Lindsay - February 6, 2020In this week’s “just us” show, Andrea, Jo, and Lindsay discussed ebook pricing, i.e. what they do for stories of various lengths, if they do something different for series starters, and when permafree can make sense. These thoughts aren’t meant to be a definitive “this is what you should do” guide, just some food for thought.
In the second half of the show, they answered listener questions. Here’s a list of the pricing topics and the questions:
- A general overview on ebook prices.
- How length (word count) plays into their pricing choices.
- Whether or not they price differently for books in Kindle Unlimited.
- Whether or not they price differently for introductory books in a series.
- If they ever discount later books in a series.
- When it can make sense to use Kindle Countdown deals or discount pricing for running a sale on older titles.
- Pricing tactics for bundles or boxed sets.
- How long you should wait after a launch before dropping the price or running a sale.
Listener questions:
- Paddy asks: If you could start all over again, what would you do different?
- Celine asks: Is it better to have a really long/deep series (like say 15 books or more) because that then increases read through value and therefore ROI on any advertising of book 1, or is it better to divide it into smaller series to have more points of entry for new readers?
- Olivia says: I would love to hear more about the guidance given on the show to wait until your series has five books before marketing. Was that advice regarding paid advertising only?
- Deb wants to know: When to make the leap to full time writer. I nearly did it at the end of last year but I’m not wide (I was and it didn’t work out) and I started to worry about a downturn in my books and whether I could write some more dependable sellers… and then people started telling me how they were having to go back to work. So what are the signs??
That’s it for this week’s show. If you want to join our listeners-only Facebook group, here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/504063143655523/
/
RSS Feed
Fantastic episode. Pricing for indies is such a headache. Every side has a good point and that makes it harder to pick which strategy to go with. Hearing you all talk about does add more knowledge for indies to base their decision on. Thank you.
Thanks, Mike! I’m glad you found it useful. 🙂
On topic: I haven’t experimented as much with ebooks since we sell mostly paperbacks (middle grade) but raising your price doesn’t always mean you’ll make fewer sales. We experimented with prices and pretty much every time we raised the price we just made more money since we didn’t lose out on any sales, we just made more per sale. Obviously, different genres have different expectations, but it’s worth experimenting a little.
Side topic: your malware woes might not have to do with somebody getting access to your admin password. Most likely, you have (or had) an old plugin with a security flaw that wasn’t updated and gave them the ability to upload a file or compromise a login account directly. Even if you’ve fixed it, if they’ve installed their own back doors, they can recomprimise your site any time they want. If you have SSH access there are scripts you can run on your site that will search all your files for possible compromises or installed malware; if you don’t, there are still ways to check that but it’s a little more work. Wordfence is a good start.
Thanks, Blaine. That’s a good point about pricing. It’s worth experimenting. I know I didn’t see much of a difference when I went from $3.99 to $4.99 for the majority of my stuff.