Effective E-books
by Alyice Edrich

Pricing E-books

As a contracted author at a publishing house, you don't worry about setting the price of the book you've written. In fact, the publishing house has a figure in mind long before the book hits the printer. But as a self-published e-book author, understanding what the market will bear when it comes to pricing your e-book is crucial. Price it too high and no one will buy it. Price it too low and it may not be considered valuable enough to even try or worse, you could end up in the negative!

But with production costs relatively non-existent, can you really afford to sell your e-books for $1, $5, or even $10 per e-book? And if you do, how much of a profit will you really make?

Let me state the obvious. E-book writers are in the business to make money and to make money they must promote, publicize, and advertise—all of which costs money. Therefore, when pricing your e-books, you must take that into consideration.

That's why I always advocate selling e-books at $24.99 per e-book or higher. You can always drop the price after the e-book's been on the market for a year or two. (Just don't drop the price a few months after it's first been published or you can end up with a bunch of angry customers!)

Factors to Ponder

When pricing your e-book, consider these factors:

1. Who is your target audience?
One area that is often overlooked when it comes to designing and pricing e-books is the target audience. Your target audience is a select group of individuals for which your e-book was written. If, for instance, your target audience is from the poor side of town, $24.99 per e-book will be steep. They'd rather spend that money on groceries, so dropping the price of your e-book to $5.99 would be more feasible. However, if your target audience is the Upper East Side and consists of movies stars, franchise owners, and the like, $199 per e-book will be a drop in the bucket.

2. Who is your competition?
It's not only important to know who your competition is when researching and writing your e-book, it's also important to know who your competition is when pricing your e-book. After all, your competition doesn't just want your readers; they want their money, too. That's why it's important to know what books are selling for in print and in electronic format.

If you've written an e-book that contains nearly the same ideals as a print book that sells for $7.99, there's no way you're going to be able to sell your e-book version for more—instant gratification or not. However, there's a good chance you could get away with selling your e-book for more than similar e-books on the market, if you promote it correctly. That being said, you'll probably gain a lot more sales and word-of-mouth traffic if you lower the price of your e-book by one dollar. In other words, if your competition is offering a similar e-book for $24.99, advertise your e-book for $23.99. Sometimes that one dollar difference is all it takes to gain the sale.

3. How well known are you?
It's a known fact that the rich and famous get richer because of their names and their connections—not just their talents and marketing savvy. So if you want to sell more e-books and if you want to demand higher prices for your e-books, then you need to develop a name for yourself. To do so, get published in trade publications, speak at conferences, moderate niche forums, get interviewed, and distribute free content articles.

4. How timely is the information?
Be the first person to break the news and you can pretty much name your price, but be the last person to break the news and you'll have to settle for crumbs.When I first started selling my notary e-books, no one had written about the subject and finding information from credible sources was near impossible. It was easy to demand $50 per e-book and get it. But as the market became laden with copycats, the demand lessened and so did my sales. Once I dropped the price of the e-book, however, the sales grew and continued to remain steady.

The same could be said of time-sensitive information. There are tons of people in this world looking for information that may no longer be relevant in a few months, let alone days, from now. They need that information and they need it fast. If you can offer them the information their looking for before it becomes outdated, you could practically name your price!

5. How many actual pages are in the e-book?
Besides competition and timeliness, the size of your e-book matters. Most consumers do not like to pay $1 per page. They'd rather pay 30 cents per page or better yet, 1 cent per page. So if you want to demand a higher fee for your e-book, take the time to bulk up your e-book with relative information, work sheets, scenarios, resource lists, pictures, and/or graphics.

6. Are free updates or mentoring sessions offered?
Not only can you bulk up the price of your e-book by including more information, you can bulk up the price by offering lifetime updates, mentoring sessions, and trial memberships to subscriber-only websites. In fact, you can increase the price of your e-book by offering an audio version of the same e-book.

Finally, don't be afraid to start out with a higher price and drop it if the e-book doesn't sell at that price. It's always easier to drop the price of an e-book than it is to raise the price because you've made a mistake.