What’s the right price for your self-published ebook?

What’s the right price for your self-published ebook? You’ll probably want to stay in the $2.99 to $5.99 range, new data from Kobo’s Writing Life platform suggests — and stay away from $1.99 if you want to maximize sales.


Publishers Weekly reports on Kobo’s self-publishing platform, Writing Life, whichlaunched in June 2012. Mark Lefebvre, Kobo’s director of self-publishing and author relations, tells PW that the $1.99 price point “is dead”:


“Authors most often start at $2.99 ‘and walk the prices up,’ he said, noting, ‘A low price point may be a hook, but it’s the quality of a work that attracts readers, not the price.’ Lefebvre added that $1.99 is dead ‘not just for us, but also, it seems, on other platforms,’ pointing out that $0.99 KWL titles sell twice as many copies as those at $1.99, and that ‘$2.99 sells more than four times more.’ About 80 percent of the KWL titles that sell consistently are priced in the $2.99–$5.99 range, and he also pointed to ‘a bit of a lift in the $7.99–$9.99 price range.’”




This is corroborated by a recent report from self-publishing platform Smashwords, in which Smashwords CEO Mark Coker called the $1.99 price point “a black hole” and said to avoid it. He found that “on average, $3.99 books sold more units than $2.99 books, and more units than any other price except FREE.”


So what is the problem with $1.99? It may be that readers have come to associate it with bargain-basement quality; they may see $0.99 or free as a promotional or limited-time price and $2.99 and above as a marker of quality.


This piece was taken from:-


http://gigaom.com/2013/09/23/dont-price-your-ebook-at-1-99/


What's your own experience/opinion?

Our THAT Authors Collective just launched a free sampler now available at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/360625 My Pilgrimage ebooks are the dreaded $1.99/$1.75 because they are short books of around 7000 words and ten plus photographs. The problem with epublishing is the total file size is very limited (at least at Smashwords) so there must be few good quality images, or more images of reduced quality. Anyway, you are welcome to download 'First Press' by our author's group at the above address.