Adventures in Epublishing: Pricing Experiment

One of the joys of being a master of your own work is the ability to adjust prices, if you see fit.  While I'm confident of my $2.99 pricing at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and Smashwords.com, I felt that maybe the price I had set for Amazon UK might be too much.  I went with Amazon's original suggestion and had Amazon UK match the US price, setting the UK price for 2.99 GBP.  The customers there are also charged a VAT (value-added tax) and the total price came to 3.44 GBP.  I've sold ONE copy in the UK, funny enough it was the first copy.

I recently came upon someone's post that in order to capitalize on the UK, authors should really consider making the price .99 GBP (including VAT).  I considered this option and even checked out the Amazon UK store and found many big name ebooks were priced between 2.00 and 4.00 GBP.  If mine is coming in at 3.44 GBP, I think that's too high of a price to compete against the traditionally published and more well known works. 

So I've changed it to a lower price in hopes of spurring more sales.  It may not work, part of getting people to purchase your book is to get the word out about it, and I have a feeling the book is the least visible in the UK.  The current price is 1.71 GBP, based off the 1.49 GBP price I had to keep in order to retain my 70% royalty option.  The price change only took about an hour or two to take effect, and no new sales yet.  But it's just in time for the Christmas rush, and I'm hoping all the new UK Kindle owners will give Into the Shadows a chance.  Either way it's not hurting the bottom line as no books were selling there, so if I sell some, I'm pretty confident I'll keep it priced at the new lower price.

Comments

  1. Karly, I've had my short story anthology, Dead Dwarves, Dirty Deeds, set at .72 pounds since October and I've sold 1 copy in England. So, I'm of the opinion that price is not as important as marketing. I'll be interested to see how your experiments go.

    -Derek J Canyon
    my blog about epublishing

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  2. Good to know! That's what I wondered, but at least I'm guessing it won't hurt, even if I can manage to get some marketing over there. Have you been able to figure anything out? We need to find out if there is a Kindleboards for England...

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  3. Alas, no. I haven't done any investigations for the English market. If only I didn't have this real job interfering with my ebook efforts! ;)

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  4. I regularly sell one or two copies of my short stories in the UK each month, but they are priced at the bottom (the equivalent to 99 cents). Will be interesting to see how this works for you since I'm planning on having longer works up soon and have been debating the price in my head.

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  5. It is a joy for self publishers to set the prices for their own books. What is more important is that you have control over it. Yet of course, any move will cause an effect to you and to your readers so it becomes a challenge and the UK market is part of this challenge.

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