Amazon New Pricing Suggestion Tool

Amazon New Beta Pricing Suggestion Tool

After my free promotion finished in the KDP select program, I went to drop the price and noticed a button that offered assistance with the pricing.

Getting the price right is very important if you are to make enough sales to make all the effort worth your while.

I first decided on the price of $7.99 which is the price that I used when I first uploaded the book.

The were several reasons for this:

• I was thinking that people perceive high cost with high value and thought, that at the higher end of the books in the category, @ $7.99 people would think it would believe at that price it has to be good.
• I thought that people would be more likely to take advantage of the FREE KDP promotion if the book was normally priced at  $7.99 rather than 0.99c
• I thought that the time and effort that has gone into the book it is well worth $7.99 (and still do for that matter)

I now believe that this strategy was wrong.

The aim is to get as many people downloading the book as possible and getting feedback in the way of reviews that will help boost the rankings and subsequently improve the sales over time.

This is the reason that I used the KDP Select FREE promotion for 3 days out of the 5 allowed. At $7.99 this is not an impulse buy and there are a lot of other books on the subject that are priced a lower than $7.99.

At a lower price, people are more likely to take a punt and hopefully find it of value and provide a review that will also help more people decide to buy it.

Also, this is my first book and as such I have no history or credibility yet and, whilst I may believe that the book is worth the money, I am not the one buying it and, of course, people could have a totally different view.

There are a few books on Social media marketing that are more expensive but, there are a lot that are cheaper.

Why would anyone want to spend double to buy my book when there are other cheaper options available?

Hopefully, the title will stand out and draw attention to it, the reviews should help and we have tried to craft a good description, although every time I look at it I think it can be improved.

Amazon Price Suggestion Tool

I had already decided to drop the price to $4.99 at 35% but when I went into edit it, I noticed amazon had a new price suggestion tool.

I believe it is reasonably new as it is still in beta. I ran the tool and it suggested $2.99 at 70% and at a click of a button it changes the price for you.

So I that’s what I did. I clicked it and now I am sat at $2.99. I will now also make more profit at the lower rate with the higher commission. I still am not sure whether this is the right price point yet but I will leave it here for a while and see how it goes and then slowly raise it again.

Commission Rates

When setting the price depending on what it is you can choose to take 35% or 70%. I had an idea or maybe I read it, that if you took a lower commission and Amazon earned more they would promote it harder? In retrospect, this is probably naive of me but you never know 🙂

I cannot think or find out the benefit of reducing your commission from 70% to 35%, unless your book has a large amount of graphics, which means the file size will be much bigger . Amazon charges for downloads on books that have a file size over 1mb. So, if you are making a lot of sales and your book has a lot of graphics and photos in it, then it may well be worth going for the 35% commission as opposed to 70% and paying for the bandwidth. It is worth making the calculation anyway.

Amazon KDP Price Suggestion Tool Video