How Much Should Your Sell Your Ebook For?

If say, you wanted to sell your ebook on Amazon, how much should you sell it for? 99c? $2.99?
Did you know what one of the most expensive books on Amazon sells for?

Its called “Margin Of Safety” by Seth Klarman.

Its a business book, more precise, it is an investor book.

And the price of this value investing book?

$2,999- hard cover new

$1,999- hard cover used.

Kinda steep…

But is it?

What would happen if you sell your ebook for a high price?

For me, I am not in that field, that field is of no use to me. However if I wanted to know about value investing and I was involved in the field would I buy this book? Maybe. Why?

Because the reviews are favourable. Also, because it is expensive.

Do you know where I am going with this?

Because of the wide misunderstanding that everything should be cheap, people expect to pay $1-5 for an ebook. Market forces have not responded and drove down prices, the sellers have trying to keep up with short sighted people wanting to get out there far and wide without thinking of long term consequences.

The car manufacturers have got this made. There is a glut of cars out there piling up in fields. Yet still, I can not buy a new car for $400. The car manufacturers would sell loads, get their name out and have huge market share. Seems a stoopid idea doesn’t it? But with so many cars and manufacturers they know the following:

– their car/ time/ manufacturing process is worth something

Heck they even make money on the back-end with financing, breakdown, servicing and “extras”. Sure, in many years to come, cars will be much cheaper- put then again so will raw materials (?), labor etc.

But not ebooks or books in general, however this value investing book sells at a price which seems to defy the norm?

But when you read through the reviews (37 of them) with an average of 4 stars you get the same information that you read in any review. Good book, bad book, over priced book, just right, not for beginners, for beginners.
Minting it with only a few books sold.

If we assume that 25 of the reviews are “normal” and they actually bought the new book, how much did the author make on 25 books sold?

$74,975

Now this number disregards the amount of people that couldnt be bothered to write a review.

I think if you were going to buy this book, the reviews will help, for over $2k you know that you are going to buy this book. The reviews with actually cement in that you buying this book is a good idea. But they probably wont sway you too much. Whether it is to do with the authors background, their own company’s performance, business reviews or even recommendation. people do not buy a $2k book on a Google search per say. They buy on knowledge of an industry and Google search is just backing up their already held belief.

So for me the book seems over priced, but to that specific audience that the author is targeting, it might be a bargain especially if they can earn $Xk from using the book.

Heck, just read this one comment, and see the “type of consumer”:

“Margin of Safety (1991) is expertly written, clearly communicating financial concepts without unnecessary jargon and tangential facts to cloud the point the author is trying to get across. But do not misunderstand the target audience. Klarman’s book is written for professional investors and very experienced retail investors. It is a sort of index of financial folly, an open letter to investors to resist temptation and shun financial instruments whose intrinsic value is difficult to assess.”

But...I get told to "sell your ebook for cheap!"

Now many ebook authors state that you should sell for cheap- where the average price is $2.99. But at this price you need to be knocking them out all the time- this is were volume will make up for the price.

If you sell cheap you have to make up the price upon the backend. Ever awesome go-to person, Seth Godin makes his money through consultations and speaking which can be very lucrative. He also sells more than one book knowing that people trust the "Seth brand", a second sell is kinda easy. But most ebook authors just do not do that. They believe that their novel, their 1 book will sell and bring them in tons of cash.

Unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way- especially if you want a continuous trickle of money coming into your bank account every month.

The truth is that 1 ebook will not do it.

You have to work hard to convince that your ebook is better...or

But ultimately people may assume that books should be cheaper- and in some ways yes they should, but also books should reflect the:

quality of the information- that is better than the free information that you can find online.
the author
time and effort put into finding out point 1.

You are now starting to get into the realms of proving that what you say can actually do...what it says!

For digital products you have to prove more than someone who printed a book because a printed book seems to have more professional image. There is the assumption that a team created it and made sure that it was OK.

With digital...there seems to be a reduced perception of professionalism. Therefore you have to build that into the product that you are trying to sell. You have to:

crank up the very related bonuses
build those bonuses into the product
break up the product into small products and sell as a bundle

You could probably sell your ebook for much more than what you are thinking, and most authors could probably do this. The problem?

they are not convinced in themselves that they should. If you dont believe your product is worth it, people sense that and you will sell it for a much reduced price
because you believe that 3rd party vendors and their "what other ebooks in this category sold for" price matching.
maybe the information isn't worth what you think? You havent included bonuses, you havent created value.
because you are trying to create a lead generated product. The problem? You have called it an ebook. Call it a report but try to remove the cheap price away from the ebook. It is going to be hard to sell an ebook with similar pages/ topic/ info at a higher price.

If you are selling on Amazon then you need to know about Amazon search. Knowing Amazon search will place you ahead of the competition. Here's how.