Today’s self-published authors have more control over the selling price of their books than ever before.
As a result, choosing the right selling price has become a critically important task for authors writing and publishing books to build their personal brands.
After deciding on the title and topic for their brand-building books and e-books, self-published authors must decide how much to charge for them.
Perspective
Traditionally, authors wrote books for income from publisher advances and royalties based on print book sales.
Now, self-publishing and e-books are eliminating “publishers as gatekeepers” and increasing numbers of authors are writing for electronic distribution.
Today, more and more authors are viewing books as brand-building loss leaders and SEO traffic magnets–investments in future profits from coaching and consulting services, speaking, and information products like audios, videos, worksheets, reports, memberships, and online events.
It’s more important than ever that authors choose the right selling price for their self-published books and e-books.
Implications
Here are some of the issues you may want to consider when pricing your self-published e-books:
- Risk versus reward. Authors, like readers, have to carefully balance risk versus reward. Income from book sales is immediately available, whereas there’s no guarantee that back-end profits will actually materialize. Authors have to carefully analyze the likelihood that book sales will lead to future coaching, consulting, and information-product sales.
- Income versus exposure. Self-published authors also have to balance income from book sales against the value of added exposure. Readers are usually risk-adverse; as the price of a book or e-book increases, the number of copies sold often goes down.
- Competition. It’s not only how an author balances income with exposure, it’s also how the author’s competition balances income and exposure when setting e-book prices. Your choice of selling price should be influenced by the prevailing costs of quality competing titles that may be selling for $1.99 or $2.99.
Your book might be better, but, unless the you can prove the superiority of your book to risk-adverse readers conditioned to expect quality for $2.99, you’ll probably have trouble selling your book for $10.00 or $20.00.
Price and value
Perhaps the best perspective on e-book pricing comes from the dialogue sparked by a recent post on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog. Joe is an experienced trade publishing executive and observer with decades of experience. He was a Vice President & Executive Publisher at John Wiley & Sons and is now General Manager & Publisher at O’Reilly Media.)
As described in a recent post, Joe Wikert addresses Amazon’s Kindle Shorts pricing strategy from a value point of view. From his perspective, short, concisely written Kindle Shorts should command a premium price, because they save the reader’s time! In his words,
“…brevity is a key product attribute, so don’t be afraid to let it drive a price up rather than down.”
Pricing your Kindle e-book
The issue of e-book pricing is not going to go away! As more and more business professionals make the decision to self-publish their brand-building books as e-books–Kindle, or otherwise–increasing attention will be placed on the importance of e-book pricing. What’s your perspective? Are you going to base the price of your e-books high or low…or, are you going to base the selling price of your brand-building e-book on the value it offers readers? Share your opinions & questions as comments, below.
Author:
Roger C. Parker‘s Published & Profitable blog offers daily tips for planning, writing, promoting, and profiting from brand-building books.
