by Penny Sansevieri
Re-releasing a book is always an exciting fresh start, which means you can also revisit pricing.
Generally, I’m not a fan of overpricing a book unless the print costs are so high that you almost have to. For most of us, print-book pricing is often out of our control, but we can control e-book pricing in almost every case. The exception would be if you’re traditionally published, because in that case the publisher controls the price.
Book pricing, especially when it comes to your e-book, can really help your Amazon optimization as well. The optimal pricing on Amazon for an e-book is $2.99 to $5.99. If that seems ridiculously low to you, I’d still encourage you to stay below $9.99 in order to stay competitive. And below $7.99, a popular traditional-publishing price, is even better.
There are a few other determining factors to keep in mind regarding pricing.
Your genre: What you write about will largely determine your pricing. Consider your genre and what the bestsellers cost. Keep in mind that bestsellers with household names are likely not what you want to compare yourself to.
Book length: Shorter books shouldn’t get full-book pricing, meaning that if you have a book that’s under 100 published pages, you shouldn’t be charging as much as someone with a 300-page book. Taking that into consideration is important, because a higher price with a low page count will deter new readers.
By the same token, you don’t want to cheapen your work by offering every smaller book you write for $0.99. The happy medium, however, is not that far removed from the 99-cent mark. $1.99 or $2.99 (again, depending on your genre) are still pretty reasonable, and your profit margin goes up to 70 percent at the $2.99 point.
Playing with Pricing
Playing with your pricing is an excellent strategy for boosting an Amazon algorithm. It’s not that difficult to raise and lower pricing when you do promos, or to just offer deals to your super-fans.
Authors often ask me how often they should change their prices. Weekly? Monthly? Well, if you have only one book, you won’t have as much flexibility as you would if you had, say, four titles out there, because having more than one book allows you to do a price-drop rotation that’s consistent without overdoing it.
If you have just one book, I’d recommend doing a price reduction along with an e-book promotion, or just to your super-fans, twice a quarter. But if you have more books on Amazon, I’d rotate them to keep at least one on some kind of pricing special.
Starting Low and Going High
If you’re putting the re-release book on Amazon as a pre-order, I’d recommend starting your book a bit lower in price and raising it after it’s launched. This will help you gain a solid foothold on Amazon sales. Doing a book launch using the Amazon pre-order option and strategically pricing it so it’s not full price right out of the gate can also keep you on the “new release” list a bit longer, which is fantastic.
If you do this, don’t miss out on the obvious marketing angle here. If your book is going to be less expensive during the pre-order period, by all means make sure your current network knows, and ask them to share with their networks!
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Penny Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. (AME) and an adjunct professor at NYU, is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns.