SFA 106 – Is It Time to Raise Prices, KU All-Star Bonuses, and Advertising Q&A

On this week’s show, Jo, Andrea, and Lindsay talk about book and ebook pricing and whether it might be time for prices to go up. Before that, Lindsay shares what it takes to get one of the Kindle Unlimited All-Star bonuses these days for those enrolled in Amazon KDP Select. And in the second half of the show, they finish answering listener questions related to book advertising (especially on Amazon ads and Facebook ads).

The first part of the show on that topic is here: Answering Your Book Advertising Questions.

Our discussion points for the book pricing conversation:

• Despite the inflation we’ve seen in the 10+ years since e-readers took off and self-publishing became more viable (origins of the KDP Dashboard on Amazon, followed by other store dashboards), the basement 99-cent price point hasn’t been raised, and $9.99 is still the most you can charge for an ebook on Amazon if you want the 70% royalty (with $2.99 the minimum to receive the 70%). Should these ranges change? Will stores raise the 99-cent minimum price?
• Have you raised the prices on any of your ebooks or paperbacks lately? Will you?
• Do you feel that as advertising costs climb, books will have to become more expensive so that authors aren’t all in the red? (To some extent, this has already occurred — Amazon’s charts now seem to be dominated by $3.99-4.99 indie titles, whereas there used to be a lot more 99-cent and $2.99 books.)

Listener questions on book advertising:

• D.L. Young: How do you scale (a successful) Amazon ad? I’ve never heard a good answer on this.
• Aster: Optimizing auto ads. I’m also curious about Robert Ryan’s method (of bidding high on super relevant ASINs to stimulate the Amazon recommendation engine).
• Ryan: A key thing for me is ad graphics for fantasy books. I’ve seen plenty of examples for romance and thriller but literally none for fantasy. It would be great to get an idea of successful ad graphics!
• Rick: Not a question so much as a sharing of my experience. If you don’t know how to do ads, don’t double down on what’s been losing you money. Find another way. I was doing okay until 2018-2019 and then my return on my ad investment started going way down. Things had changed and I hadn’t changed with them. So I stopped all my ads, stepped back and tried something different.
• Follow-up: Eileen: that happened to me too. In April 2019 when default bids went from 25c to 85c it changed the game. I didn’t change with it and lost traction. Luckily, I changed and relearned in Oct 2019 and have tried to keep up with changes since then. So I’d ask, how do you find time to continually keep up with all the changes, new features and types of ads out there? Or do you feel that with such a large following, your ads aren’t as essential as for a new author?
• Kristen: How to spread your advertising budget across all the many platforms & ad types: AMS, Social media, PPC, Paid Newsletters, etc.
• Steven: If you have similar series within the same subgenre, do you put them in 1 ad or separate them? What about books within the same series? Do you advertise all books, or just book 1 and the new release? If you do separate them, are you using the same keywords or different keywords across ad sets?
• Christy: Best strategies for advertising wide. Do you use Goodreads? How worth it is it to be a part of Facebook reader groups?

Thank you for listening, and thank you to Joshua Pearson for producing the show.

Six Figure Authors

SFA 106 - Is It Time to Raise Prices, KU All-Star Bonuses, and Advertising Q&A

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