Finding the Right Cover Price for Your Ebooks

Hah, good luck! This is going to be one of your worst trials as an independent author. Trust me on that.

I’m betting most indie authors do spend some time reading other indies’ blogs when they post about their sales. I do. I’m always on the look out to see what prices ebooks are being sold the most for.

According to many of them, it’s 99 cents across the board, regardless of the length of the stories.

At 99 cents, some authors are selling 100s to 1000s of copies of their titles every month on Amazon. You can choose to take such statements with a grain of salt or not, based on whether they also post screen shots of their DTP sales page, like J. A. Konrath has done (though technically, I don’t think he’s an indie author, since several of his titles were previously traditionally published). He’s a smart guy who grabbed hold of his digital rights and utilized them, who already had a pretty good sized fan base in place.

I’m not calling any of them liars, but I’m betting some indies might think they are if there’s no shown ‘proof’ of those sales. I tend to think ‘why would anyone lie about selling their hard work for 99 cents a pop?’, so have a tendency to believe them.

I don’t sell hundreds or thousands of copies of my ebooks every month (possibly because most of my vocal ‘fans’ are other writers, and they’re all in the same leaky financial boat that I am, LOL). In fact, I don’t even sell a steady dozen copies every month. My monthly sales tend to range from 3 to 30 copies.

So yes, my sales, they do suck pig butt and frankly, they always have. Go ahead and laugh, I’ll wait until you’re done.

Finished? Okay, moving on. I was trying to prepare you for just how pitiful my sales are.

These are my sales figures from when I first published Feral Intensity, and include all the titles I’ve had for sale at any point in time (except five under pen names, which haven’t sold jack yet), so we’re looking at sales from Jan. 2008 through May 2010 here for only Amazon and Smashwords, and they do not include the five returns I’ve had.

Feral Intensity:

$2.50 – 1 sale

$3.25 -55 sales

Free coupon redemptions – 9

One pay what you like sale for $6

Bytes:

$4.75 – 13 sales

Lasting Echoes:

$5.25 – 29 sales

Rising Moon:

$5.25 – 36 sales

Tria’s Tale:

$5.25 – 13 sales

$4.99 – 5 sales

$.99 – 1

Free coupon redemptions – 11

A Little Nip:

$1.75 – 14 sales

The Harkfell Chronicles:

$1.99 – 0 sales

Free coupon redemptions – 12

Good Intentions:

$3.25 – 12 sales

$2.97 -1 sale

$2.99 – 2 sales

Free coupon redemptions – 12

By Chance:

$3.25 – 7 sales

$2.97 – 1 sale

$2.99 – 3 sales

Free coupon redemptions – 30

Daughters of the Lore: Resurgence:

$1.00 – 14 sales

$.99 – 6 sales

Free coupon redemptions – 11

Moon Children Dark Cravings:

$4.75 – 14 sales

$3.97 – 2 sales

$3.99 – 1 sale

$.99 – 5 sales

Free coupon redemptions – 12

The Silent One:

$3.25 – 0 sales

$2.99 – 1 sale

Free coupon redemptions – 2

Near Dark Vol. 1:

$2.99 – 1 sale

Breakdown #1:

 Prices ending in 9 – 25 sales

 Prices ending in 7 – 4 sales

 Prices ending in 0 – 15 sales

 Prices ending in 5 – 193 sales

‘Priced’ for free – 99

Breakdown #2:

 Priced under $1 – 12 sales

 Priced $1.01 to $2.50 – 15 sales

 Priced $2.97 to $2.99 – 9 sales

 Priced $3.25 to $3.99 – 77 sales, with 74 being at $3.25

 Priced $4.75 to $5.25 – 110 sales, with 78 being at $5.25

 Free coupons – 99 ‘sales’

Total number of sales, including coupons: 336

 So my higher number of sales have been at $3.25 (74), $4.75 (27) and $5.25 (78), or free coupons (99).

 Note: I’ve always tried to place a fair value on my work. Apparently, I had done so and have now screwed that all up by trying other price points in order to sell more, and more often.

 Note #2: Prices ending in five seem to be my magical ebook selling points.

 Note #3: I probably screwed myself by making Feral Intensity a CC licensed freebie, and retiring Lasting Echoes & Rising Moon to only being available as free reading on the Shadow Connor site as I start the series over. But I didn’t want to continue selling what’s going to basically be obsolete titles for the series, so…oh, well.

 What am I learning with those kinds of numbers and what I see other indie authors posting about their sales?

 Placing what I feel is a fair value on my work, and not pricing lower than that has resulted in more sales for me. But not a high volume of sales, or even anything that could be considered a relatively steady number every month.

 My sales at Amazon have totaled 231 with five returns, so my return rate is roughly 2.2%. Which I guess means the majority of Amazon purchasers liked what they read of mine well enough that they didn’t want their money back.

 But I haz no Amazon reviews. Not even bad ones on those five titles that had a return each. So, the majority liked them well enough to not want their money back, but not enough to review them, would be the logical conclusion to draw.

 Sucks for me, huh?

 My ebooks just don’t sell well when priced below $3.25. Which sucks because I price based on word count, so lower prices are short stories or very short stories.

 Which is funny, because my original $3.25 price point was for short stories too (of 10k-15k, I think it was).

 People were willing to pay $3.25 for a 10k short story of mine, but not pay a lower price so much, or even redeem a 100% off coupon for one.

 How weird is that?

 My $5.25 price point was for titles with word counts of 30k-45k (I think; it might have been 30k-40k). That price isn’t a whole lot off from what I pay for a full length novel picked up in the grocery store. Something like $2.74 lower than printed book that usually has at least twice that word count.

 How weird is that one? Seriously?

 Let me add that only 3 of those purchasers wanted their money back on $5.25 titles. One return was for a $3.25 title, the other on a 99 cent title.

 For the most part, it looks like people would rather buy my titles than redeem a free coupon for them. Because of those 99 free coupon ‘sales’, 32 were not for Operation Ebook Drop, but limited offers made via Twitter.

 Operation Ebook Drop is where authors volunteer their titles for free to the armed forces so they’ll have stuff to read while deployed. They were meant to be free, and so maybe I shouldn’t have counted them in on ‘sales’ figures here. I don’t know. Whatever. Smashwords counts coupon sales as sales, even if they are for 100% off.

 I dropped Tria’s Tale from $4.99 to 99 cents about three weeks or so ago. Dropped Dark Cravings from $3.99 to 99 cents at the same time.

 Big sales flurry, huh? One and five in sales for them since doing that. I’m planning to leave them at 99 cents until the end of June (not so subtle hint to go buy now if you were planning to, LOL).

 What I’m looking at here is that:

 Anything priced less than what I feel is a fair value for my work doesn’t really sell for me.

Pricing at fair value doesn’t result in large numbers of sales.

Lowering prices actually harms my sales.

Titles priced under that magical $3.25 barely sell.

Yet:

 I know that if I price my short stories and very short stories any higher, they not only won’t sell much, but anyone who pays $3.25 for a 3k short short is going to be pissed and then I’ll get reviews. Bad ones about gouging innocent buyers by over pricing my work.

Apparently nothing I try – free coupons, fair pricing, infrequent limited time price drops – causes my sales to go up. Nor do I get many reviews from any of those things, which might help drive my sales up.

Giving away free coupons doesn’t work.

Pricing my ebooks at 99 cents doesn’t work.

I apparently need to start promoting a lot more shamelessly than I have been, and my own work, not everyone else’s as I have been doing on a regular basis.

Being social isn’t resulting in growing sales, because I bet buyers on Amazon aren’t following me on Twitter, Facebook etc. They’re finding me on Amazon, based on tag searching or the cross-promotion Amazon does. Because Amazon is where the largest part of my sales come from, when it comes to numbers and distribution sites.

 So now what?

 I have no idea.

 Yeah, I can return my pricing schedule back to what it was originally, and it will possibly result in the sales trickling in, but those sales aren’t going to be 100s or 1000s every month. Nor will those ‘steady’ (ha, ha!) sales result in any reviews that might help boost them, though I probably won’t see any higher of a rate of returns than I have been.

 I’ve considered putting all future new releases at 99 cents as an introductory price for their first thirty or so days, then hiking them up to their regular cover price. To be honest, if I released Hunter’s Edge and it sold 100 copies, I’d probably leave it at 99 cents for another thirty days to see if that number of sales would repeat.

 But my sales history tells me it won’t sell at 99 cents. It’ll sell at what I consider a fair value for my work. Of course, I can’t know that for certain until I release it, priced either way, but that’s just what I’m getting from previous sales data.

 I also thought I’d do that with each of the new Shadow Connor titles as they’re released. The three original titles were my best (again with the ha, ha!) sellers, at what I deemed fair value for my work. So if I did release them initially at 99 cents, will they sell, or tank?

 Feral Intensity certainly didn’t start selling until I hiked the price up to $3.25. No, it didn’t sell like hotcakes at that price, but it certainly sold more than it did at $2.50.

 Now that it’s free, it’s been downloaded 372 times from my blog here and Smashwords. More than triple the times it sold. I can’t tell you off the top of my head how many people might have read it online over on the site.

 So what my sales figures really tell me is that trying to find the right price to sell a lot of copies of any given ebook at is full of frustration and guesswork.

 Why are my ‘big’ sellers at the higher price points, and why aren’t they coming in greater number than they are? Why when I lower prices, do my sales tank like the Titantic?

 It’s a freakin’ mystery, y’all.

 I’m a pretty good writer, or so say those who’ve read my stories and communicated with me. I think I’m a pretty good writer, and I certainly try to be one.

 But that’s not producing any results worth crowing over, is it?

 Sigh. It’s enough to make a writer want to give the hell up. It really is. I mean, I’m still $644 in the red ink for production expenses on those titles. And have another one with my editor now that will probably add over $400 to the red ink.

 I guess it’s a matter of opinion on whether or not it’s a good thing I’m too hard-headed to quit.