Publishing E-Books For Dummies

Using Price Pulsing to Boost Sales

Price pulsing your e-book changes its price in order to elevate your work on the sales chart. The regular price of your e-book might be $3.99, but you can drop the price to 99 cents to help your e-book sell more copies and gain visibility. After your e-book has gained a more prominent position, you can raise its price again — and if it drops too far, you can lower the price again, and so on.

However, some authors believe that Amazon’s algorithms now promote e-books priced $2.99 or higher in favor of those priced between 99 cents and $2.98. (The Amazon algorithm is the behind-the-scenes math that gives e-books prominence on the site — not only in the charts, but also in other locations, such as in the recommendations shown to readers on their home pages.) For this reason, you may want to set the standard price of your e-book at $2.99 or more and only occasionally lower it as part of a marketing push.

When Amazon first brought out KDP Select (a program described in Chapter 13), authors found that by enrolling in this program and making their books free for five days, they could rapidly rise up the ranks — and maintain a high ranking even when their book wasn’t free. Now Amazon has changed this algorithm so that a high ranking on the free chart isn’t maintained on the paid chart.

Price pulsing is an especially useful technique if you have published ...