$0.99? $2.99? $9.99? My Answers to Ebook Pricing Questions

I went skimming through the traffic logs this morning to see what search terms people were using to find my blog and picked out a few questions related to ebook pricing. I figure if one person is asking something then others may be wondering about it too. Pricing can be a heated topic in the independent e-publishing world and almost everything in here will simply be my opinion based on my experience of the last two years, six novels, and numerous odd short stories and novellas. I hope something helps!

Ebook Pricing Q&A

How much should I charge for my novel?

As you probably already know, Amazon and many of the other retailers reward authors and publishers who create price points between $2.99 and $9.99 by offering a 70% cut of earnings. Sell for less than that or more than that and you’ll only receive 35%. So a $2.99 ebook brings you a little over $2.00 whereas a $0.99 ebook only brings about 30 cents. For those who want specifics, here’s a chart with the breakdown for each price point.

Anything in that $2.99 to $9.99 range is going to bring what I consider to be a decent return, per reader, for a full-length novel. At 30-60 cents, it’s always felt (to me) that you can get more out of giving the novel away for free (basically using it as a loss leader to encourage sales of other books, an established and effective technique for many authors publishing series).

Of course, earnings depend on units sold, not simply earnings per unit sold, so, yes, if you can sell oodles of books at 99 cents, you can do well for yourself. That worked for some self-published authors in popular genres in 2010. This year, however, Amazon tweaked its algorithms, apparently to cut down on the numbers of 99-cent titles rocking the popularity lists. More on that in this “Updates to Amazon Book Ranking Algorithms” interview from earlier in the year.

I personally think about $5 per full-length novel is a fair price all around. It gives you far higher per-book earnings than traditionally published authors are receiving (even those whose ebooks are selling for $10+), it gives the readers a deal when compared to most traditionally published ebooks, and it’s often considered a fair price by those who feel that digital books should cost less than the dead-tree variety since paper, ink, and shipping aren’t a part of the equation. Lastly, it separates you from the legions of indie authors charging $0.99, $1.99, and $2.99 for their novels (often on the belief that they won’t be able to sell at a higher price because they’re not established names — I started out at $2.99 for just that reason). A lot of readers still walk warily around self-published books, so it can only help if you’re not giving obvious clues that your book was never vetted by a gatekeeper.

How much should I charge for a short story?

For ebooks that come in under 10,000 words, authors often choose 99 cents as a price point, and I’m in agreement with that choice. Yes, you’re stuck at the lower royalty rate, but a lot less work goes into writing and editing a piece that short. If reviews and sales rankings are anything to go by, readers aren’t keen on the idea of $2.99 short stories, even by established authors.

But that’s okay. If you sell a 100 copies a month of a 5,000-word, 99-cent story, you’re still making more that year than you’d receive if you sold that same story to a pro-paying magazine. If you have a fan base established, you can sell a lot more copies than that in the first month or two you publish it. During release month, I sold about 1400 copies of my last short story (Enigma) even though I also mailed out a Smashwords coupon so readers could download it for free (and many people took advantage of that). If it follows the pattern of my other short stories, it should continue to sell 100+ copies a month. This is from a mid-list self-published author, not a best-selling indie rock star. It’s why I don’t bother submitting anything to magazines or anthologies any more. Even at 99 cents, you can do pretty well for the amount of work that goes into a short story.

What’s up with all those free ebooks? Why would an author give away her hard work? Are these folks smoking some of that newly legal Washington pot?

I already touched on the idea of using a free ebook (a short story, a novella, or even a full-length novel) as a loss leader, the idea being that you can sell more of your other books by giving away free samples. This works particularly well with a series (and particularly less well without a series), assuming your free book is well-written, well-edited, etc. Having awesome cover art doesn’t hurt either.

Another reason you’ll see authors offer books for free is because they’re a part of the Amazon KDP Select program (which demands exclusivity in exchange for enrolling your ebook in the Amazon Prime lending library). As a promotional perk, these authors are allowed to make their ebooks free for five days a quarter at Amazon. Receiving a pile of downloads during the free days used to help boost a book’s sales ranking and visibility when it came off of the free days, though Amazon has nerfed that particular “feature” this year so that it’s less effective (though not totally ineffective). There’s more on that in the interview I mentioned above.

Wait, so how do you make your ebook permanently free at Amazon?

Though one never knows how long such tricks might last, you can currently make your ebook free at Barnes & Noble (through Smashwords distribution), Kobo, and iTunes, and Amazon may price-match. Here’s a video I did last year to explain the free ebook/price-matching thing in more depth.

How do you make a living as an indie author?

Not exactly a question about price points, but variations of this one show up in my traffic log every day, so here’s the quickie “formula.”

1. Hone your craft for years, receive feedback from mentors and peers, hire an editor, and put out as rocking of a first book as you can.

2. Write many more books in the coming years (I did hit the “make a living” point about a year into this, but I had four novels and some shorter ebooks out at that point), and put something out on a regular basis (as much as we’d like to wish and hope otherwise, more books are always being published and it’s rare for any one book to stay on the radar for long).

3. Promote, promote, promote. As time goes on, if you do things correctly (see next step), you’ll be able to do less promoting to random people you don’t know and more to your existing fans (i.e. blog, Facebook, Twitter announcements, fun extras — character interviews, cut scenes, etc.) who will then (we hope!) share news of your work of their own accord.

4. Have a web presence (whether you need to blog or not is always up for debate — it sells some books for me directly, through the links at the right, but not a lot in the grand scheme of things) that you direct readers to (i.e. at the end of your ebook) where they can sign up for your newsletter (see my post on newsletter marketing for authors). This way, you can immediately get in touch with fans when you have a new book out. Right now, if you get a thousand purchases of your book on the day you release it, it will be enough to propel you into the Top 1000 at Amazon, something that will, at least temporarily, put you into the Top 10-20 in most sub-categories (i.e. fantasy > epic) and make you a “hot new release” in your category. Yes, this fades once sales slow down, though for some authors with books with wide appeal, this may bring the necessary attention to become a best-seller for weeks or even months on Amazon. (No, that hasn’t happened with any of my stuff, but you can make a nice living simply by cultivating a core fan base and selling to them — if you haven’t yet, read Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans post.)

Any other questions related to pricing or thoughts on these? Please leave them below.

Update: You may also want to read my post on Ebook Pricing Strategies for a First or Stand-Alone Novel.

 

Related Posts:

How to Sell Advanced Reader Copies as a Self-Published Author
Is It Harder Today for Self-Published Authors to “Break in” at Amazon?
What Can We Learn from JA Konrath’s $140,000 E-Publishing Sales Month?