What is the best selling price range for ebooks? Publishing
ebooks is still a new and evolving arena. Formulas used for
determining the price of a paper bound book provide little help
when pricing ebooks, because with ebooks, there are no printing
costs.
When
publishing ebooks, your expenses are one-time costs. For instance,
you might pay $200 for a software compiler that allows you to
produce an unlimited number of ebooks.
Whether
you are selling ebooks or paper books, the best starting price
for your book will often be whatever the average market price
is for similar books. You can later adjust prices up or down
and see how sales are affected.
Typical
ebook prices range from free to $80 or more with the majority
of reported ebook sales falling in the price range from $7 to
$15.
Giving
it away
Stephen
King's Riding the Bullet started off selling at $3.50
but also became available for $2.50 at some sites and $1.50
at others. Some web sites like Amazon.com bought thousands of
copies and gave them away for free to entice customers to buy
other items. The strategy is that you take a loss on a smaller
priced item in order to make a bigger ticket sale.
Giving
away sample chapters for free makes good sense and is easy to
set up with autoresponders as described in Your
Guide to Ebook Publishing Success. Consider formatting
smaller versions of your ebooks as give away items. Use the
free ebook to upsell the full price edition.
Higher
demand = higher prices
An
ebook might be priced higher than it's paper bound edition because
it is in higher demand. For instance, say you are a student
doing a report for school. You have only tonight to get help
for your project. You could go online and download an ebook
with exactly the material you need. Are you willing to pay a
little more for this material? In addition to writing books,
I
paid around $39 for an ebook by Paul Krupin, Trash Proof
News Releases, about using publicity to increase sales.
I willingly spent forty bucks because this ebook contained over
50 examples of effective news releases, some specifically written
to publicize books. Since many professional publicists charge
hundreds of dollars to write one news release, this collection
was a bargain.
Two
prices for the same ebook
Ebooks
can have one price for being viewable on the screen and a slightly
higher cost if the customer is allowed to print the material.
Most ebook compilers allow you to specify whether the client
can print the ebook or not.
Serials
Serialized
ebooks can be priced as subscriptions. Sci-fi author Jim Baen
offers serializes portions of his titles before they are to
appear in print to subscribers for $10 a month at http://www.baen.com.
Stephen King released his ebook, The Plant as a serial.
He asked readers to send a dollar upon receiving each issue
of the downloaded material. Around 172,000 people paid $1 each
for part one and over 74,000 people paid another $1 for part
two.
Production
costs of ebooks
With
ebooks, you don't have the costs associated with typical printing
of paper books. You may pay for software to produce and layout
your ebooks. Once paid for, that software can produce an unlimited
number of ebooks. If you work with one of the content delivery
providers, you will pay a percentage of each sale — from 10%
to 30% — depending on the service you use. Other costs for delivering
ebooks include your dial up internet service provider (around
$20 a month, unless you use a free ISP) and web hosting (anywhere
from $15 to $50 a month, unless you use a free web host). You
are probably already paying the cost required to be online.
As an epublisher, you can most likely deduct some or all of
your ISP service bill as a business expense.
Comparison
pricing
I
priced my ebooks at roughly half of the price of their paperback
versions, without regard for my software expenses or labor involved
in formatting the digital files. There was no evidence or data
to determine a market based price as mine seemed to be the first
ebooks in the craft marketing genre.
Since
there are no recurring printing costs with ebooks, pricing comes
down to "how much is the customer willing to pay?"
and you can only learn that through testing.
Many
consumers make a purchasing decision when they feel they can
save money. I made it clear on my web pages that customers could
save 50% over the price of the paper bound editions by getting
the ebook delivered to their desktop in a matter of minutes.
This approach apparently works because my ebook sales go up
every month.
Popular
selling prices
Some
ebook sellers report more ebooks sell in the range of $8 to
$15 than above or below those prices. Think about what you would
be willing to pay if you were the customer. It the book is information
the customer needs now and can't find elsewhere, you can probably
collect a higher price for as long as no one is selling lower
priced ebooks that compete with similar subject matter.
How
do you know the absolutely perfect price -- the price that will
maximize your income, right from the outset? Click
here to learn more.
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This
article is copyrighted and excerpted from the book Your
Guide to Ebook Publishing Success by James
Dillehay
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now
No
portion of this material may be published, resold or reproduced
in any form including electronically for any purposes.
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