How Much to Charge for Your Book?

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How to Get Book Reviews

How to price your book?

 

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Once your book is created and ready to upload onto Amazon, pricing will quickly became an issue. You don’t want the price be too high and loose sales, but you also don’t want to go too low and wait forever until your editing, formatting, and book cover design cost are covered – not even to speak of your writing time, possible copyright and lSBN fees, and certainly the online retailers cut.

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Lots of Considerations…
There are so many facts that can influence how to set book prices, here are just a few examples:

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Countries in which books and ebooks are sold.
Study the local book prices for your genre. Price books for Germany differently from those for Italy or Spain.
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Requirements of online retailers.
To receive a certain revenue for your books, online retailers set a lower and upper price limit, such as $2.99 or the equivalent for ca. 70% and under or over ca. 35%.
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Exclusivity at KDP Select.
Selling exclusive with Amazon means you don’t need to worry about book price matches. And you can use 99cents prices or even free for a couple of days as teaser, e.g. before launch of a new book. Prime Members and …. can lend your book and you get paid. However they choose mostly higher-priced books!
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Book production cost (POD or print run).
The mostly higher printing and binding quality requires a slightly higher price in most cases.
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Price Matching of online retailers.
Especially Amazon and Kobo are infamous for matching author’s book prices in order to offer it lower than the competition. (It’s in the contract and you can’t object it).
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Charm prices for books.
Michelle Demers wrote a great chapter about charm prices in her book The Global Indie Author 
about this topic. Read the book or at least study a shorter version on her blog.
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Sales tax in a various countries.
In (mostly) European countries sales tax is included, while in North America the sales tax will be added. Check out my recent blog post Tax for Books Sold in Europe.

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Retailer contracts that dictate price endings.
The Apple contract for example requires f the use of price endings at .99 (or .49) contractually.
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Fiction or non-fiction book.
Useful information-based non-fiction books (guide books) that require lots of research are almost always higher priced than novels.
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Certain numbers are considered bad numbers, such as 4 or 13.
In Japan, the number 4 and the number 9 have a bad image, in Europe and North America the number 13 and in China it’s also the number 4 for bad luck. So better avoid these numbers there.
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Prices for bestselling, comparable books in the same category.
As always: study your competition, find out the average price for quality books in your category, and also consider other factors too: the number of book reviews, the cover design and other professional attributes of a book.
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Is it your first book? Or the third or fifth?
Maybe you better start with $2.99 and then, after having an audience and maybe even writer books with more pages, slowly raise the price? Experiment with different prices. You don’t have to stick with the first one, theoretically you can change them every week.
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Do you have room for promotions?
With a book priced at $4.99 you have room for sales campaigns, such as “countdown deals”, with a $0.99 you are stuck.  You will earn royalties based on your regular royalty rate and the promotional price. As a result, if you are using the 70% royalty option, you’ll earn 70% even if the price is below $2.99.

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You as an author, you think about the price, however your customer, the reader, thinks about value. “Is this book worth the price?” Before setting a book price, make sure you it gives the impression of value, via a great cover, title, blurb and lots of reviews. And certainly through “Look Inside” where you can proof great content before the reader hits the order button.

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Here are more price opinions:
http://www.standoutbooks.com/how-to-price-your-ebook/
http://www.molly-greene.com/ebook-pricing/
https://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/no-more-99cent-books-decent-pay-for-decent-work/

 

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