I’ve been trying a bunch of different ebook pricing, marketing, and promotions strategies. While you shouldn’t consider me an expert by any means, I have come away with some lessons. The first post is here; the ongoing series is here.
Pricing
Short stories seem to be in the $.99 range for me. I experimented with pricing some longer/better selling stories at $2.99 (I did a double, too, with one longer story and one bonus story). I priced a couple of longer shorts at $1.49, but sales died on those, too. Sales dropped off overall on short stories, and went to zilch for the $2.99 stories. (The short story dropoff may have been due to pulling the free stories, too; see Promotions for more on that.) Sales have come back up on most short stories since I changed all to $.99.
The pricing on novels didn’t affect sales all that much. I priced Alien Blue at: $2.99, $4.99, $5.99, $6.99, and $7.99. $7.99 made three sales (at least two of whom being people I knew). The rest of the sales for the other prices were very nearly the same; I’m leaving novels at $5.99 for now.
Novellas are troublesome, as in I have trouble selling them. I have the same problem with collections. I’ll have to start messing around with their pricing structure and other elements, too…
Coming Tuesday: Marketing
I know someone who priced her novel at $7.99 and she made over $10 K in the first few days after it was no longer available for free. She did a lot of marketing though, which is partly responsible for the tremendous sales.
I think that $7.99 is not out of the realm of possibility for a great book, marketed/promoted superbly. *I’ve* bought $7.99 ebooks without stressing too much over them. I think that my book, minimal marketing/promotion, of decent but not HALLELUJIA quality, though, wasn’t meant for $7.99. Yet.
I’ve been wanting to try $1.49 for shorts, so I’ve decided to price my next short there. I’m keeping each issue of Sandpaper Fidelity at $0.99, though; they’re each only going to be 1,000 words. I want to do some submitting, though, so it may be a while before I try out that $1.49 pricing model.
My plan is to leave the $0.99 ones as is and try out just one at $1.49. That way I can kind of compare (though I wonder if I could get away with changing my current most popular short to $1.49)… Hmn…
I think it’s interesting that $2.99, $4.99, $5.99, and $6.99 sold almost the same. I don’t know what it means, but it’s interesting. Heh.
I don’t know, either. Sheesh.