A Pricing Experiment With KDP Select

If you are a Indie Author like me and you have your work published through Amazons KDP select program you may be interested in this little blog post. Like most self-published authors I'm currently wallowing in the lower bowels of Amazons ebook inventory. Trying to get your book noticed by anyone who isn't a friend or a family member seems to be close to impossible at times.

So, feeling just a bit frustrated, I did what many other frustrated authors before me have done: I Googled for help. I think I was secretly hoping to find that magical missing piece that would rocket me and my work all the way up Amazons best-sellers charts. I'm sad to report that I never found it, but I did find something that actually helped me make a few sales.

It was during that tearful Googling session that I came across an article by the founder of smashwords. The article was about the most popular price for ebooks, in which Mark Coker stated 2.99 seemed to be the magical number.

Now, none of my books are long enough to charge that price since I like to write in short chunks, often serializing what could have been a novel into smaller parts and then selling them for 0.99 each. However with my frustration at an all time high I decided to up the price on one of my books called Fists, Bullets & One Dead Crime Lord from 0.99 to 2.99.

For two days after the price change nothing seemed to happen. But on the third day I made nine sales of that book, which is only 55 pages long. The fourth day I made another eight sales of the same book plus a few of my others. The days following that spike resulted in a sale every other day for up to two weeks at which point my sales flat-lined completely.

When the sales dropped to nothing I decided to use one of my free day's to offer the same book for free. I left the price at 2.99 and to be honest whenever I've tried to give a book away for free I usually only get around a maximum of five downloads.

This time though I got fifty free downloads with the space of four hours. Which I know doesn't sound a lot but for me that was amazing. I thought when I returned the book back to it's original 0.99 price that maybe sales would take off again, but alas, even fifty free downloads and a price drop wasn't enough to breath life back into the sales.

However, there was a definet change after i upped the price to 2.99, so if your struggling to gain ground and have your work read, then you might want to try altering the prices on your book in combination with a free day to see if you get better results.