Pricing an e-book

You've written and compiled an e-book. Now you have to decide how much to charge for it. Finding the right price is essential to the success of your product. If you charge too little, people will think it's of little value, and they won't purchase it, or even if they do buy your book, you will have to sell thousands of copies to get to the point where you can begin to see a profit. 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, people who buy your e-book at the initial higher price will feel short charged when the price is subsequently reduced.

Choosing the right price for your e-book is one of the most critical parts of the marketing process. The first rule of pricing e-books is to never under-price. 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 e-book before they buy it. So always start with the highest price, and then launch a mega-marketing campaign.

Goal: Decide if your goal is to get wide distribution and maximum exposure. This goal is aimed at drawing customers to your business or service, or to establishing the credibility of your reputation. If this is your main goal, you should aim to keep your price on the low side. Some authors have even priced their e-books at a least profit to draw a high number of new customers.

This is an excellent pricing strategy if you are looking to acquire long-term customers. Long-term customers are extremely likely to buy from you again and again as long as the first e-book they buy is of exceptional quality and beneficial to the customer.

However, if your book contains valuable and more importantly NEW information, references, or techniques then you should aim to price it on the high end.

Target Audience: If your book solves a problem or answers questions in a new and unique way, you should price your book as high as you can go. You will achieve larger profits this way, but bring in fewer customers. Just make sure the question or problem that your book solves is one that is important 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.

Marketing Strategies

The key that unlocks the sales potential of your e-book 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 e-book 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 e-book.

Give something away for free with your book, such as a valuable bonus item. Or bundle several e-books under one price, which lowers the price for each e-book if they were sold separately.

Another strategy is to test out prices by creating a number of duplicate sales pages with different prices on each page. Make sure your sales copy is exactly the same on every page, and includes your selling-handle sentence. Then figure out for each page the conversion ratio between visitors to your site and sales of your book. This will tell you what your optimum price is.