How to Price a Self Published Book on Amazon

Hey there, I'm Julie, the book broad of book launchers dot com. We help professionals and entrepreneurs write, publish and sell a fantastic nonfiction book. Now when you self publish, one of the essential things that you have to figure out to sell your book is what price point to offer it at. When you're trying to figure out the price point of your book, it's one part art, one part science. First you want to figure out what is the ultimate goal of your book, what are the distribution channels and what is the value you're offering to the reader. And by the way, Amazon's really what you need to pay attention to as a self published author. That's where more than 80% of your book sales are going to come from, even if you have bookstore distribution. So really you're figuring out what's going to make you stand out and keep that Amazon monster fat and happy. But how do you figure it all out? Well, let's take a look. Let's head on over to Amazon and I'll show you one approach for figuring out range that you may want to price your books at. Alright, so here we are on Amazon. Now let's say you've decided that start with why by Simon Sinek is a good comparable for your book. So I've gone ahead and pulled it up on Amazon. And now what you want to do is a couple things. First, you're going to pull the price for the Kindle, you're going to pull the price for the paperback, and there is in fact a hardcover available. So you're going to take all those prices and put them in a spreadsheet just like I did over here. So spreadsheet, put book title category, Kindle price, as you can see all these at the top. And then you're going to input information here. So book title category and then most importantly, you're putting the Kindle price, the softcover price and overall sales. So we're going to scroll down, I'm going to show you where you can find the sales numbers. So the Amazon best sellers rank, so it's 148 overall in books. And now I want to look at the categories because this is where I might find some other books that are similar to it. So I'm going to click on this, it's a hyperlink. And I'm going to go ahead and look at other books that might be in this category to see if there's something else that might be another comp for my books. We'll just say Blueprint to Business might be it. So now what I want to look at is number of reviews. This one doesn't have very many reviews, so I probably won't use it as a comp. And you want to look for somebody with probably 50 or more reviews and four star or higher, because that's really, again, you're looking for pricing comparables. You don't really want to compete against somebody who has no reviews. The book isn't selling because that's not going to be a great comp. So you want 50 or more reviews. And you also want to have books that are in multiple, multiple formats. So let's say this book, the Code of an Extraordinary Mind, was only available in Kindle. The that wouldn't work for our purposes. We want books that are available in Kindle and ideally soft cover as well as hardcover. And then you're just going to take all this information and keep inputting it into the spreadsheet. When you have at least 20 or 20 to 50 comparable titles, you're going to take an average of the Kindle price and average of the softcover price and see where you come out. You may even want to take a mean and a low and a high and just really start to take a look at the range of books you'll be competing with. It might be tempting to just think about how much profit you want to make from every book and calculate it. But that would be a mistake doing this exercise. For another book project that we're working on, we came out with a $9.99 average for Kindle and a $1,799 average for the soft cover book. Based on that, it depends on where you want to be and how you want to compete with those books. In the categories that you were comparing yourself to, you could take that average and add $2 or subtract $2, it depends. But if you haven't already seen my video on selling your book too cheap, then you definitely want to check that one out before you make your pricing decision. Now, one thing you're probably thinking is, I haven't touched on how you're going to figure out what categories are the right ones for your book. But this gets you started on pricing. And of course, if this seems like a giant pain in the butt and you wish someone else would do it all for you, our platinum level clients get this work done. That's just part of our service. To help you write, publish and promote your book. We'll talk about category selection and keywords in the future, because it matters a lot too if you have a question, go ahead and post it in the YouTube comments below. If you want to share how you're going to approach pricing your book, because there's more than one way to do this, please share below. And of course, when you do that, you can tell us about your book project if you want. Now, if you like getting free tips, hit that thumbs up button. It makes me happy. If you prefer to pay for your tips, that makes me happy too. So you can go ahead and hit the thumbs down button. And of course, while you're here, subscribe to the channel. I'll see you on the next video.