Pricing Your E-Book

Once you have decided to publish your manuscript as an e-book, you have lots of opportunities to sell it in different formats, but you will definitely want to start by getting your book formatted for  the industry leader, Amazon.com.  In an August 2010 interview a vice president at Amazon estimated that his company has 70 to 80 percent of the e-book market, and I would guess that still holds true as of this writing.   Amazon e-books are sold on its Kindle store, but remember that you don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle books.  I have a Kindle app on my iPad, and buy all my e-books through Amazon which are then downloaded to my iPad in seconds. The unprecedented popularity of the iPad has boosted the sale of all e-books, but particularly books bought from Amazon.

When you are ready to upload your e-book to Amazon, you will want to ask the experts on the best way to do that, and that of course is Amazon itself.  You’ll want to follow the instructions in the Kindle Direct Publishing Section by going to:  https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin.  Not surprisingly you can download a free e-book from Amazon, titled Publish On Amazon Kindle with Kindle Direct Publishing.

There are quite a few things to think about when publishing your e-book on Amazon, but none may be as important as the pricing, and this decision is not as obvious as you might think.  How do you find out about this topic?  Read an e-book, of course, and there is a good one out by Kindle expert Stephen Windwalker titled How to Price EBooks for the Kindle.

Here is the most essential thing you need to know:  price your e-book between $2.99 and $9.99, not higher or lower.  Why?  Because when you sell an e-book through Amazon you get a 70% royalty if your book is priced in this range, and a 35% royalty if it is priced either higher or lower.  Clearly this is the “sweet spot” that Amazon has determined that its customers will buy most of their e-books.  So don’t ignore Amazon’s advice based on millions of transactions; no one can dispute that they know how to sell the most books, and when you make money, they make money. Of course you will find e-books priced at $12.95 or even higher on Amazon, but these are likely best sellers, and placed on Amazon by major publishers, and the math that determines their best price point for these books  is far different than the math that will apply to you.

Trying to get a few dollars more for your e-book and going above the $9.99 pricing simply doesn’t make any sense. For example, if you priced a book a $19.99, you would be getting the same royalty as if you priced your book at $9.99, and you don’t have to do much math to figure out that you will be selling lots more books at $9.99. But don’t assume that just because your book is terrific (as I’m sure it is), you can price it at as high as $9.99. Windwalker has done a lot of research about pricing e-books, and has concluded that you must determine the best price point in part on your experience as an author. 

These are his recommendations for pricing a full length book equivalent to 160+ print pages with a defined and reachable target audience: 

$9.95 if you are a bestselling author, with over 150K books sold, including 50K of a single title.

$6.99 if you are an established author with 50K to 150K books sold.

$2.99 if you are an emerging author with10K to 50K books sold.

$2.99 if you are a fledging author with 0 to 10K books sold.

But Windwalker notes that there are other factors to consider as well, including:

What price are similar books selling for?  You don’t want to sell your book for more than a book by a person with similar credentials on a similar topic. But you also may not want to under price your book if you see that a similar book is very popular.

Is it hard to define your market? Subtract up to $3 from the price if you can’t clearly define the market for your book, but don’t go lower than $2.99.

Do you have a book that is “guaranteed” to help people make money?  This will raise your price, but not higher than $9.99.

There are other factors as well, and nothing is as important as how much time you are able to spend marketing your book and building a platform.  If you are willing to commit at least an hour a day to marketing your book, then this might be a good reason to charge more. Even the price sensitive customers who purchase e-books are susceptible to good marketing, which will make a few dollars inconsequential if they really want to buy and read your book.

For a very different perspective, you might want to purchase another interesting e-book,  How I Sold One Million E-Books In 5 Months, by John Locke.  John sold his popular mysteries as e-books and his not as popular western books by using his own “method” of combining blogging and social media.  I’m not sure if his ideas apply to self-help non-fiction, but they certainly make interesting reading.