[Gregg Bell]

I've got the first book in a legal thriller series I'm about to publish. I realize the big picture is to write a lot of books and the following books do better than the first. I tend to do pretty good lining up 99 cent ads. Have a good launch. But then when it comes to upping the price to 4.99 I get panicked. I've done Book Bub pay per click and AMS ads but neither seem to work overly great. Any tips on making the leap?

 

[Sam Frank]

I've got the first book in a legal thriller series I'm about to publish. I realize the big picture is to write a lot of books and the following books do better than the first. I tend to do pretty good lining up 99 cent ads. Have a good launch. But then when it comes to upping the price to 4.99 I get panicked. I've done Book Bub pay per click and AMS ads but neither seem to work overly great. Any tips on making the leap?

Most novels should be priced at least 4.99 or more. I raised my prices and they sold just as well. All of my novels are priced at .6.99 and they sell.

 

[alhawke]

I've got the first book in a legal thriller series I'm about to publish. I realize the big picture is to write a lot of books and the following books do better than the first. I tend to do pretty good lining up 99 cent ads. Have a good launch. But then when it comes to upping the price to 4.99 I get panicked. I've done Book Bub pay per click and AMS ads but neither seem to work overly great. Any tips on making the leap?

Just do it. I always up the price when my promo sale is over to $3.99 or $4.99. I don't ever go under $2.99 sales price. Are you worried about losing sales? So. The royalty payback is multiple times higher with regular price than 99c.

I do recall past kboards posters keeping a book at 99c for up to one month. Those posts are a few years old. I sort of did this once in order to extend a pre-planned promo with an accepted new release BookBub (which in retrospect, I shouldn't have done for it). But I don't like doing that. Generally, I think we need to sell books at regular ebook prices >2.99.

 

[Lorri Moulton]

I'm about to launch a Kickstarter campaign, so I decided to raise most of my prices. It didn't seem to make a difference. I don't do a lot of paid advertising, and I have my own store. It's a work in progress, but I decided to try the boutique route. I also took a few books down from all other retailers. Ideally, I'd like to just sell from my own store but not quite there yet.

 

[Carol (was Dara)]

I launch them at $3.99 while they're new releases and bump them up to $4.99 about six months later. That's for first in series. Later books in a series all launch at $4.99 or $5.99. I don't do promos with the bargain newsletters anymore, except for Bookbub, so I don't use the $0.99 price point. Instead, I use PPC ads on full priced books.

 

[Crystal_]

You raise the prices. There isn't a tricky to it.

Books will sell if they appeal to readers. Pricing them at .99 doesn't make them more appealing. It lowers the threshold to purchase... but only for price-conscious readers.

In some genres, many readers are price conscious, and so discounts are very helpful, say steamy romance (though less-so these days with the influx of TikTok readers who are purchasing trad books for 9.99+). I'm not sure legal thriller readers are especially price conscious.

 

[Decon]

I don't know if Amazon still does this without looking, but at upload, they showed a graph of likely sales at differing price points for similar books.

I think that this showed that at some level, though not the only consideration, readers have price points in certain numbers. Some will only download free, some 99c and some $2.99 and above in increments. $2.99 always seemed to me the retail that had more attention in likely numbers of sales, but that could just have been my genre.

Saying that, readers will also be influenced by other pricing of books on your also bought list. As an example, if you have a perma free or a 99c book., then it is likely your also bought list will likely be of a similar prices. This makes it difficult to say increase it to $4.99 for it to be effective right away while there are similar books on your also bought list at lower prices on your sales page, that is until you get sales that populate at a higher price. Perception of quality has to come into it somewhere along the line.

If you are say using Amazon sponsored ads, then it is better if you increase your price to target manually books of the same or a higher price so that you stand a better chance of having similar priced books on your "Customers also viewed", or your "also bought" list.

If you are enrolled in KU, then raising the price makes more sense, as readers will look to extract as much value as possible from their subscription. A book at $4.99 is more likely to do that than a book at 99c. The negative side to that is for say a 90,000 word book you will only get around $2 in royalty from page reads for a book priced at $4.99, which is the equivalent of selling the book at $2.99.

Just my observation and opinion.

 

[Sam Frank]

But then when it comes to upping the price to 4.99 I get panicked.

If you are fearful, you shouldn't raise the price to 4.99. My father used to say if you are uncertain about doing something, don't do it.

 

[Darryl Hughes]

If you are enrolled in KU, then raising the price makes more sense, as readers will look to extract as much value as possible from their subscription. A book at $4.99 is more likely to do that than a book at 99c. The negative side to that is for say a 90,000 word book you will only get around $2 in royalty from page reads for a book priced at $4.99, which is the equivalent of selling the book at $2.99.

Just my observation and opinion.

Someone else here was just telling me the same thing when I asked him about experimenting with different prices in order to get better KENP reads/sales response after both fell off a cliff in the last few months and trying $.99 didn't do much good either way. So I'll see what $4.99 does for me and if KU users see more value/appeal at that price point.

Dee

 

[Decon]

At the beginning of the month, I withdrew the first book of my trilogy from sponsored ads. The cost of increased sales and KU reads, though welcome, just wasn't cost effective, even with a decent sell through.

Well, anyway, I took the plunge and increased the price of my trilogy from $2.99 to $4.99 on Sunday, and today I sold my first book at that price. What a difference it makes to the royalty..

Fingers crossed that it continues. It'll be interesting to see if it improves my KU reads. If not, I'll dip back into sponsored ads and maybe the increased price might make the effort more cost effective through any sales, though the increased price won't increase the royalty for page reads. .

 

[travelinged]

At the beginning of the month, I withdrew the first book of my trilogy from sponsored ads. The cost of increased sales and KU reads, though welcome, just wasn't cost effective, even with a decent sell through.

Well, anyway, I took the plunge and increased the price of my trilogy from $2.99 to $4.99 on Sunday, and today I sold my first book at that price. What a difference it makes to the royalty..

Fingers crossed that it continues. It'll be interesting to see if it improves my KU reads. If not, I'll dip back into sponsored ads and maybe the increased price might make the effort more cost effective through any sales, though the increased price won't increase the royalty for page reads. .

Why not a sponsored ad for a $4.99 book? Is there a connection in your head? Lots of sponsored books are pricey.

 

[Gregg Bell]

I launch them at $3.99 while they're new releases and bump them up to $4.99 about six months later. That's for first in series. Later books in a series all launch at $4.99 or $5.99. I don't do promos with the bargain newsletters anymore, except for Bookbub, so I don't use the $0.99 price point. Instead, I use PPC ads on full priced books.

Thanks. That sounds good but PPC ads where? (They say AMS ads are for "trickle" sales and BookBub ads are for bargain hunters. So Facebook PPC ads? Somewhere else?)

 

[Gregg Bell]

I don't know if Amazon still does this without looking, but at upload, they showed a graph of likely sales at differing price points for similar books.

I think that this showed that at some level, though not the only consideration, readers have price points in certain numbers. Some will only download free, some 99c and some $2.99 and above in increments. $2.99 always seemed to me the retail that had more attention in likely numbers of sales, but that could just have been my genre.

Saying that, readers will also be influenced by other pricing of books on your also bought list. As an example, if you have a perma free or a 99c book., then it is likely your also bought list will likely be of a similar prices. This makes it difficult to say increase it to $4.99 for it to be effective right away while there are similar books on your also bought list at lower prices on your sales page, that is until you get sales that populate at a higher price. Perception of quality has to come into it somewhere along the line.

If you are say using Amazon sponsored ads, then it is better if you increase your price to target manually books of the same or a higher price so that you stand a better chance of having similar priced books on your "Customers also viewed", or your "also bought" list.

If you are enrolled in KU, then raising the price makes more sense, as readers will look to extract as much value as possible from their subscription. A book at $4.99 is more likely to do that than a book at 99c. The negative side to that is for say a 90,000 word book you will only get around $2 in royalty from page reads for a book priced at $4.99, which is the equivalent of selling the book at $2.99.

Just my observation and opinion.

Good point about the comparable value and polluting the also-boughts and customers-also-vieweds. I just looked at my Bookshelf in KDP and I didn't see any pricing suggestions. I know what you're talking about, though. I guess they don't have them anymore.

 

[Gregg Bell]

Thanks for all the replies. I am so resistant to launching without 99 cent ads as it seems to me that's the only way to get a good sales rank and then the good sales rank lets Amazon do the heavy lifting and the book gets sticky. AMS sponsored ads have always seemed like slow (unprofitable) torture to me. Maybe I never gave them enough chance. And I know part of my problem is that I'm always coming out with a book in a different genre. But I am sticking with legal thrillers from here on out.