The Best Price for an Ebook – Part 2

In the preceding post,What is the best price for an Ebook –Part 1, I talked about the underlying economics that affect book pricing. It all boiled down to the fact that if you know the number of your books sold as a function of price, you could determine the price that maximized your book sale income.

In this post, I briefly summarize some of the conventional qualitative wisdom that I found from surfing the internet.

1. Make your first book free

There is so much competition out there that the potential readers have little chance of learning that yours even exist. By making the first book free, these readers can take a chance on you without any risk.

Free books build awareness and a readership following. Then, if what you have written is well liked, readers are primed to snap up your second book when it comes out. You will more than recoup the lost revenue by stronger sales of future volumes.

2. Don’t make your book free.

The people who buy free books don’t pay money for any books that cost anything. Why should they? There are always more free ones to choose from.

Most people who download eBooks never get around to reading them anyway. They are too busy downloading more free books. This audience is unaddressable. Don’t waste time on them.

3. Discount your book

Consider your first book a permanent loss leader. Or, from time to time run promotions in conjunction with sites that publicize limited time sales. People like bargains. It doesn’t matter much what they are. They just like bargains.

4. Don’t discount your book

Low price denotes poor quality. Readers know this and they will shy away from books that are too inexpensive.

5. If you have a series of books, price them the same, all at the same price

You are building a brand with your series of books. Establish brand consistency. The reader can count on each volume having the same bang per buck, the same quality. Otherwise the reader will wonder why one volume costs more (or less) than others. It eats away at the trust that you want to have with him.

6. If you have a series of books, price them differently.

There is no definitive way to know what the optimum price is for any individual author. Give the marketplace choices, see what happens with different volumes having different prices and then select the best choice to use with them all.

So, the answer is …???

My surfing did not help in my quest as much as I had hoped. All of the qualitative arguments I summarized each carry some measure of truth with them, but for each suggestion a counter argument can be found.

One thing I did learn, however, is that considering pricing in a vacuum for each book might be a mistake. The best price of one can influence the best prices of others.

So, I have modified my original question. Now it is the following.

What is the best price for a book if it is not the very first one.

In my searching I did find two sites that had some quantitative data.
I will report on them in Part 3 of this series.