Have you ever wondered about how influential the amount of price of your books is to the number of sales you may get? Check out this article to know what will happen if your price is too low.
Today's article has three points and you're going to want to stick around. Because the third point is a secret as to the number one thing you need to know when it comes to the pricing for your books. So the topic we're discussing today is your price is too low!
By the end of this article, you're going to know the theories behind pricing and what role it plays. With regards to the amount of money that you're making for your books. You're going to have the necessary information in order to pick the right prices for your books and adjust them accordingly.
You're going to feel great that you're not leaving money on the table you could be making if your prices were correct for your books. Grab a copy of my absolutely free self-publishing Checklist to make sure that you are not skipping any of the steps necessary when it comes to winning the self-publishing game.
So let's get into it. From my own story when I put my very first book onto the market, I had to fill out the pricing. You have all these different regions and the question is which pricing should you use? But it's even much more complicated than that because you have different types of books.
You have the eBook version of your book like the kindle version on amazon and then you have your paperback and your hardback. For your audiobooks, you don't have to choose because they automatically do those but for hardback, you have to decide what prices you should do for them.
Check out this related article: Can You Make Money Self-Publishing
Now I can say with the kindle versions, it's a little bit easier. Amazon knows at what rate they're going to make as much money as possible. And that is between $2.99 to $9.99 in this price region you're going to be making 70% on the sales of your books.
This tells you or amazon's way of saying "look just choose somewhere in that range do not go super high or super low". Or "we're going to punish you by taking a lot more of the royalties". In reality, you would just be losing money anyways outside this range.
So for me, it was easy in that range to decide but then for paperbacks how low should I go? I mean even a book that is let's just say you have a book that's 24 to 25 pages in length. You're going to need to charge at least $11 if you want to make I think it was $5.
So in other words you could go down as low as let's say it would be about $7 and that would be your break-even point. So I think on some of my first books which were about 100 pages each. I was looking at saying what if I just make a dollar apiece?
Because who's going to want to pay so much money for a paperback book? I just couldn't see it being very marketable. And if I saw there were a lot of sales well then I would take the price up. The only problem is this is a terrible strategy, I was charging way too low with regards to my book.
I misunderstood the role of pricing. The first thing you need to understand when it comes to pricing is that it isn't the top reason people decide to buy the book. Like I said the price is too high, in fact for any product that's not the role price plays.
Price is the number one determinant of the value of the product or service that we're charging. So by charging a very low price and the classic example is with a Rolex watch. If you have a Rolex watch and you say "I'm willing to pay $5 000, $10 000, $20 000 apiece".
Then it sort of makes sense you would see it but if somebody says "hey you want to buy this Rolex it's $50". Your brain immediately judges the quality of the watch. You might be thinking "I thought the price was all about encouraging people to buy" but it's the exact opposite.
It's how we determine the value of something. Another example I heard somebody comment on it was the artwork that was being done by people with disabilities. And they were thinking "wow some of this artwork is amazing" and they were thinking "I would really like to hang some of it on my wall".
You know both you can support the community and at the same time, some of the artwork is really impressive. So they were thinking you know probably about a thousand dollars $5,000 for some of this amazing artwork. Then when they were getting ready to buy it they found out it was $25 to $50 per piece.
And suddenly it lost a lot of value, now it's not to distract, and maybe they should have bought it anyway. But it was the idea that we use price not to determine whether we can afford something or not but whether or not the value is there. So this is the number one thing.
Build A Personal Brand
So if you're charging too low of a price you're communicating that your books are terrible on the value. At the same time if we look at prices that are similar for our same products on the market we may find that they're charging about the right price.
If we're way above that we better be delivering a value that is a lot higher than theirs or at least positions ourselves to be so unique. This is one of the reasons I push for this concept with your books of building a personal brand around them.
We're not just selling a book, we're selling ourselves and our brand around it that's what distinguishes us. Your competitors can't rip that off when they say "I'm not just buying an exciting book or a book that's helpful".
But "I'm buying it from this person that I know like and trust and therefore I'm willing to pay a premium price for it". In addition a lot of the people who will take stuff even for free end up giving one-star reviews to your books. These people tend to not be the people we really want to do business with.
It seems very counter-intuitive I'd rather make lots of sales like at $1 for my book than I would a lot at a high price for my book. And this is the wrong idea when it comes to our books. What we want to do is not be making the lowest price possible but rather we want to be selling them at the highest price possible.
That maximizes the sales and the royalties we're making. So this is something that a lot of people get completely backward. The thing is you make a lot more money at higher prices, now notice I still haven't told you that's where our answers for the day are going to come in and where those prices need to be.
But the topic again is your price is too low. So the first thing you need to know is that for your eBooks no matter how long or great they are they're going to be $2.99. This is the price that we're going to sell for a single manuscript.
If you create bundles which you should do as you have multiple books then each additional manuscript will add $1 to that price. So we also only end in .99. There's a psychological aspect behind this that absolutely works so you definitely need to do that.
And so in other words if I have two manuscript bundles well then it's going to be $3.99 if it's a three manuscript bundle then it will be $4.99. Our base price is never less than $2.99 and we add on $1 for each additional manuscript. This will maximize the sales.
The other thing with the eBook is it will show the paperback price where they slash through it. And then it will show you the price that you're getting for your eBook it's like "look it's 70% off of the price on the paperback". So for people who only like to read eBooks.
They have a sensation that they're getting a really great deal compared to the paperback prices. But the main role of the eBook as I was describing recently to one of the viewers on the channel. It was that when it comes to the eBook its rule is to drive the traffic in so that we sell the paperbacks.
The money on books is made in paperbacks and it used to be audiobooks. This changes from time to time but currently, it is still on paperbacks. We're using eBooks to drive traffic in to get them to read the description and then tempt them to buy the paperback.
And that's why the pricing strategy on paperbacks is even more important in the e-book. Since most authors make twice as much money on paperbacks. There are exceptions like the romance genre, people don't like to be seen reading certain romance novels.
And so the e-book version sells more but on the paperbacks, you should be earning $5 for every single copy manuscript that you sell, does that make sense? Then for each additional manuscript in a bundle, we're going to add an additional dollar on the royalties.
And we say what we make that is after all costs have been removed. So for many books, your base price is going to be let's say if the book were only 25 pages which is the minimum length of a paperback book. It's going to be priced at $11.99 on Amazon, which will earn you $5.
If you have two books together let's say now we're at 50 pages we're going to go to maybe $12.99 but it could go up to 13 or 14. Because sometimes the prices on the production of the paperback books change as you do it. So as you adjust the price, look and see how it goes up.
They have calculators that you can use on amazon to see quickly where the pricing should be. You should be earning $2 that would be $6 then for two books and $7 for three. And there's a psychology on these bundles as well that we're playing on.
The Psychology Of Base Price
Which is that people feel they're getting more value when they simply are buying a bundle. Because look at this you're getting two or three books and only in a small increase in the overall price. So it messes with people's heads a little bit and they start to think "well maybe I should do that".
It also increases the total number of products you have in the market. So when they search and your keywords are there, these books are going to be showing up. That's a lot of the psychology behind the bundle issue but the price is there. And then here comes the most brilliant, the most powerful pricing strategy.
I know it's not the secret one but it might as well be. It's that when you make six sales on your books for every six sales within let's say in the last 90 day period you raise the price a dollar. If we go in 90 day period without making any sales on our books we go back to the base price.
So if we're not making any sales at all back to the base price. The base price again, $5 in royalties and we just keep going up. Some of my books have reached level 13 where suddenly I'm not making $5 a sale, I'm making $15 to $20 a sale of each book.
Usually, this happens around Christmas time so some of my books are even hitting it right now. As the prices are going up up up every two to three days I raise the price additional dollar. If you change the prices multiple times a day you can get your account banned by amazon.
Since there is a delay when you raise the price to when a sale occurs. They will give it to you at that price and not at the other sale. I saw multiple people getting their accounts threatened, some people I've known even had half of their royalties taken away for the month of December.
As a result of this specific strategy one person, in particular, their royalties had hit $40 000 for the month of December alone on their books. But they were raising the prices multiple times a day and this will get your account banned. So be very very careful when playing a strategy like this.
This is the reason I am not recommending that you will change your price at most one time a day and only after six additional sales. So we raise the price, we see if we get six sales of the new price and then we raise it an additional dollar.
One dollar at a time so in other words each day we can go up a dollar. When we go 90 days with no sales we drop it to the base price and then we go from there. So this strategy alone has accounted for hundreds and hundreds of dollars raised in royalties a month as a result of my things.
And this is a secret that sometimes you know I would give to my coaching clients. I have a number of other secrets that I also give specifically to my coaching clients. So if you're interested let me know below in the comments you can find the link to that we may be a match.
Many of my spots are taken up so you have to decide for yourself how long you wish to do it alone. But I definitely can help you with a lot of secrets just like this one with regards to your specific problems and ways of getting around them.
Moving on to the secret answer of the day and the third point to your price being too low. It is that you need to raise your prices, watch your royalties, and the revenue that you're making go up. Because this is about building a business in the long run.
And I'm trying to do everything in my power to help you do it. I'm excited about self-publishing but like a board game why play the game to lose why not play this game to win? Winning means more readers are getting to see and read the amazing content that you have on the market.
And if you don't have it on the market get your books out there, okay? Get them on the market, let people start buying them so we can start making money off of our books. This builds excitement and that causes you to want to write more books.
It makes your readers more interested we get into a feedback loop here. And if you need help please let me know I do Coaching. I have a regular base of clients that were continually going around and hitting your problems as they come up.
And we go from there in terms of raising the amount of money that you're pulling in. But let's move on to the final thing my question for you is are you charging too little for your books? If you are, write "yes" below in the comments.
And if you're right about not charging too little write "no" below in the comments because I need to know where you're coming from. And check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.