Pricing e- books

[Keith Taylor]

$2.99 and £1.99 are the starting point for 70% royalties. So not below $2.99. But... smashwords suggest it's not as good a pricepoint as $3.99.

I'd hesitate before making pricing decisions based on Smashwords research. For one thing that study is from 2013, so in self-publishing terms the data might as well have been delivered by telegram. I've seen pricing trends change a fair bit in the last few years, so while the end result may be the correct (I've no idea), the conclusions drawn from the study are certainly outdated.

More important, though, are the flaws with the data itself. $12 million in sales spread across 120,000 ebooks represents only a small sample of the total ebook market. Last year I sold something like $130k all told, so my sales alone could have influenced any conclusions drawn from such a small data set (not by much, but noticeably) if I'd decided to increase/reduce my prices across the board.

That's not the biggest problem, though. The biggest problem by far is the fact that only 200 of the 120,000 books sampled included Amazon sales data. That's like studying elephant populations only using data from South America. Apple, B&N, Kobo and Smashwords itself all work very differently than Amazon, and you can get away with pricing that wouldn't fly in the big store. I have friends who still make a healthy living selling 5k word erotic shorts at the smaller sites for $2.99-$3.99 a pop. which is a strategy you really can't get away with at Amazon these days.

So yeah, $3.99 may be the optimal price point for all I know (though in reality it probably varies genre by genre), but if that's true it would just be by chance that the Smashwords 2013 data reached the same conclusion

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Wait, what? I'd always assumed the Amazon rankings were based entirely on sales volume. Is this humungously wrong?

Ha! Yes. It's based on lots of things - whether you are in Kindle unlimited, sales history, how you're selling across all your books and whatever else the Amazon algorithms have within them (no one knows for sure.)

 

[Ed Ryder]

If I remember, Amazon supplies suggested price point information as a graph when you upload your book based on their data of price, sales and return so hopefully the data set will be quite large. Think it was $2.99 as an optimum last time I looked but that may have changed.

 

[Gonk the Insane]

Yes.

Thanks

whatever else the Amazon algorithms have within them (no one knows for sure.)

*sigh* Probably more bistro maths. It's everywhere when you start looking for it

 

[Brian W. Foster]

Wait, what? I'd always assumed the Amazon rankings were based entirely on sales volume. Is this humungously wrong?

My understanding is that Amazon changed its ranking process a while back to account for price as part of the formula. I don't think anyone outside of Zon employees knows exactly how much each factor is weighted, though.

 

[pambaddeley]

That would be deliberate as there are enough people on AZ already trying to game the system with non books that get lots of page reads in KU for example.