Guest Post: The Marketing Power Of Book Pricing

You’ve written the perfect book, and now you’ve put it out there on Amazon. But how can you be sure that you’re getting the absolute maximum amount of sales that are possible, with the quality of your book, cover and description staying the same? Price. It’s an important part of your marketing which often goes relatively under-the-radar, and authors – especially self-published authors – can often feel like they have very few options when it comes to pricing, and that randomly picking a price rather than considering their book’s worth and other factors is the way to go. This is a terrible way of thinking, so, if this is your line of thought, stop! You need to work on your book’s pricing in order to help it succeed in marketing, so consider these tips on how to sell better by adjusting only the price of your book.

Research
It may sound simple, but sometimes simply researching book pricing is the best way to go. Many experts have written on the subject and given their opinions, as well as backed-up facts and statistics, and you can always view other best-selling books of similar qualities, lengths and genres to yours and see how they are priced. If your book is wildly more expensive than anything else on the market, then readers are going to skip over it without thinking twice, and some – who may use the ‘low to high’ price setting on searches – may never even see your book. Do your research, and you might be surprised by what you find out: it will, more than likely, make you consider changing your book’s pricing.

Book Sales Reporting
Book sales reporting is the mass of statistics which come from all book sales on Amazon or related websites – finding reports on specific companies shouldn’t be difficult, but Amazon is a market leader in book sales so it’ll be used as an example here. These can tell you which prices are selling the most books, and which prices alienate buyers and don’t create the sales which you need. After quickly researching these statistics, you can price your book in a ‘sweet spot’ where lots of sales are made, and ignore the pitfall price points like the plague.

Pre-Ordering
“Offering pre-ordering as an option can work from a marketing standpoint (it’ll create a buzz for the release of your book) as well as from an economic one (more buzz equals more sales, which can only be good for you),” Nick Cameron, a marketing writer at Assignment Writers and Revieweal, says. “As long as you keep your pre-order price lower than the actual retail price, you’ll be able to catch a curious crowd. However, make sure your pre-order price isn’t too low, or you’ll suffer from not being involved in Amazon discounts and such, which takes away the immediacy value of sales during, well, sales!” Pre-orders can be brilliant ways to secure sales and not have to ship out your books’ immediately, building up capital for when you do have to produce the books – which, if you’re acting without a publisher, could be costly.

Consider Discounts
Leading on from that last point, make sure that your standard retail price isn’t too low, even for an e-book if that is what you’re selling (since they’re notoriously cheaper than ‘real’ books due to the lack of manufacturing costs. If your prices are too low, then your products won’t show up as having massive discounts during sales. Instead, they’ll be mediocre savings on items which are simply no longer at their full price, so they’ll avoid whipping shoppers up into a frenzy of ‘buy, buy, buy’ and not seem quite low enough to warrant a sudden, urge-driven sale.

Keywords
“Keywords are key, if you’d believe it,” Danielle Chapman, a blogger atDissertation Writing Service UK and UKWritings, laughs, “but in all seriousness, you need to know what people are searching and the prices of the books which those keywords lead you to. If you’ve got a book about talking animals, then some variations of those words, until you end up with a good idea of the pricing of the books which will be surrounding yours on the digital shop.” Keywords can be pushed into your description to make sure that your book lands within the right search terms, but keeping the price similar to or lower than the books which are surrounding it can only be a good thing.

Beatrix Potter writes creatively at Top assignment writing services in Queensland and also Top essay writing services , where she contributes to numerous posts on online magazines and blogs, sharing her various life experiences through her favourite medium of literature and written texts. Nothing gives her more joy in life than seeing another person going through a similar situation to what she has been through then picking up one of her articles at Essay writing service reviews and bettering their life from it as a result.