Martelle - Pricing Strategies: Making the most from your hard work: Book 5 of the Successful Indie Author series

Copyright 2019 Craig Martelle

All rights reserved.

Editing services provided by Joe Martin

Cover by Sapphire Designs

Formatting (both eBook and paperback) by Drew Avera

This is a book on writing books. If that wasn't your desire in buying this eBook, then please return it within seven days for a full refund from Amazon.

What is the best price where you make the most money? Higher isnt necessarily better. Lower isnt necessarily more attractive. You have to find the best fit for your brand to draw the most readers willing to pay that right price.

What is the psychology of pricing? How do readers react to a book thats free or maybe 99 cents? Why do we always price at $xx.99cant we make it an ever four bucks?

Not if you want to sell more books. One percent here, five percent there, and all of a sudden, the sales number becomes significant. The greater the sales, the greater that one percent becomes.

Thats what this book is aboutdecrypting book pricing in an easy-to-digest way with just a taste-tempter of data geekery for those so inclined (if you want the full exploration of the numbers behind the scene, this book isnt for youI started to do that but the time investment was more than I was willing to pay). You can skip the math problems, although the ones I include are important.

Ill put the bottom line up front. This book is called Pricing Strategies because there are strategies that you should adopt, embrace, and stay with to be least confusing to your established readership and any new readers you might bring on board as you identify your brand and slap a price on it.

Do you want more readers? Then maybe you pimp that first book far and wide, spending tens of thousands of dollars on ad campaigns and promotions because you know its a great book and once people read it, theyll be moving to the rest of the books in your series. And thats where you make your money. Milk is cheap in the United States, and it runs out with great and untimely frequency. Grocery stores put it as far from the front door as possible, so you have to walk through the entire store to get it. They do that on purpose. Giving away a book for free to get an email address is a little bit of the same. Its called marketing. You get something, but Im going to show you all these other taste-tempting somethings along the way.

What does your author brand tell readers? The price of your books plays a role in that. Regular prices, discount prices, promotions, omnibuses, and so many other ways to price yourself into or out of existence. Are you playing the long game? If you just want to sell one book, this book isnt for you. This book is for professional authors who want to make a career of writing, even if you dont do it full time. You can still make full-time money with a great book and then more great books.

There will be plenty of if-then statements, because youll have triggers in pricing that tell you whether youre too low or too high. Unfortunately, your sale and promotions may have already run their course, but the best news is that there will be a next time. Study your numbers and improve your strategy to make more with your next promotion. Theres enough turnover on lists that you can hit the same promotions once every six to twelve months with little degradation in return.

Make the most you can. Why price a book at $0.99 if the same number of people will buy it at $2.99? Why price a book at $2.99 if no one will buy it at that price? Maybe theres a reason. And for the pricing strategies I discuss here, Im assuming you have a decent book, a genre-appropriate cover, and your blurb is good.

I dont share a great deal of my numbers in this book because those would have made the book unwieldy, but Ive included enough to reinforce my main points. I have a few sexy graphs and such, most from BookReport (an add-on that puts your Amazon KDP data into a more useful format). I sell from 3,000 to 10,000 books a month. That may sound like a lot, but it could be more and how can I make sure that I get every bit of profit from each of my more than 100 titles, all while keeping my readers happy?

How do you balance those seemingly competing interests?

Managing your reader expectations while running marketing campaigns to bring in more readers. Pricing brings home the money. If people gave their books away, they wouldnt be feeding themselves or their families. You can give all your stuff away in a hundred and fifty years when your books are in the public domain.

Until then, lets make a little something for us.

Setting Yourself Up for Success

• What is the potential?
• Terms and Definitions
• Linear calculations
• Regular Price
• Advertising
• Marketing

Self-flagellation is no way to go through life. Learn what you need to know without donating your hard earnings by having misaligned prices. Dont beat yourself with pennies when dollar bills are to be had.

What is the potential?

I wish I knew what I had in mind when I put this section header into my outline. Maybe I wanted to talk about 70% royalty versus 35%. Maybe I wanted to talk about ten readers coming on board because of a discount instead of just one buying your book at full price. Maybe I wanted to talk about the absolute highest price you could charge and still find readers willing to pay it.

There is so much potential to make money and an infinite number of ways to do it, most of which fall under three approaches.