Learning to Price My Books

When I priced my first books, how did I land on a number? Honestly, not very scientifically. I thought they were worth $15 each. Looking at those same books now, with everything I've learned since, I'd price them closer to $4.

What changed between then and now? Not the books, they're the same words on the same pages. What changed is that once I built an actual audience, I got outside feedback for the first time, and I realized my early books were overpriced for their actual quality. So I marked them down, while still accounting for print costs, since those set a real floor no matter how the pricing conversation goes.

Pricing to match the work

Compare that to The Monitor, my latest book, which I priced at $14.99. That's not me deciding my own book is worth that number just because I made it. It's genuinely the best thing I've made, both by my own judgment and by feedback from readers who've actually read it, and the price reflects the sheer amount of work and time that went into making it as close to perfect as I could get it.

So what does price actually track, if not just “how proud I am of it”? It should track the actual quality of the book, and here's the part that's easy to miss: quality is often something you can't judge accurately by yourself. You need outside perspective, readers, an audience, to check it against. The Monitor is the same book from the zen-garden module in Write a Book, five scrapped drafts before it ever clicked, and the price reflects every one of those drafts, not just the final one.