What has to be done by the end of this week?
Setting the best price for my book.
How to Select the Optimum List Price
1. Survey the top 50 bestselling titles in your Niche Category on Amazon.com and check that the price you are thinking about is not totally outrageously different from the current market.
Super easy. Open up a new Excel spreadsheet, or GoogleSheets, and quickly go down the bestseller list on Amazon for your niche and type, or copy and paste in, the price of the kindle book into a table on your spreadsheet. Starting at number one and working down the list. You are looking for single books rather than box sets. And it will always just be a snapshot of what is happening on that day.
For example. The Cozy Mystery Category
It took me about 10 mins to open a spreasheet and note down the price in US dollars of the top 50 books in the Cozy paid chart. [This list changes by the day of course.]
The average price of these top 20 titles = $2.53.
60% of the top 20 were priced at $1.32.
There were a few books which skewed the distribution upwards. The number one title is priced at $6.01 which is very high.
If you exclude this first book, the average price drops to $2.26
The average price of the top 50 titles = $3.16.
52% of the top 50 were priced at $1.32.
2. Think Series.
Only 2 books in the top 20 bestsellers were NOT series. If you want readers to buy more of your books in a specific sequence, price them competitively so that price is not a barrier.
3. The equivalent number of pages or word count.
For example. Would you expect to pay the same amount for:
* A 20,000 word novella or perhaps 50 equivalent pages?
* A 50,000 word, 200 equivalent page category romance? And
* The latest full length, 450 equivalent page blockbuster crime book from a well-known author.
I wouldn’t. And yet if you look at any online bookseller you will see authors who have set a list price for their novella or short story collection which is the same as a new release of the eBook version of a bestselling novel in the charts.
Price your work within a price band which is realistic for the genre of eBook you are selling.
Think about how much you would pay as a reader, and the list price for other books of the same length and genre.
Take a look at your eBook reader.
How many books do you have on it which you know that you are never going to read, or read again? Why do you want to add more? Any new eBook has to earn its place.
I think the tide has turned and many readers are now slowly turning away from free or very low price books which they know that they will probably never read.
But it is more than that. We all lead such hectic lives with very little leisure time.
If a reader is going to invest several hours of their life reading your eBook then they want to make sure that the time will not be wasted, irrespective of how little it costs.
The pressure is on authors to price our books in a way that helps readers to discover our work – and then delight them by over delivering with a compelling, well-written story which is free from errors and the best work that we can create.
That is the way to create a good reader experience and have them coming back for more.
Now back to the manuscript. Have a good one. Nina.
