Recommended Pricing

I would check other books in your genre of similar length. There's a top 100 books in all the categories (paid and being offered free at the moment) to give you an idea. If you are using Amazon KDP, you would most likely want the 70% royalty rate, so the book should be priced no lower than $2.99.

I would price based on category (short, novella, novel) rather than length OF the novel.

Also, let me throw this out there:
I rarely buy short stories as stand alone, but if I do, NEVER for more than the .99, which I assume is minimum other than free.
I will pay up to around 2.99 for a novella, but I usually only buy them from authors I like or from publishers.
I DO NOT generally buy ebooks priced at 2.99 and below because that screams "I self-published this and I'm not sure it's worth Real Money" to me. My favored price range to see for ebooks that are not from the Big 6 is around 4.99, give or take. To me, that $5 says "Yeah, I know I don't have Tor backing me up, but I'm confident that this is worth it."

I'm basing mine on a set of guidelines Dean Wesley Smith posted on his blog earlier this year.

All the studies/graphs/whatnot I've seen places the sweet spot between 2.99 and 5.99. I wouldn't go down to .99 unless it was a novella or lengthy short story.

I agree that avoiding the .99 is good practice. I feel that selling at such low prices is 'training' readers to expect books at the price. This is a very short term vision. The problem is that at .99 it is very difficult for anyone to make any real money.

Captim_Spaghetti said:

Do you have a link?

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I am not Greg, but I do remember that article. Here it is:

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=6391

I don't necessarily agree with the exact price points and wouldn't divide it quite so often, but I agree with the general point that one shouldn't undervalue his own work.

Is it cool to ask what y'all price your books at? If you're selling I mean. I've been wavering between 2.99 and 3.99 or maybe even 4.99. I don't wanna get greedy though. I'd rather have my books in more hands being enjoyed than sitting on a throne of money. Although a money throne would be rad.

Justin_AC said:

Is it cool to ask what y'all price your books at? If you're selling I mean. I've been wavering between 2.99 and 3.99 or maybe even 4.99. I don't wanna get greedy though. I'd rather have my books in more hands being enjoyed than sitting on a throne of money. Although a money throne would be rad.

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Most of my e-books are $2.99. Short stories are $.99 cents.

Justin_AC said:

Is it cool to ask what y'all price your books at? If you're selling I mean. I've been wavering between 2.99 and 3.99 or maybe even 4.99. I don't wanna get greedy though. I'd rather have my books in more hands being enjoyed than sitting on a throne of money. Although a money throne would be rad.

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I just self published two books. My novel is $3.99 and my novelette is $1.99.
So my pricing is going to look like this:
Novel $3.99
Novella $2.99
Novelette $1.99
Short Story $.99

Btw, I actually saw my sales, which are still low, pick up about 33% at all 3 locations I sell them at during the 1st quarter of this year after I reprised them upward.

Justin_AC said:

Is it cool to ask what y'all price your books at?

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0.99 for individual short stories.
2.99 for collection of about 25K-30K words.

If I ever write a full length novel I'd price it higher, say 3.99 or 4.99 but I prefer writing short stories even though they don't sell as well.

Be aware that there is an increasing reader backlash against 99c books, which have for some come to mean Trash. Pricing higher might make a better impression. Check out your competitors.

Since I just downloaded my last lousy ebook at $4.99, I'm no longer going by price point. (The last lousy ebook before that was $7.99.)

I've come to the conclusion that an overpriced bad ebook is worse than a 99-cent ebook. At least, I feel more unhappy about the purchase and will actually write a review (usually) to spare others from making the same mistake.

From now on, if I don't know the author, I judge a book by its cover and its sample. Even at that, if it's too expensive, I won't buy.

Statistically there will be more crap books at 99c as that is what people who do not wish to earn money, but only fame, price at.

retromovie said:

Statistically there will be more crap books at 99c as that is what people who do not wish to earn money, but only fame, price at.

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Not everyone prices a title at $.99 cents because they want fame. I priced the first title in a trilogy at that price to encourage readers to check out the trilogy. The goal being that they would purchase the two other titles at a higher price point, if they liked the first title.

Nick Russell priced his fiction title at $.99 cents and has sold over 100,000 paid copies. That's easy math, even for me -- $35,000. Not everyone has that kind of success, but I'd be deliriously happy to make that much of a royalty off one $.99 cent title (or any title for that matter).

retromovie said:

Statistically there will be more crap books at 99c as that is what people who do not wish to earn money, but only fame, price at.

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Or they could be new authors looking to create a following by offering eBooks at 99 cents, and the quoted logic actually makes little sense. Only pricing books at that low price point for fame? Are they looking to become known for crap books? Not the kind of fame I'd be interested in.

I was actually curious about this topic so went over to Amazon's Kindle forums to see what readers thought. While there are a couple that go with the '.99=crap' formula, most know that crap exists within all price ranges. Many are using cover art (so much for don't judge a book by its cover) and the 'Look Inside' feature, deciding that the intro will reveal if the author knows pesky things like spelling and punctuation.

While I believe my eBooks are worth more than 99 cents, I'm sticking with the price because it helps readers decide to take a chance on an author they've never heard of. I'll raise prices after I get them hooked

I have a friend that publishes solely on the Kindle platform at $4.99. But she writes in two different (soon to be three) series and has a following that watch for them. She also uses the free days to promote the new books by putting the original in a series out free for five days before the newest in the series is released. She's not a millionaire, but she's supporting two kids without needing to work as a waitress anymore.

On the flip side, I know an author who is pushing 99 cent novels. She makes almost nothing in the end. She has decent sales numbers, but the commissions aren't big. And they only sell for a month or two and then drop off the radar. (Her issue is she doesn't think her work is worth as much as others, so the pricing scheme isn't based on a profit motive).

Just sayin'...

Jeff

On Smashwords their statistics since they first came into ebook distribution show that more books are sold at $2.99 than any other price.
The Genres were in rough order; Romance; Erotica; Other genres.
I had all my books, other than one free, at $4.99. Immediately I changed to $2.99 I got sales on books that hadn't moved for awhile.
That's just my experience on pricing.

Regards
GJ

I still recommend this post by the owener of smashwords. http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/04/can-ebook-data-reveal-new-viral.html

It tells that the ideal pricing of an ebook is around $5. I like $5.99 personally.
Check it out.

Bestselling author John Locke, who famously sold over 1,000,000 Kindle books during the first 5 months of 2011, recommends and sticks to $0.99 (for all his fiction).

"Paradoxically" (no, not really), he finds that 35% of $.099 is worth a lot more than 70% of $2.99 in the long run, simply because the sales volumes are so much higher. As he sees it, he needs to sell "only 6 times as many" at the lower price to make it the right price.

I suspect this varies from genre to genre, and that some genre's readers are more willing to pay higher prices than others. (Locke's are crime/detective stories).

alexaherself said:

Bestselling author John Locke, who famously sold over 1,000,000 Kindle books during the first 5 months of 2011, recommends and sticks to $0.99 (for all his fiction).

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On the other hand, when he started with that there was a big boom in kindle ereader buying over that xmas, which he has credited for his sales (he said he succeeded in getting into kindle for those buyers to see him at the right time), and now he's got a rep, it's self-perpetuating. Since everyone else started going 99c too, there's no advantage and no huge sales without a rep, all prices were depressed more to try and sell, then people started going free on Select as the 'new' sales edge, which then meant there was and is a glut of freebies which is the current situation that numerous people are complaining about, to the extent that excessive use of Select by indies is now being blamed for the death of all sales on Kindle for some. These are books guys, not cans of beans, price wars are bad!

If this is the first in a series people recommend setting the price a tad lower before the sequel comes out. Say price book one at 3.99 and book 2 at 4.99 or so. Also remember that you can always lower the price if sales aren't that good.