Pricing Ebooks 

What is the best selling price range for ebooks? Pricing ebooks has been a real challenge. If you research the topic online, you can come up with scores of arguments for various prices. But just as I was writing this article, a new study was made public by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.

According to his company’s analysis of more than $12 million in ebook sales (both fiction and nonfiction) on Smashwords, their most popular prices points were free through $2.99. However, ebooks at $3.99 sold more copies than $2.99. Ebooks priced at $1.99 did not do well. At least as far as this survey, $1.99 is not a good asking price for ebooks.

When looking at price alone as how it relates to sales, one of the overall conclusions of the Smashwords survey was that pricing at $2.99 will earn you more per book and result in more sales. Of course, the more authors who adjust their prices based on the survey, the more likely the results would change next time the same survey were conducted.

Whether you are selling ebooks or paper books, the best starting price for your book will often be whatever the average market price is for similar books. You can later adjust prices up or down based on how sales are affected.  For instance, if you start out at $5.99 and sales are slow, try $4.99 and see if that price point helps. I found several of my nonfiction titles did better at $4.99, while one title is selling well at $7.99. Stephen King's Riding the Bullet started off selling at $3.50 but also became available for $2.50 at some sites and $1.50 at others. You have to experiment to know.

Giving it away

The Amazon Kindle Select program allows authors gave them away their Kindle book for free oon 5 days during the 90 day program time. The give away entices more Kindle shoppers to download and hopefully review the books as well as buy other titles by the same author. The strategy is that you take a loss on the free item in order to get more exposure, gather a larger fan base, and make bigger ticket sales down the road.

Giving away sample chapters for free makes good sense and is easy to set up with autoresponders. Consider formatting smaller versions of your ebooks as give away items. Use the free ebook to upsell the full price edition.

Higher demand = higher prices

An ebook might be priced higher than it's paper bound edition because it is in higher demand. For instance, say you are a student doing a report for school. You have only tonight to get help for your project. You could go online and download an ebook with exactly the material you need. Are you willing to pay a little more for this material?

In addition to writing books, I paid a premium for an ebook about using publicity to increase my book sales. I willingly spent twenty bucks because this ebook contained over 50 examples of effective news releases, some specifically written to publicize books. Since many professional publicists charge hundreds of dollars to write one news release, I felt the collection was a bargain.

Serials

Serialized ebooks can be priced as subscriptions. Sci-fi author Jim Baen offers serializes portions of his titles before they are to appear in print to subscribers for $10 a month at http://www.baen.com. Stephen King released his ebook, The Plant as a serial. He asked readers to send a dollar upon receiving each issue of the downloaded material. Around 172,000 people paid $1 each for part one and over 74,000 people paid another $1 for part two.

Publishing costs of ebooks

With ebooks, you don't have the costs associated with typical printing of paper books. You may pay for software to produce and layout your ebooks or hire a service provider. Once paid for, the production end of your ebook is done, though you will still have marketing costs. If you work with one of the digital content delivery providers, you will pay a percentage of each sale depending on the service you use. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing pays authors 70% royalties on books priced at $2.99 or more.

I have priced some of my ebooks at roughly half of the price of their paperback versions, just because it would make sense that a customer would see that as a bargain. Many consumers make a purchasing decision when they feel they can save money. I made it clear on my web pages that customers could save 50% over the price of the paper bound editions by getting the ebook delivered to their desktop in a matter of minutes. This approach apparently works because my ebook sales go up every month.

Since there are no recurring printing costs with ebooks, pricing comes down to "how much is the customer willing to pay?" and you can only learn that through testing.

Popular selling prices

If the book is information the customer needs now and can't find elsewhere, you can probably collect a higher price for as long as no one is selling lower priced ebooks that compete with similar subject matter. The more your book is considered a resource, the more you can ask.

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