What is the average cost of e books

I would like to know the word count expected if you price a fiction book at 99 cents. Could you explain expected minimum word counts for each category such as Fiction Non Fiction as the price grows? Awesome tips, Carol. Thanks for giving awesome, useful specifics. This will be very helpful when I start launching ebooks. And, after filling in my husband and all of your wisdom on one of our recent date nights!

And that will bring us to our first e-book together!! If a person is trying to feel out the market with their first book, pricing low is a good idea. The demand for the low priced book tells me there are people out there looking at my work. My next book would be competitively priced.

Although we all want to sell our books out the gate, sometimes you have to take baby steps to feel out the market and work with the information you gain regarding your e-book. Great point, Mridu! How long is the e-book how many words, or how many pages in a Word document or. Ninety-nine cents is fine for a page book, not so great for a pager. And if you spent weeks researching a book and included multiple expert sources and recommended reading, it certainly should be worth more than a book where you included only what you already knew.

What are comparable hard-copy books priced at? My personal opinion is that if a book is published in both e- and hard-copy versions, the former should be about half the price of the latter. Fantastic post, Carol. And people are not only willing to pay more for information they want, but subconsciously, we all trust higher-priced information more than we do lower-priced information. Carol, Thank you for digging up such a wide variety of possible solutions to selling our ebooks.

I appreciate John Soares example too! Carol, I really appreciate your detailed advice on pricing. By contrast, the ebook about my specific writing specialty is 27 bucks and is available only from my website, as is a short course I created for freelance writers.

The Kindle ebook also includes links to my website and an invitation to subscribe, tactics you have recently advocated. In the digital marketplace, a thumbnail image not much bigger than the nail of your pinky finger is all that makes your book stand out.

That takes some serious design chops. But they cost money. Once inside the book, the text needs to be free of objective errors like spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, poor sentence structure, missing words and homophones. The book also needs to be well-paced, with decent characterisation, a solid plot, rich but efficient language, consistent PoV and voice. There are people who can help with this, too, called editors.

But they also cost money. Your readers will ascribe the same value to it that you do. There are signs already that a two-tier self-publishing market is evolving. Inside, the writing is technically faultless, allowing you, as reader, to immerse yourself in the unfolding story. There are two further economic arguments for not valuing your work at nothing: one simple, one quite complex. The first is merely substitution of goods. That is an insanity of modern society that needs to be confronted.

The second argument is the concept of price elasticity. But books are generally found to be price inelastic-you sell close to the same number at whatever price, within reason, you pitch it at. In certain genres there does seem to be a price elasticity at play, where a reader will genuinely regard two similar books by different authors as substitutable.

Romance is one such genre. In a way, that has always historically been the case. Mills and Boon paperbacks have always been slightly cheaper than conventional fiction, and romance readers have been trained to expect lower prices. Without being dismissive, romance readers know what they like in terms of structure, characters, and plot.

The romance tropes are tightly bound, and an author steps outside those boundaries at their peril. To a certain extent, the books are substitutable. Another situation where a loss-leader might work is in the introductory book of a long series.

The idea here is that the author has 5 or 10 other books in a series. The low price of the first book is to get readers hooked, enough that they will then invest in the rest of the series at a more realistic price. The self-publishing industry has come of age. This means a good story, several rounds of professional editing, and professional cover designs. Lastly, one obvious fact. Traditional publishers are in business to make money.

If there was a pricing strategy that made them more money, they would use it. They know that good quality books, even e-books, sell well at multiples of that price. If they reduced their prices, they might sell more copies, but their overall revenue would drop. Independently published authors need to understand that they compete with the traditional industry on quality, not price. That is changing. Richard Bradburn is the managing editor of editorial. You make a royalty on each purchase of your ebook.

Please note: These are for example only. Other factors, such as delivery costs and the country or territory an ebook is purchased in, affect your actual royalties. Because Amazon and BN. All amounts rounded to the nearest dollar. Readers expect shorter books to be priced cheaper. With fiction and some creative nonfiction e.