If you are not seeing many sales on your books, it can be that you're pricing them wrong all this time. Let me tell you a Kindle book pricing strategy to help you increase book sales.
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. It is a secret as to the real reason pricing matters when it comes to your Kindle books.
So the topic we're discussing today is Kindle Book Pricing Strategy. By the end of this Blog, you're going to know why pricing matters so much when it comes to your Kindle books. You're going to have the correct price strategy to implement immediately when putting your books on the market.
Check out this related article: Your Price is Too Low
Or adjusting the books you currently have on the market. You're going to feel great knowing you're not leaving any money on the table when it comes to royalties you could have been making otherwise on your books.
Check out and grab a copy of my absolutely free Self-Publishing Checklist. To make sure that you are not skipping any of the steps necessary to not only get your books onto the market but also get them selling with all of my secrets.
So let's get into it from my own story. When I first got started, I had no idea what to set the prices at. I think I was setting it at 99 cents or something. One of the reasons is that as a new author, you feel your books aren't really that great.
What do I have to tell the world? I had ideas that I have picked up over the years. I've had things that I tested but maybe these things have been used before. So I need to set a low price to convince people to buy my book.
Because after all, it's such a good deal. There's a big problem with this which is that pricing is not psychologically the main reason people choose to buy or not to buy. It's very low in the pricing category. Rather, it tells them the quality of the book that you're doing now.
If you price your book at a thousand dollars, we're not going to be seeing it flying off the shelves. But if you put it at let's say one cent/a single penny, we might start wondering why exactly is it so cheap? Is it because the quality of the book is so low?
And so instead of motivating people to buy, we motivated people to not purchase your book. This is not exactly what you want to do. But that was the wrong mindset that I had when I was first figuring out which prices were the correct ones when it came to my specific book.
So the thing was that it was completely backward. But I learned that the ideal price is to ensure you're making the 70% zone, 70% profit on royalties off of the sales. So if you sell let's say a hundred dollars worth of books, you should be making 70% off of that.
Now we'll get into the exact correct pricing. But I need you to understand that Amazon punishes you if you're not in the goldilocks zone for pricing. They see they make a lot more money. So let's just say if you do it at 99 cents, you're not making that 70%.
And so each time you do make a sale, you make less because it's 99 cents. Then you also make less because they're not paying you that, I think it was like 40%. I can't remember the exact figure but it's not the 70% zone.
Ideal Starting Price
So this was a huge problem even if you're in that 70% zone, you increase the sales of your paperbacks as well. The thing is that after I raised the rates on my books to this magic price, then started seeing my royalties go up. The sales themselves did not necessarily increase but our goal as authors is not to get as many copies out into the universe.
But rather to increase the royalties we're making. So that it will motivate us to write more books and put more on the market. Many, if not all of my books are in libraries all around the world. And there, people can get them for free if they need to get something.
But for the average person going on Amazon, they're not looking for a library or something for free. Rather, they're looking to buy books. So we want to make sure that you and I as authors, we're making as much money off of each sale as possible when it comes to our books.
It's not about how many sales you make or how few but how much money in royalties we're making as a whole. The thing is the Kindle book pricing strategy, there are three main tips for today.
So the first one is you need to set your books at $2.99. This is the starting price that will get you that 70% royalties rate. From $2.99 to $9.99, that's the goldilocks zone where we're going to get that 70% range now.
There are some strategies where you can see if you sell 10 books for example in a month, raise it by a dollar. Some people have tried this strategy. I would not recommend this, I say keep it permanently at $2.99.
Check out this related article: How To Find Success In Self Publishing
We will adjust our paperback prices based upon sales. But the Kindle prices permanently stuck at $2.99. We make our 70% and we encourage people to put the money in. Or to at least look at our sales page when they see our ad and see the book at $2.99.
They click on it and they're on our sales page and that's where the secret is. The next thing is we are going to increase the price by one dollar for each additional manuscript in a bundle. Now, some people say "What do you mean by manuscript? What do you mean by bundle?".
The answer is that this is a magical thing about Amazon. If you have 2 books on the same subject, let's say I have Puppy Training: Get Your Puppies To Sleep At Night and I have Puppy Training: Get Your Puppies To Eat Healthy Food, I can combine these two books.
Let's call them manuscripts because it gets confusing when we talk about books. Two manuscripts together into a bundle that's called some additional names and it include the following manuscripts. Here are these two main scripts for your two books.
Amazon will not like it if you show a picture of two books bundled or stacked. This violates some of their policies, so this is not something you should do. Because then the person who buys it would expect to see a little box set coming in the mail.
This is not a box set, it's simply bundling the two together and using Jutoh my favorite tool for formatting. You can check that app, it's so easy to take. You've already formatted the two books and we can just combine them.
We don't have to repeat any of the work to do it. We have a new cover and it says it doesn't violate any of Amazon's policies. But what price should we charge for the two-manuscript bundle?
Raising The Price For Bundles
The answer is for each manuscript, we raise the price by $1. So our first book, even if it's 130 pages or 500 pages, that's going to be $3.99 or $2.99. When we add a second manuscript, we now raise the price to $3.99 and we keep repeating.
Usually, I would take two books that are in a two-manuscript thing. Let's say two bundles, I put them together. Now I have a four-book bundle and this would be $5.99. So for each additional manuscript, we add $1.
You may be thinking, why does this even matter? And the answer is
when a person's going to buy one of your books and they see that they could get a huge discount by buying more than one, well then it makes it a no-brainer pick-up.
Then comes in additional the royalties for us. We have an additional book even though it's a bundle but in Amazon terms, it's a new book on the market. So you have your first book A and your second book B.
When we combine book A and B, that gives us book C. Does that make sense? So you have A, B, and C, three different products in your Kindle books now. If you have paper books too, that's additional, so that's three more paperbacks.
If you're talking about audiobooks, that's three audiobooks. Now, remember with audiobooks, you're only paying for the voices for the first two books. So the combination is going to give you three audiobooks.
And the last one will earn you more money because it's longer. Unlike some of these other ones which can cost you a little bit. But the fact is we want to get in and play the psychology of pricing.
Check out this related article: Can Self Published Books Become Bestsellers
We want to maximize how it's working for us. So that we're making as much money off of the books that we're putting on the market as possible. To motivate us to write more books which is a win for everyone; Amazon, us, and our readers assuming our books are quality books.
But the secret answer for today is the one that I believe is the most non-obvious of all of the answers. It's the fact that the main point of the Kindle books is not to sell Kindle books, it is to drive traffic to our paperbacks. My paperbacks make twice as much on Amazon.
It takes about four to five times as much on In gram spark as my eBooks do over there. So what happens is we're running our ads against our books, these Kindle books. They see a book for $2.99, they click on it and they get to our sales page.
Our sales page will show them you can get the Kindle book at $2.99. It puts a slash right through the price for our paperback book. Then what happens is that the price then goes down for it and then it shows up for the Kindle book.
But often, many of our readers will go and do it on the other site. What they'll do is they'll end up buying a paperback even though they initially intended to get the Kindle book.
But my question for you today is what prices are you using for your Kindle books? Do you have a Kindle book pricing strategy that worked? Let me know below in the comments so that I will know. Check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.