Self-Published Novel: Investigate Your Genre

Courtesy of Dmitry Maslov from Dreamstime.com

KNOW THY ENEMY....
Okay, okay enough fightin' words. Recently I was part of a good-natured debate about the pricing of ebooks, especially indie books. It pays to research your genre before deciding on a firm pricing structure...


It's easy, really. Go to Amazon, search in your genre. For example, my book will be labeled a contemporary romance. The main storyline is about who the main character will or will not end up with, his fiancee or the mother of his baby. It has a happy-for-now ending like most chick-lit/women's fiction titles, but deals with love and romance in an urban and contemporary context.  


My awesome news is that my genre has strong showings by indie authors in the top 10 and top 20 downloads. Also, pricing varies from $0.99 to $9.99 (traditionally published). There are many indie authors in the $3-$5 range. I plan to price my first book at $3.25. I have a couple of reasons for this:

• It's my birthday (A gimmick I will use and abuse)
• It will grab attention in a list of prices all ending with $.99 (don't believe me, check yourself, read down the list of prices and see if you aren't paused by $4.67 or some other ending...)
• It's good price point to offer sales from without dramatically impacting my profit, at first.
• It's the earliest full price of a movie ticket I can remember buying with my own money.

The biggest things that seem to set the indie/self published titles vs. traditionally published titles are the prices, cover art, and author photograph. Professionalism doesn't seem to be a deciding factor since the traditional romance genre is well-known for quantity over quality (publication wise, most books are NOT error free, as least not the ones I've read), there are even comments on a few traditional offerings complaining about crappy formatting. 


I am not a big fan of the $.99 pricing while a title is in what I call "first-run." First-run meaning it's the newest ebook offering an author has. I'm not terribly crazy about the $.99 pricing forever, either. I am interested by the strategy author Lucy Kevin is employing. She has one book offered for free, "Spark Fly." Then the next two in the series "Falling Fast" and "Seattle Girl" are both priced at $2.99. Her "box set" of all three is priced at $4.99. 


This is very smart to me, and I love the idea of packaging my books together. People can buy books individually, or for less than the price of two, can get all three! I might try to contact her and see how that pricing strategy is going, maybe after I have a few more followers here.


Regardless of what you price your self-published novel at, make sure it is a price that falls well in your genre. I noticed most of the books at the $.99 price point in my genre listing were published over a year ago. 


"Cancelled" arriving Late Summer 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.