What To Consider When Pricing Your Kindle Book

Before you jump to a price, or look at what everyone else is doing, ask yourself this question, ‘What do I want from the sales of this book?’

• If it’s to build a list, you may want to consider lowering the price to get in front of as many people as possible.
• If it’s solely to make money from sales, then the opposite is what you want. You want to find that sweet spot between traffic and sales. And a low-priced book isn’t going to get you there.

If you’re looking at the first option, and want to widen the net as far as possible, then why even put a price on your kindle book?

Maybe free is the best price point for your book. 

Offering Your Kindle Book for Free

If your goal is to use your kindle book almost like a business card, then free is probably the best option for you. But there’s something you need to consider.

Amazon has changed how they deal with free books in their kindle store.

Once upon a time it was easy to discount your book by pricing your book for free on a site like Smashwords.com, wait until it was picked up by Barnes & Noble, and then contact Amazon to do a price match. – Once they agreed, they lowered your book to zero.

But now that door has been closed tight, and who can blame them. Because in essence, you’re using their sites popularity and traffic to build your email list for free.

And when you’re Amazon, and wants to make a profit from every part of their website, and your free book isn’t doing that for them, why should they carry it?

So, what can you do now?

If your heart is still set on getting into the kindle platform and making it free. You’ll need to settle for signing up to the KDP system – something that’s going to allow you to offer your book for free for 5 days in every 90.

So, for the other 85 days, while you’re locked into the KDP contract, you’ll have to settle for a book that at it’s lowest must have a price tag of $0.99. 

Things To Consider For Making The Most Of Free KDP Days.

You’ll Have To Do All The Heavy Lifting – While Amazon gives you the ability to give away your work to it’s Kindle readers for those 5 days, don’t make the mistake that they’ll do any promotional work for you.

Free kindle books might keep their readers happy, but they don’t make any money from it. And Amazon didn’t get to the top giving away free stuff. So, you’ll have to have a book promotion plan in place to take advantage of it.

Is Everything In Place On Your Side – Is the call to action for your next book, free report, or lead magnet, strong enough to get a free reader to join your mailing list, or buy that book?

If not, then it doesn’t matter how many people download that free book, you’ll have lost out. Make sure all book hyperlinks are working, domain names spelled properly, a compelling offer in place, and that your autoresponder is set up properly and ready for the leads that are coming its way.

How Does Your Free Kindle Book Look? – Your book may be the greatest piece of literature out there, may be able to help the average housewife to lose twenty pounds before the end of the day, but if it looks poor you’ll never have the success you want to have.

A great book cover, a strong and compelling book description, and plenty of positive book reviews, will up the chances that anyone will click the download button – free or otherwise.

Not that we’ve got the free kindle books out of the way, we’ll take a look at pricing your book. 

How to Set A Price For Your Kindle Book

When it comes to picking a price for your kindle book, there’s more to consider than just picking the same price point as everyone else so you’re not pricing yourself out of the game.

When it comes to picking a price, consider the following…

You As The Author – If you’re new to writing in your niche you can’t expect to price your work at the same level as the experts. You wouldn’t come out the gate and think you could price your book at the same level as Tony Robbins in the self-development niche, or Brian Tracy in business.

Why? Because you’re an unknown and people are going to have to take a risk on you when buying your book.

Your Book’s Popularity – If your book’s on the topic of how to make money selling fidget spinners when they were at their highest, you could command a better price than six months later when the trend ended. (That’s why book stores have bargain bins.)

If you’re writing for an audience that’s moved on to the next celebrity diet, you may want to consider lowering the price of your older dieting knowledge.

How Original Is Your Information? – If you’re writing the same content that can easily be found in ten other books, you may want to consider a decrease in price.

But have an idea like how a ‘Mom and Pop store’ can not only build a huge following on their Instagram account, but make $2,000 a day with it, and you can charge a lot more for it.

How Does Your Book Look? – If your book cover looks cheap, your potential reader is going to assume that the content is the same. Don’t believe me? Do a tour of books in your niche and pay attention to the book covers and not the price tag.

Self-published books still have a stigma to them, so the less you make yours look that way the more you can charge for them. – Same content, different cover, better price. 

Coming Up With A Price For Your Kindle Book

When it comes to picking a price point for your book, toss aside the lowest and highest on sale in your niche. (These don’t tell you anything.) Instead gather together everything else and come up with an average price point for your book.

Now that you have that, don’t think that’s where your work ends.

Taking that average price point, does the content in your book deserve to be lower than that, at that level, or higher than that?

• Is the content you’re bring to the market the same as everyone else?
• Is it specialized knowledge?
• Are you interviewing a celebrity or business leader that no one else can get their hands on?

Being honest about your work and what you’re bringing to the market place can go a long way in choosing the best price for you. But as always, you need to test your price points and see how it effects how people see your work and how willingly they are to hand over money for that price.

That, and you’ve also got to take into account how much Amazon’s percentage will be at that price point. Pick a price too high or too low and Amazon will take the larger of your books price home in commission.

Like I wrote earlier, how your book is perceived can make a difference to how much you can charge for it. Getting plenty of good book reviews can help with this. – This is what I use.

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