Pricing your Kindle book

Pricing digital books has been in the press a lot lately. Digital publishing is still an emerging platform and many are still figuring what a good price for a kindle book is. As ever, context is important. Let us take a quick look at the commercially successful Lee Child, who's books are now movies headlined by Tom Cruise. On Aug 30 this year Lee Child's latest book will be released. The Kindle version at launch will be £10.53 ($16.49), slightly less expensive than the Hardcover. The price of last year's The Affair is currently £6.83 ($10.80) on the Kindle and 2010's Worth Dying For is £4.49 ($7.10). The pricing of Lee Child's Kindle books keep pace with the most recent printed version. Each of his back catalogue are priced slightly cheaper than the paperback. Lee Child sells about two books every second of every day.

My one indie published book looks like it might be commercially produced but has nothing other than the cover, Amazon reviews and word of mouth to commend it. The reality is Kindle owners will pay seven bucks for their favourite commercial authors and thankfully, they will pay to try an indie author. They will not pay much though. I can't really say I blame them. I'm one of them. Quality is a big issue (and the topic for a future post).

On releasing Chasing Innocence I knew slightly more than NOTHING about selling Kindle books. I priced the Kindle version at £3.45 and it sold 21 copies that month. I knew every one of the people that bought it. Out of a desire for the book to be read over a desire to make money, I scheduled a two day Amazon Select promotion and suddenly it was on four thousand Kindle devices across the UK and US. During the promotion I'd researched prices for indie books and immediately after the promotion dropped the price to £1.53 ($2.99). I was surprised to see it purchased 800 times over the next month with sales dropping off over that time. If I dropped the price to 99p sales picked up. If I ran a Select promotion I had a spike in sales after the promotion and a slow drop-off. If I kept the price at £1.53 sales ticked-over at about five units a week. If I dropped the price to £1 then sales picked up to 10-30 units per week. If I set the price to £3.45 sales drop to one a week. I discovered people are more likely to leave a review of your book if they downloaded it for free or bought it for a buck or two.

As a reader I love a series character and good story telling over literary concepts, which usually results in me buying more of an author's books. If you want long term success as an indie author you will need more than one book, probably upwards of five. If you're building your writing brand from scratch expect to price your book a lot lower than commercial authors. By pricing low and working Amazon Select you will find an audience, you will spend less time marketing and have more time to write the best selling sequel.

The next indie publishing post is going to be about tagging and categorising your book on Amazon KDP. If you have stories or advice to share or questions on indie publishing you'd like answered, then I'd love to hear from you.