to $.99 and I've used that for short stories ever since. Regardless of word count. My available short stories range from 2000 words to 8500 words. They're all $.99. They've all sold at least one copy.
 

The Summoning Fire was my first indie published novel. There was (and still is) lots of chatter on the Web and forums about pricing ebook novels at $.99. But to me, that's the "discount bin" price. I avoid the discount bin as much as I can. $2.99 was another popular price, since it's the minimum price you can set on Amazon and still get a 70% royalty. (Some people seem to believe $2.99 is somehow "magic". I don't think that. I believe in simple math.) But $2.99 still seemed a bit low for a novel. From what I could see, $2.99 was doing well for novellas in the 20,000-word range and there were (and still are) lots of novels, indie and otherwise, doing well at higher prices. So I opted for $3.99. I also used $3.99 as the ebook price when I released The Girl Who Ran With Horses in late November 2010.
 
In March 2011, though, seeing that my unit sales of both The Summoning Fire and The Girl Who Ran With Horses were hardly impressive, I upped both ebooks to $4.99. Two-and-a-half months later, Horse Girl's sales have remained steady with a slight upward trend. TSF's sales have also remained steady–but not in as positive a fashion. So, the $4.99 price increase didn't hurt Horse Girl, but didn't help TSF (so far).
 
When I released The Door to the Sky in March 2011, I chose $2.99 for the price. Primarily because the novel is short. Only about 35,000 words. I added a bonus short story (about one of the main characters in the novel) to bring the total word-count of the ebook up to 41,000 words. So far, The Door to the Sky has sold only a few copies, but I don't think that's because of the price. I'm pretty sure it's the blurb and just the odd nature of the book itself. Not just the atypical nature of the story being told, but also the "mosaic" approach I used when structuring it.
 
I priced my first collections of stories at $.99 because they were on the shorter side. Nasty, Brutish & Short Short, with 13 flash fiction stories, came to just over 10,000 words. Serene Morning & Other Tales of a Little Girl has only 4 short short stories, with a total word-count of about 3600. The more recent collections have all weighed in at over 20,000 total words, so I priced them at $2.99. When I get the omnibus collection ready, since it will have about 70,000 words total, I plan to price it like the novels: $4.99.
 

 
Here is my current Ebook Pricing Plan:

$0.99 – Short story (or a small collection of flash fiction,
$1.99 – Long short story or short collections (10K-20K words) (unused so far)
$2.99 – Collections, short novels (20K – 50K words)
$4.99 – Novels, collections (>50K words)

 
Of course, all of this is subject to change. Evolution never sleeps.
 
-David
 
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