I’ve noticed something unusual in the ebook price alerts going out from Luzme.
The old ‘cheap’ ebook price point used to be £0.99, and before that, it was £0.20.
But now, it seems to be £1.99.
The Martian, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, The Devil in the Marshalsea, and more. All dropped to £1.99 whereas before I’d have expected £0.99.
Interesting…
How much should you pay for an ebook? $9.99? $0.99? $0? And how much should you price your ebooks? I’m going to tell you what people have actually paid for their ebooks, based on some hard data from Luzme.
You can set the price of your book to be anything you want; what really matters is what someone will pay for it!
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch.
Last year, Luzme captured a large amount of ebook price data and reader pricing preferences.
Last week, I looked at the UK Kindle Top 50 chart, and saw some evidence that unless you’re willing to cut your price to just about free, then you’re unlikely at present to get your ebook into the UK Kindle Top 50.
So if the Kindle chart is little more than a vanity metric, what can we learn from the more mainstream bestseller charts in the UK?
I decided to look at the Bookseller Top 50.
Here’s a graph of yesterday’s Top 30 Kindle bestsellers in the UK.
A spread of prices as you’d expect, mostly below £5, with just one with a £9.99 price (the new Ian Rankin book, “Standing in Another Man’s Grave” by Ian Rankin).
Then I wondered, “that’s what the prices are now but I wonder what they were previously”.
Here’s the same books, but instead using the lowest price they’ve had over the previous week.