Why self-publishers should consider low prices for e-books

As an independent publisher, pricing your books is one of the big issues you need to take care of. We’ve looked before on this blog at pricing books – in particular, pricing e-books – and it’s something that’s worth looking at in slightly more detail.

The issue of pricing is a complicated one. There’s a lot you need to balance: the effort that’s gone into your book, your need to find readers, the need to earn a living, the desire to build a good author platform and so on. This means that there’s no set right or wrong way to price your e-books, but it seems that independent publishers who price their books lower tend to do better than those who set higher prices for their books.

If this is an issue you’re interested in then this blog post is definitely worth a read. It’s written by Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, which so many of us self-publishers use to distribute our e-books. In the blog post, he says that pricing an e-book at $2.99 can help the author find up to four times as many readers as a book priced at $9.99. And, when compared with books priced over $10.00, books priced at $2.99 get six times as many readers.

This shows a clear argument for pricing e-books lower than you might initially think to, and it also highlights the potential for independent publishers to make more money out of a book priced at $2.99 than an author using traditional publishers would make for a book priced at $9.99 due to the way royalties are calculated.

Pricing is clearly an issue worth engaging in for independent publishers, and if pricing a book at a low price such as $2.99 can net you more readers (and comparatively more money), it certainly makes sense to do it.

What are your views on pricing your books?