In Part 8 we talked about the different platforms where you can self-publish, and whether you should go Amazon-exclusive or 'wide.
You’ve chosen to either go ‘wide’ or go ‘Amazon exclusive’, so depending on which one it is, it is now the time to create your account and get your book uploaded (hopefully a few months before your book is supposed to be out). There are a lot of tutorials on YouTube and on multiple websites on how to do this properly. You can do the research and do that yourself. Pay attention, and make sure you fill in all the details properly. The keywords are especially important since they will be how your book appears when people search for books online. Make sure you upload the proper cover file and the book’s interior file, then write up the title, subtitle and the book’s blurb, and you’d be all ready to go.
Now an extremely important part of self-publishing is setting up the right price for your ebook. I find that the best thing to do is look at books like yours and research what they’re selling for. Typically, fiction books sell between 2.99 and 6.99. Unfortunately, I don’t know how much non-fiction books sell for, but it’s research you should be doing yourself.
Pricing your Ebook
Pricing is extremely important, because if you price the book too low, you might get lots of sales, but you make less money from them, and if you sell it too cheaply, people might just buy it as a cheap purchase and never mentally commit to actually reading it, leaving it in their kindle for eternity. On the other hand, if you price it too high, as a debut author and someone who is utterly unproven, then I can guarantee you are risking no one purchasing your book at all.
See, pricing has nothing to do with how hard you worked to write the book, or how long the book is in terms of pages: it’s all about how readers are used to paying for books like yours.
Pricing Strategy
One pricing strategy I followed when I debuted my novel, Seeds of War (which might be outdated now, by the way—do your research!), was to open up pre-orders with the book at 0.99, then make it free for two or three days to generate buzz, schedule free book campaigns on campaign websites like Freebooksy and Fussy Librarian, and then bring the price back up to 0.99 after that to capitalise on it.
The good thing about doing this is that you will move a lot of books, either free or at 0.99 cents. The philosophy behind this strategy is that “readers” are more important than “sales”, and as a starting author, you need as many readers as you possibly can. Plus, having more readers pick up your book increase your chances of having more reviews, or them picking up your next book.
The bad thing is... you’re essentially not making almost any money during your launch, which is when you should be going hard and raking in money.
On one hand, I think I still agree that as a debut author, especially if you’re writing in very competitive genres where readers don’t expect to pay much for books, this might be a strategy you want to consider. Otherwise, I think pricing your book at 2.99 could work too. It’s still affordable, and instead of the 35% royalty rate you’d get from selling the book at 0.99, you’d get a 70% royalty rate, which is already exciting.
If you are adamant you want to go big and price the book high, by all means do it, just be aware that you are maybe limiting yourself to a bunch of readers who are more risk-averse and don’t want to pay much for an author they’ve never heard of before. Put yourself in their shoes: would you pay 4.99 or 5.99 for a book of an author with little to no reviews whose name you’ve never heard of? And would you do it when you had the chance to buy 5 or 6 books for 0.99 from other authors?
Yeah...
Do what’s best for you. Be humble, but don’t be too humble. You need readers, but you also need to value your book. On the flip side, a lot of people also don’t buy books at 0.99 because they assume it’s very low quality, so there’s that to consider as well.
Decisions, decisions...
Another Pricing Strategy
A good pricing strategy (in my opinion) for book launches is to start the book maybe at 2.99 or 3.99 and then use the Kindle Countdown Deal to drop the price during the week of the launch to 0.99. When you use a Kindle Countdown Deal, your book goes down to 0.99, but instead of getting paid a 35% royalty rate (33 cents/book), you get to keep the 70% royalty rate (66 cents/book). It’s not the same as the full price, but it’s a good way to keep readers engaged and boost your position in the Amazon rankings.
Speaking of Amazon rankings... pricing your book low typically helps your book climb up the ranks, and when you reach the top of the ranks, more people can find your book in the different categories it’s listed in. For example, when I dropped my book to 0.99, I ended up in the top 20 of a few categories (Military Fantasy and Arthurian Fantasy), and that got a lot more people picking up the book for sure.
Every time you drop the price, it’s a good idea to obviously shout it everywhere, in all the channels you’ve been actively building up until now. At this point, you should have a good mailing list and some social media followers, so that’s a good way to get started.
As you can probably imagine, there is a lot more nuance to this, but the bottom line is: this is something you can’t just brush over. Pricing strategies are abundant, and people come up with different ones based on their goals, with a lot of them done in conjunction with advertisements on Amazon and/or Facebook, but that’s something for another time!
(Continues in Part 10!)
