It’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. We’ve been walking through the process of making choices for what path we want for our indie publishing career.
My series about Indie Publishing Paths at Fiction University has been highlighting some of the choices we have to make and giving us a few guidelines for figuring out how to make the best decisions for us.
We started off talking about knowing our goals. There’s no end to the conflicting advice out there about self-publishing, and to add confusion, the “rules” from retailers and others change frequently. So we need to have an understanding of why we’re choosing certain paths so that we can adapt as the industry changes.
Once we know our priorities, we might make different choices about distribution, release schedules, or pricing. I’ve been focusing on each of those areas in the next segment of the series, calling them the where, when, and how much of our decision process.
Last month, we identified three options for the pricing strategy of our books—the how much. We can…:
- price high,
- price in the middle, or
- price low.
The most common (and yet controversial) advice about pricing is that we should price low—possibly even free. But it’s important to remember there are no right or wrong answers when it comes to the pricing strategy that will work best for us.
Yes, there are many good reasons we might want to price our books below the typical $2.99-$4.99 “sweet spot” (for novels). However, there are also many reasons why we might not.
Before blindly following any advice, we’d want to understand more about how or why the advice is supposed to work so we can see if it applies to our situation. Same thing when it comes to pricing advice.
Any strategy applied to an incompatible situation would likely cause problems. So we’d want to dig deeper into our pricing plans to ensure that a low-price strategy wouldn’t end up being short-sighted.
This month’s post helps us through that digging process. Have we thought about what we want to accomplish with our pricing strategy? Will our pricing strategy actually work to accomplish that? *smile*
In the post, I cover the three main strategies for why we might want to price low and delve into when/why/how each one might work—or not work—for us.
I hope you’ll join me at Fiction University for this month’s post!
Have you seen advice for authors to price their books low? Do you think that’s always the best strategy? Have you thought about what would make the most sense for your situation? And most importantly, have you thought about how pricing low would accomplish your goals?
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