How to Price Your Ebook (And When to Change It)
21 September 2026 · 4 min read
Price is the easiest thing to change and one of the most consequential. It's also where authors most often let pride make the decision.
The royalty cliff nobody warns you about
Amazon pays 70% royalties on ebooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99. Outside that band — below $2.99 or above $9.99 — it pays 35%.
That produces some genuinely counterintuitive maths:
| Price | Royalty rate | You earn |
|---|---|---|
| $0.99 | 35% | ~$0.35 |
| $2.99 | 70% | ~$2.09 |
| $4.99 | 70% | ~$3.49 |
| $9.99 | 70% | ~$6.99 |
| $12.99 | 35% | ~$4.55 |
Note the last row: pricing at $12.99 earns you less per copy than $9.99, and sells far fewer. There is almost never a reason to price an ebook above $9.99.
Where most books should sit
$0.99 — for the first book in a series, or a short-term promotion. Terrible standalone economics, excellent as a gateway. You're buying readers, not earning.
$2.99 — the entry point to full royalties. Good for novellas, debut authors and short non-fiction.
$3.99–4.99 — where most indie novels belong. Enough to signal quality, low enough for an impulse purchase from an unknown author.
$5.99–7.99 — for established authors with an audience, or longer works in genres that expect it (epic fantasy, dense non-fiction).
$9.99 — specialist non-fiction where the reader is buying a solution, not entertainment.
Price signals quality — in both directions
Under-pricing is a real mistake. A $0.99 permanent price can read as "not confident in this." Readers absolutely make quality inferences from price.
Over-pricing is the more common mistake though. A $7.99 debut novel from an unknown author is competing with established names at the same price, on trust you haven't built. Readers take chances at $3.99 that they won't at $7.99.
Genre expectations are real
Romance readers read fast and buy in volume — they're price-sensitive, and $2.99–4.99 is the norm. Literary fiction tolerates higher. Non-fiction can go substantially higher when it solves an expensive problem. Fantasy readers accept more for length.
Check the top 20 in your specific subcategory. That's your answer, not a general rule.
Print is a different calculation
Paperback pricing is driven by printing cost, which depends on page count. A 400-page paperback might cost $6 to print, so $12.99 leaves thin margins.
Most indie authors don't make real money on print. It exists because some readers want it, because it makes the ebook look like better value by comparison, and because it's what you sign at events.
Price as a tool, not a setting
The most useful thing about price is that it's free to change.
- Launch promotion: $0.99 for the first week to drive ranking, then up to your standard price.
- Series starter: permanently $0.99 or free once book three exists. You lose money on book one and make it back three times over.
- Countdown deals: KDP Select lets you run timed discounts while keeping 70% royalties at $0.99 — the only way to have both.
- Testing: try $3.99 for a month, then $4.99. Compare total revenue, not copies sold.
Free — worth it or not?
Permanently free works when you have a series to funnel into. It works badly for a standalone — you get downloads, not readers, and the reviews from people who downloaded something free and unmatched to their taste can be brutal.
To go free on Amazon you either need KDP Select's five free days per term, or you list free elsewhere and wait for Amazon to price-match.
Where price sits among your problems
Price is rarely the reason a book doesn't sell. Visibility usually is.
If nobody is finding your book, dropping the price from $4.99 to $2.99 just means fewer people don't find it at a lower margin. Fix discoverability first; tune price after.
Getting the rest of it right
Price interacts with everything else — a promotion only works if you tell people about it, and a series funnel only works if readers reach the end of book one and find book two waiting.
BookSpur plans that sequencing around your book: when to promote, what to say, and how to line the pieces up so a price change actually reaches somebody.
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