Shannon Phillips

I am targeting a January 15th release date for making the e-book version of The Millennial Sword available through Apple’s iBookstore, Kobo, and other outlets. (I’ll be publishing to Smashwords, which supports basically all the non-Amazon retailers.) At that time, I’m planning to raise the price of the e-book to $3.99. My friend Megan, who has a publishing background, advised me to look into a higher price point, and after doing some research I discovered there’s something of a consensus among indie authors that slightly higher prices can actually boost sales. I’ve also noticed that on my book’s Amazon page, in the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section, the majority of other titles that readers of The Millennial Sword are picking up are priced at $3.99 or $4.99. So, just a heads-up: there will be a slight price bump soon.

Amazon remains the 800 pound gorilla of the e-publishing market, and their royalty structure rewards e-books priced at $2.99 or higher, so $2.99 is in many ways the floor for self-published book prices. (You do see 99 cent titles, but Amazon only pays out 35 percent royalties for these books, as opposed to 70 percent royalties at the $2.99 price—making it very difficult for a 99 cent title to ever make significant earnings.) And it’s nice for authors to be able to reserve the $2.99 pricing for shorter works like novellas.

Amazon sales so far for The Millennial Sword: in the first three months I’ve sold 93 copies across both print and digital formats (mostly digital). When I started this project I decided that fewer than 500 sales in the first year I’d consider disappointing, while more than a thousand I’d consider a big success. I expect sales to end up somewhere in between. I’m not really worried about slow sales at the start, though, because the book is just starting to see some promotion on the review blogs—and the more reviews it picks up on Amazon and Goodreads, the more visibility it will have. Right now I think the book is doing pretty much exactly what I expected it to do, and the real test will be whether or not the sales figures start to gradually rise over the next few months.