How DO You Price Your eBook?
Published -
- October 2, 2019
- 11:14 am
If you price it too high when compared with your competition, you will find yourself steadily lowering the price, which will cause you all kinds of new problems in the future.
For example, if you sell your ebook at first for $49.99, and later reduce it to $29.95, don’t you think the people who bought it for $49.99 will be unhappy?
Choosing the right price for your ebook is one of the most critical parts of marketing. The first rule of pricing ebooks is never to underprice. Determine the highest price your audience can afford, and then if you find your book isn’t selling, you can always reduce the cost. Before taking that step, make sure you promote your book like crazy on the Internet. The price should be aimed at bringing in profits, but you should never forget that price is one of the factors that people use in judging the value of your ebook before they buy it. So always start with the highest price and then launch a mega-marketing campaign.
Pricing an ebook is particularly difficult because ebooks are a reasonably new commodity. Since they are digital, the value of an ebook is as confusing as the understanding of what digital is to the average layperson. This means that we must look at ebooks differently to determine their actual worth in this brave, new cyber world.
Let’s look at the difference between a book in print and an ebook. A printed book is an object you can hold in your hand, store on your bookshelf, even hand down to the next generation. It is priced on factors such as paper stock, design, production costs, and marketing.
But the fact that unites ebooks and print books is that they are composed of ideas. The ideas in these books can change or possibly transform people’s lives.
What do you think an idea is worth when evaluated against the cost of paper and ink?
It is the IDEAS that are valuable! That is how you determine the cost of your ebook.
What should I charge for my ideas?
There are different formulas and methods for determining the correct price for your ebook. Let’s begin with honing in on your ultimate goals.
Decide if your goal is to get wide distribution and maximum exposure. This goal aims to draw customers to your business or service or establish the credibility of your reputation. If this is your primary goal, you should aim to keep your price on the low side. Some authors have even priced their ebooks at a profit loss to draw a high number of new customers. The key is to find a price that maximizes your profits and the number of books you sell.
This is an excellent pricing strategy if you want to acquire long-term customers. Long-term customers are highly likely to buy from you again and again ? as long as the first ebook they buy is of exceptional quality and beneficial to the customer.
However, if your book contains valuable and NEW information, references, or techniques, you should aim to price it on the high end.
After you figure out your goal, you must determine your audience’s need for your ebook. For example, does your book solve a particular problem? If it does and solves it in a way that hasn’t been written about in one hundred other ebooks, you will be able to achieve high sales at a high price. If your book solves a problem or answers questions in a new and unique way, you should price your book as high as possible. You will achieve more significant profits this way, but bring in fewer customers. Just make sure the question or problem that your book solves is essential and relevant to the majority of your market audience. If your ideas are not common knowledge, or you are presenting a brand new technique, you will be able to sell books at a high price. Just be prepared for your competition to undercut you on price as soon as they hear about your book.
Keep in mind that the above pricing strategy is temporary. Eventually, you will cease to sell books at this high price. So figure out how long you plan to offer your ebook at this high price, and when that time is up, change your pricing strategy.
If you want to see large profits over customer draw, aim for an audience looking for easy solutions to their problems at a low price. If your book aims to solve one particular problem rather than general advice, then you can charge more. Starting at the highest price, the market will bring in the largest profits and plan to discount the book several times throughout the year.
Marketing Strategies
The key that unlocks the sales potential of your ebook is to find a single sentence that becomes your selling handle. This sentence states what question or problem your book answers and the benefits your ebook can provide. Then be sure to use that sentence in every piece of sales and promotional material and every time anyone asks you about your ebook.
Besides promoting your books assiduously online, several other strategies can help you sell more books.
One is to give something away for free with your book, such as a valuable bonus item. Or bundle several ebooks under one price, which lowers the price for each ebook if you sold them separately.
An effective technique for figuring out a price is to send out a survey to your current customers. If these customers have already bought an ebook from you, ask for their opinion in terms of price. Do this by creating a sales page for the new book, but don’t include a price on that page. Instead, add a number of links to survey questions that ask pointed questions to aid you in assigning a cost to your ebook.
Another strategy is to test out prices by creating several duplicate sales pages with different prices on each page. Make sure your sales copy is the same on every page and includes your selling-handle sentence. Then figure out the conversion ratio between visitors to your site and sales of your book for each page. This will tell you what your optimum price is.
Ultimately, if you’ve written a book that solves a problem or presents a new technique, your book will bring traffic and profits. So be sure to note that selling-handle sentence that sums up what problem your book solves and what the benefits of your book will be to the customers who purchase it. And then watch your market come to you!
