How To Price An Ebook: 10 Proven Tips + Examples
Looking for advice on ebook pricing? I’ve got you covered.
New authors often find choosing the right price for their ebooks challenging. Too high, and you’ll struggle to make sales. Too low, and you risk undervaluing your work.
In this post, I’ll be showing you how to price your ebook the right way and find that sweet spot that leads to maximum profits.
We’ll start by looking at what the evidence says the ‘best’ price range is for most authors. Then, I’ll share some tips to help you come up with your own personal pricing strategy.
What’s the best price for an ebook?
Let’s cut straight to the chase: There is no one-size-fits-all ‘best price’ to sell an ebook.
The price you should sell your ebook at will depend on lots of different factors, like your audience, book genre, author reputation, goals, marketing strategy, and so on.
However…
As a general rule of thumb, I’d recommend most authors sell their ebooks within the $2.99 to $9.99 price range.
We know that’s the sweet spot because that’s the price range Amazon (the biggest ebook marketplace in the world) wants you to sell at—because they know that’s what most of their ebook shoppers are willing to spend.
That’s why Amazon offers authors 70% royalties when they sell ebooks within this price range, but only 35% when they sell them <$2.99 or >$9.99.
Practically, this also means if you’re selling on Amazon, you’ll still earn more royalties per sale if you sell at $9.99 ($6.93), than you would if you were to sell at the higher price of $15 ($5.25).
Just keep in mind, though, that this is just a guideline. There are plenty of cases where you might want to sell outside of that optimal price range. We’ll cover some of those later as we get into the list of tips.
10 ebook pricing tips & strategies
Next, I’m going to share 10 tips to help you determine your perfect ebook price.
We’ll start by exploring various pricing strategies that I know many authors have a lot of success with. Then, move on to some general tips and factors to consider.
1. The ‘penetration pricing’ strategy
If you’re a brand new author without an existing audience, one strategy you can try is to initially price your ebooks as low as possible—ideally $0.99.
You’ll hardly make any money per purchase at that price (around $0.35 on Amazon in royalties).
However, shoppers are much more willing to ‘take a chance’ on an author they’ve never heard of if it costs them less than a buck. Your ebook becomes an easy impulse buy.
For example, The Dressmaker’s Secret by Lorna Cook is available for 99 cents on Amazon. Thanks in part to that low price point, it’s sold tens of thousands of copies and has even been shortlisted for a best historical romance award.
While you won’t make a lot of money from sales at this price point, it helps to get your name out there and start building your audience, which can pay dividends later down the line.
The positive reviews you get from those early sales will serve as powerful social proof in the future. And all the people who read and enjoy your first ebook might get hooked and be willing to pay more for your next ebook.
If you want to earn more per sale but still price your ebook as low as possible, jump the price up to $2.99 as that’s the minimum price Amazon requires you to sell at to earn the 70% royalty rate.
Don’t bother selling ebooks at around the $1.99 mark as this is the ‘dead zone’. Shoppers just don’t buy books at those price points and you’ll lose out on a ton of royalties. Either drop it down to the lower price of $0.99 or increase it to $2.99.
2. The ‘prestige pricing’ strategy
The main problem with the strategy above is that budget prices communicate to shoppers that you’re a budget author.
And in that sense, low prices can put off many potential readers. Their thought process: ‘If your ebook isn’t worth paying more for, why would it be worth my time?’
That’s why a lot of authors go in the opposite direction.
Instead of pricing your ebooks as low as possible, price them as high as possible to give the appearance of quality. We call this strategy ‘prestige pricing’.
If you want to go down this route and sell a higher-priced ebook, I’d recommend charging either $7.99 or $9.99. You should still make sales at this price (albeit less than if you sold at $0.99 or $2.99), but your ebook will seem more valuable and you’ll earn more money per sale.
You can go higher than that if you want, but remember that Amazon halves your royalties when you exceed that $9.99 price range, so you’ll need to jump up to at least $19.99 for it to be worth it.
And hardly any readers are willing to spend 20 bucks or more on an ebook so, unless you’re offering something really valuable and exclusive, you’re going to struggle to make sales.
3. The ‘limited-time sale’ strategy
If you want the best of both worlds, charge a bit more for your ebooks than you might otherwise (e.g. $7.99) to give you flexibility.
Then, periodically run limited-time discount sales, like 99-cent promos, free promos, half-price introductory sales, etc.
The higher base price sends the message that your ebook is high quality and worth reading, while the promotions help you to increase your sales volume and start building an audience. It’s a win-win.
If your sale is a huge hit, it could even help you to reach the best-sellers list on Amazon. That, in turn, can help you land a ton more customers who are willing to pay full price once the sale is over.
4. The ‘series pricing’ strategy
This is my favorite ebook pricing strategy, but it’ll only work for sellers who have a series of ebooks to sell.
The idea is to underprice the first ebook title in your series and use it to sell the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. at full price.
For example, let’s say you have a series of five ebooks. Here’s how you could price them:
- Book 1 – Free
- Book 2 – $2.99
- Book 3 – $7.99
- Book 4 – $7.99
- Book 5 – $7.99
Making the first ebook free encourages as many readers as possible to explore your work.
If you can manage to ‘hook them in’ with that first free ebook and get them invested in the narrative, you can bet a lot of them will be willing to pay more for the second.
Those who finish book two are even more invested in the story, so at that point, they should, in theory, be willing to pay full price for book three and beyond.
Rhonda Hopkins’ ebook series Witches of the Whispering Pines is a great example of this strategy.
The first ebook in the series is free to get readers hooked. The second is available at the low price of $2.58 to encourage readers to continue reading, and all subsequent ebooks cost even more.
5. The ‘tiered pricing’ strategy
This strategy involves increasing the price of your ebook periodically when you reach pre-determined milestones.
This allows you to adjust your prices based on demand and ensure you’re not underpricing or overpricing your work.
For example:
- If I sell 0 – 10 ebooks this month, charge $0.99
- If I sell 10-20 ebooks this month, increase the price to $2.99
- If I sell 20-50 ebooks this month, increase the price to $4.99
- If I sell 50-100 ebooks this month, increase the price to $6.99
- If I sell 100+ ebooks this month, increase the price to $7.99
You get the idea.
You can also use metrics other than sales to determine your ebook prices, like the number of leads in your email list or sales funnel, the number of positive reviews you have, etc.
6. Adjust your prices for different channels
Consider the platform(s) you plan to sell your ebook on when setting your prices. A lot of authors adjust their prices for each sales channel.
For example, if you plan to sell your ebooks exclusively through your website (as opposed to third-party retailers), you have more leeway when it comes to price.
You’re not competing with other sellers like you are on marketplaces and you don’t have to worry about royalty rates, so you can get away with charging more.
If you are selling through third-party retailers/marketplaces, you’ll need to consider royalty rates and delivery fees and factor them into your prices.
Amazon is the biggest ebook marketplace and accounts for over 80% of global ebook sales according to the latest book sales statistics. Other popular ebook retailers include Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.
You also have the option of enrolling in Amazon’s KDP Select program. Doing so allows you to earn higher royalties and get your ebook into Kindle Unlimited, where you get paid based on the number of page reads your ebook receives.
Just keep in mind that this requires you to make your ebook exclusively available to Amazon for 90 days (so you won’t be able to sell it elsewhere).
Read more: 10 Best Platforms To Sell Ebooks (Comparison)
7. Look at what your competitors are charging
It’s worth doing some market research to get an idea of what other books similar to yours are selling for when setting your prices.
Open up Amazon’s bestsellers in your niche, or run a targeted Google search for ebooks in your genre.
Then, shop around and get a feel for the average ebook price from indie sellers (as opposed to A-list authors) in your genre, and try to stick somewhere in that ballpark.
Remember that your ebook will show up alongside your competitors, so if it’s too expensive in comparison, you’ll struggle to make sales.
For example, if the majority of ebooks in your niche sell for $4.99, then you probably don’t want to charge $9.99, but you might get away with charging $6.99 or so.
8. Consider your ebook’s intrinsic value
Another factor to consider is how much your ebook is worth in its own right.
A lot of authors determine the value of their ebook based on the number of words or pages. For example, they might charge $0.99 for ebooks under 80,000 words, and $2.99 for those over 80,000 words.
But value isn’t just based on word count. It’s also the value of the knowledge or entertainment it provides.
Ask yourself: How much do I think this ebook is worth? How much do I think customers should pay for this? Use that as your starting point.
9. Consider your audience
Do you already have an existing audience to tap into? For example, a large social media following or a large readership that’s already familiar with your work?
If so, you can afford to charge more for your ebook. If you’re building an audience from scratch, you might need to underprice your work at the start.
It’s also important to think about who your target audience is, and what they can afford to pay.
If you’ve written an informational, non-fiction ebook on a complex topic aimed at CEOs with deep wallets, you can charge premium prices—maybe even $100+.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you’ve written a short children’s story aimed at parents, it’s probably best to charge $2.99 or less as buyers in that market typically don’t want to overspend.
For example, the ebook How To Implement Evidence-Based Healthcare by Trisha Greenhalgh is currently selling for $47 on Amazon.
That’s 5x higher than most ebooks on the platform, but because it’s targeted at clinicians and researchers, and covers such a complex niche, it’s still sold plenty of copies. That high price tag is justified.
10. Consider your time investment
A lot of authors create a pricing model based on their time investment to ensure they earn a fair wage.
The way to do this is to estimate how long it has taken you to write the ebook. Then, estimate how many sales you expect to make, and how much you’d need to charge per sale to guarantee that you earn a fair, liveable hourly rate.
For example, let’s say you estimate that you write around 1,000 words an hour, and your ebook is 100k words long, meaning it took you 100 hours total to write it, plus around 20 hours for research—around 120 hours in total.
You know you want to earn at least $20/hour from writing for it to be worth your time. So in total, you’ll need to earn $2,400 from that ebook.
You know that most of the ebooks in your back catalog have sold at least 400 copies, so you expect to sell at least that amount again.
In that case, you’d need to earn $6 per copy (2400 / 400) to guarantee you’d make $2,400 from it in total, which would pay for the time spent writing it.
Therefore, you decide to sell it at $8.99 so that you earn at least 6 bucks per sale in royalties.
See how it works? You can use the same calculation with your own numbers to arrive at a fair price for your work.
Final thoughts
That concludes our comprehensive guide on how to price an ebook.
To recap, there’s no universal ‘best price’ to sell an ebook that will work for everyone, but $2.99 to $9.99 is a good general guideline for most authors.
You’ll need to consider factors like your audience, genre, time investment, etc. when setting your prices. And advanced pricing strategies like running 99-cent sales and making the first ebook in a series three can help you to maximize profits.
For more advice, check out our beginner’s guide on how to sell ebooks. Or for another way to monetize your writing, see our beginner’s guide on how to make money blogging.
Remember that ebooks aren’t the only product you can sell online. See our roundups of the best digital products to sell online and the best ecommerce platforms for digital products for more ideas.
