KDP pricing support

Indie authors will be
interested in Amazon's new feature, KDP Pricing Support, which helps
authors choose the most lucrative price point for their ebook. 
Amazon bases their recommendation on each book's category, customer
reviews, ratings, past sales, best-seller rank and page count, using
past data to estimate how many books you'd sell if you raised or lowered
your book's price.  They don't
seem to factor in delivery costs, though, so if your books are
picture-heavy like mine, you'll need to do a bit of extra math to see if
Amazon's suggestions hold water.



To see what Amazon thinks
the best price for your book would be, go into your Bookshelf on KDP,
click on "Edit rights, royalty, and pricing," then click "view service"
under the Step 8 KDP Pricing Support (Beta) section.  You'll get a
graph like the one shown at the top of this post, with Amazon's estimate
for your earnings and the number of books sold at various price points.



In the past, my strategy
with ebooks has been to price very low so that more readers can access
my books, driving the titles up the best-seller lists and garnering lots
of new readers.  So it's no surprise that Amazon thinks I should
charge more, figuring that the increase in revenue per book will
overcome the lower number of books sold.



Although I'm a bit
dubious, I tentatively chose to take their advice for our most popular
titles, raising the price of every book significantly.  I'll be
keeping a close eye on my sales, though, and will lower prices as
necessary if I feel like I'm losing momentum (or getting bad reviews) by
pricing books at a higher point.  I'll also try to remember to
post an update in a month or so analyzing how the higher prices affected
ebook sales and revenue so you know whether to follow suit.  Feel
free to chime in with a comment if you've also tried Amazon's new
feature and loved it or hated it.