Self-publishing platforms offer authors a great opportunity for making a profitable living from their writing. Pricing their eBook appropriately is one of the most important decisions for self-published authors in order to maximize their sales. Setting an eBook price that is too high or too low could put buyers off and lose you valuable eBook sales. The various self-publishing platforms have some guidelines which can help direct authors towards setting a reasonable price for their eBook. However, authors will still have to experiment with their eBook prices until they find the sweet spot where they see the maximum sales for their eBook.
Generally, most self-publishing platforms allow you to set prices for eBooks between $0.99 and $9.99. According to industry experts, the $0.99 price point is ineffectual in getting profitable sales for authors. Also, you will get 70 percent royalties (on Amazon KDP and a few other eBook stores) if you price your eBook at or above $2.99, and only 35 percent royalties if you price your eBook below this point. So, keep this in mind when you set the initial price. Here are some tips on how to increase your eBook prices from your initial price over time without losing your customers.
1. Wait for the right moment to raise the price
One of the usual approaches towards reaching the optimal price point is to start off with a lower price when you first publish your eBook, and then as you see sales begin, you can gradually increase your price. Give your eBook some time initially to get noticed at the lower initial price. When you have some good reviews coming in and the sales are on the rise, wait for the sales to continue increasing. Raise the price of your eBook when you see a sustained increase in your eBook sales.
2. Be reasonable while raising prices
Increasing the price by 20 percent to 40 percent at one time is reasonable, but increasing at a steeper rate than that might put buyers off. Also, keep an eye on the competition. Regularly check the prices of other eBooks in your genre or authors with a similar eBook as yours. Be sure that your eBook is not priced much higher than theirs, even if your eBook is doing much better than the other eBooks.
3. Raise after a free promotion period
Amazon’s KDP Select program offer writers the chance to give away their eBooks for free during the promotional period, which can be any five days of your choice. This is a great feature which allows writers to increase their eBooks downloads so that they can get more reviews and readership. Based on the readers’ response at the end of your free eBook period, you can increase the price to a point higher than it was initially before the promotional period.
4. Be patient, don’t change prices too quickly
Just because your eBook sales are increasing and good reviews are coming in, don’t go on a price raising spree. Frequent and steep price rising will put many buyers off who might have read your eBook’s reviews mentioning a lower price. Raise the price once, and then wait for a few weeks at least to see what the response is like, before deciding to raise the price further. You need to be patient and vigilant about monitoring the sales with each price increase.
5. Provide added benefits with your price raise
If you have already increased your eBook price to a point that is similar or higher than other eBooks in your genre or category, and you would like to raise it further, then make sure that readers will see some additional benefits of your eBook over others to justify the higher price. This is not too difficult, and you can easily include some ‘free’ material in your eBook price such as a discount towards another eBook, access to a training course on your website or some extra downloadable content. You can get really creative with adding ‘extras’ that will attract your readers into purchasing your eBook even at higher prices.
Image credit: Elliott Brown on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/CS_Rajan.jpg [/author_image] [author_info]CS Rajan is a freelance writer who loves to write on various topics, and is currently working on her first novel. [/author_info] [/author]