Pricing your ebook

For one, it can cut into your profit margins when you offer sales or discounts. Author Joseph Hogue , for instance, estimated that it took to hours to write each of his page ebooks, and that excluded time spent editing, formatting, and marketing those ebooks. For those and many other reasons, entrepreneurs should consider the value-based pricing model , where companies determine a price based on the value customers believe an item has.

Whatever obstacle you perceive to be keeping you from charging the price your ebook deserves, there are always ways to enhance either its real or perceived value.

The last point to consider when pricing your product -- where you will sell it -- may seem minor, but can be the difference between a slim or thick profit margin. Additionally, if you decide to sell on a marketplace, you may want to be wary of the prices they recommend for your ebook.

Yet another reason why authors may want to sell digital downloads from their website is that not all platforms will be around forever. Join our demo and see exactly how Podia can help your business thrive. Let me explain. Most obviously, pre-sales can earn you more by attracting orders before the ebook has been officially released.

Chiefly, presales can help you validate your ebook idea. Sujan Patel and Rob Wormely, for example, used pre-sales to validate their ebook idea before writing it.

They sold copies in advance and went on to sell over 40, copies of their ebook, Days of Growth. Likewise, Justin Jackson of MegaMaker had only a sample chapter of his ebook, Marketing for Developers , when he launched a landing page below to validate his idea. Plus, pre-selling your ebook gives you an even greater opportunity than just validation and extra income in the short-term -- it gives you the fulcrum, an email list, for long-term profits, too.

So why not use your list to send them even more helpful information about a product that could help them even further i. Author Karen Banes, for example, said most of her early sales from each of her books came from her email subscribers. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Planning workshops with Orna Ross. How to Set Ebook Prices These 8 top tips will help you get the prices right for your ebooks. Non-fiction ebooks are generally priced higher than fiction.

Disregard what the big names in your genre are charging, because famous authors can command a premium which their avid fans will willingly pay. A tricky balancing act! The choice is all yours! Let Amazon help you: it has a handy tool on the pricing page of the KDP dashboard that suggests the price at which your book will sell most copies.

Are you selling to families on a budget or to high-earning business owners? How does that influence their expectations of your ebook price? Research tactic 2: Look at Amazon ebook prices for your industry and topic. Give them prompts to get as detailed answers as possible. You can ask questions such as:. If you have an email list of any size! You can use a survey tool like SurveyMonkey to do this, or you can write a simple email and ask them just like you would a friend. Use features such as Twitter polls, Instagram polls, or Instagram questions to ask your audience about the solutions they buy to solve their pain points.

You now have a price range you can work from to define your price. Now, think about the outcome of your book we talked about earlier. Is your reader looking for…. Consider how these questions influence your reader long-term. This is what she clearly communicates on her landing page:. Based on the ebook price range you discovered in step 1, and the solutions your audience already buys you learned in step 2, how does your ebook outcome impact your ebook pricing?

First one is simple: increase the perceived value of your ebook by sprinkling in extra materials. Add-ons can be video walkthroughs, live streams, recorded interviews with experts, templates, cheat sheets and more. You can also use add-ons as price anchoring to present your ebook in the best light possible. Anchoring is a cognitive bias, a tendency to rely on the first piece of information offered when making decisions.

For your ebook, this means you can offer a premium version next to it. Your customers may see the ebook-only version as a bargain next to the premium version. Finally, the market will tell you everything you need to know about ebook pricing. All you need to do is listen. Here are the main ways you can review your sales data and listen to your customers—just choose one and go.

Prelaunch your ebook with a limited-time only price. Be transparent about your plan to increase the price once you launch the ebook. Offer tiered ebook pricing and increase the price every X sales. She was also told by her customers to charge more, which helped her validate her product idea and show the real value of her ebook to people who were still undecided.

Choose one consistent price and actively reach out to customers to get their feedback. Ask them about the value they received based on what they paid for the ebook based on their expectations and what they would usually buy to solve problems.

You not only have your ebook ready, but you also know exactly how to price your ebook to maximize its chance for success.