How to price your Kindle eBook
A question I get asked all the time is:
“How do I price my eBook?
(And just to be 100% clear – this is an eBook available on Amazon.com – NOT a .pdf download on your website.)
Excellent question!
First off, know that to maximize your eBook commission on Amazon you need to price your eBook between $2.99 and $9.99. When your book is priced in this range, you’ll receive up to 70% commission per sale.
And of course, it’s not exactly as simple as that since there are additional factors that go into how much commission you’ll receive. But for the sake of this article on pricing your eBook, that’s the price range we’re looking at.
You can read the Kindle eBook Pricing Page.
There are 4 factors you need to take into consideration.
1. What will your genre bear?
Every genre has a different price point. If you compare romance to self-help, you’ll see a HUGE difference in what price the market with bear for your eBook.
2. How much do you want to make?
Yes, you CAN make money selling eBooks! (I do. My clients do. I know lots of authors who do!) So when you’re pricing your eBook, you need to keep your target sales goal in mind.
3. Are you interested in dollars per book OR selling more books?
If you’re more interested in getting the highest commission per book, you’ll price your book at the upper end of what your genre will bear. If you’re looking to sell more books… Don’t assume that selling for a higher cost-per-unit is mutually exclusive with selling lots of books!
But the answer to this question WILL help you with your pricing.
4. Decide what your book is worth – to you.
You worked hard on this book! Which means it probably feels terrible to think of selling it at $0.99 or $1.99 or even $2.99. And you don’t HAVE to sell for cheap. But also keep in mind that your book’s price should be in line with other books in the genre.
How to figure out what price your genre will bear.
1. Go to Amazon.com and select ‘Kindle Store’ from the dropdown menu on the search bar.
2. Enter in the keywords, topic, or search term that would call up books similar to yours.
HINT: It’s better to be REALLY specific here! As an example, do these steps once with ‘fishing’ and once with ‘trout fishing’ and compare the results! Specific means YOU get better results!
3. Sort your results by “New & Popular” – you really want to evaluate the top sellers in your category. Amazon calls these the “popular” books.
4. Make a list of the sales prices for the top twenty books in your genre. When you’re making this list you’re going to exclude:
- Anything that obviously doesn’t fit. In this exercise, a novel about fishing came up. If I’m writing a non-fiction book, I don’t want to compare my How-To Book to a novel!
- Anything that is listed for free. There IS a way to get Amazon to permanently set an eBook price to $0.00. Since YOU will be selling yours, it’s not a comparison
- Anything that is brand-new. If it’s newer than 30 days, don’t count the price in the results.
Once you’ve made your list, you’ll quickly be able to see the median average of prices. THAT’S where you should start your pricing!
Remember, that your eBook price isn’t set in stone so you CAN adjust it later if you find you’re priced too high or too low.
By the way, this is the same system I use to price my print books as well. I recommend you START your price research with the Kindle version since the results are usually easier to interpret at first.
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