October 3rd, 2026   •   4 minute read   •   Issue #174

Most of us price our books one at a time.

A new book comes out, we look at what similar books are charging, think about what feels fair for the length and the work that went into it, and pick a number. Then we do the same thing next time, and the time after that.

It feels sensible. Each book gets its own careful decision.

The trouble is that readers don't experience your books one at a time.

A reader who enjoys the first one doesn't stop there if there's somewhere to go next. They go looking for the next book, and the one after that.

So the price on any single title is doing a job for the whole shelf, whether we planned it that way or not.

I've come to think that's the question worth asking about every price you set. Not "what's this book worth?" but "what's this book's job?"

Every Book Has A Different Job

In most genres, there are two kinds of book.

There's the book readers find first. For a novelist with a five-book series, that's usually book one.

For a business coach with three books, it's often the broadest title, the one that answers the question most people are typing into Amazon.

For an author with a catalog of standalones, it's whichever book your ads and also-boughts send people to most.

That book's job is to start the relationship with a reader. To get a new reader to say yes for the first time.

Then there are the books readers find next. Their job is different.

These are the books someone buys once they already trust you, and over time they're where most of your royalties tend to come from.

When we price every book the same way, we ask the first one to do both jobs at once: win over strangers, and earn like the rest of the catalog. More often than not, it ends up doing neither particularly well.

The Number Behind The Number

Here's a simple example. 

A romance novelist has book one at $4.99. On Kindle, that earns her about $3.49 a sale, and she sells 100 copies a month.

This is where readthrough comes in: the share of readers who carry on from one book to the next. Thanks to her readthrough, each reader who starts book one goes on to earn her another $8 in royalties across the rest of the series, on average. Some stop after book one, some read all five, and $8 is the blend.

So with book one at $4.99:

→ 100 readers × $3.49 = $349

→ Plus $800 from the rest of the series

→ $1,149 a month

Now she drops book one to $2.99, which earns about $2.09 a sale, and more readers take a chance on it. Say 150 a month.

→ 150 readers × $2.09 = $314

→ Plus $1,200 from the rest of the series

→ $1,514 a month

Look only at book one, and she's earning less. Look at the shelf, and she's making about $365 more each month, from exactly the same books.

The business coach would run the same sum, using his readthrough across his three books. If a reader of his entry book goes on to buy the other two, or books a call, or joins a program, that's the number that belongs alongside book one's royalty.

It Doesn't Always Mean Cheaper

This isn't an argument for discounting everything, though. Far from it. Often the numbers points the other way.

If your readthrough is low and very few readers go past book one, a lower price just means more readers stopping in the same place. The fix there is in the ending, the back matter or the book itself. 

And lower price books, especially free and $0.99 books tend to attract lower quality readers who create low read-through.

Kindle Unlimited (KU) changes the picture too.

A KU subscriber choosing between a $0.99 book and a $4.99 book in the same genre will almost always pick the $4.99 one.

It costs them nothing either way, so they're getting a $4.99 book for free rather than a $0.99 book for free. In KU, a low price rarely wins you the reader, and it can make your book look like the lesser option.

That's true well beyond KU, too. Price tells readers something before they've read a word. A higher-priced book feels more valuable, and readers assume it's the better book.

If you saw a one-year-old Ferrari with 2,000 miles on the clock for $10,000, you wouldn't think, "What a great deal, I'll take ten of them." You'd think, "What's wrong with it?"

Readers can feel the same way about a book that's priced too low. And for the books readers find next, the ones doing the earning, authors are often charging less than their readers would happily pay.

The point is simply to run the numbers across the whole shelf, and to remember that your price is part of how the book sells itself.

It's also why I advise authors to think about pricing before they run ads.

Ads just multiply whatever numbers sit underneath them.

If each new reader is worth $11.49 to you across your catalog, your ad spend has room to breathe.

If you've only ever looked at book one's $3.49 royalty, it's very easy to decide the ads aren't working when the price just wasn't telling the whole story.

Something To Try This Weekend

Write your books down in the order most readers find them.

Next to each one, write its job: start relationships, or earn.

Then use your readthrough to work out, roughly, what a new reader is worth to you across everything they go on to buy. It doesn't need to be precise. Your KDP reports and a calculator will get you close enough.

Finally, look at the price on your first book and ask whether it's priced correctly for its job, or priced as if it were the only book you've got.

You might find it's exactly right. Plenty of authors do. But pricing is one of the few changes in an author business that can lift your royalties without adding a single hour of marketing to your week, so it's worth knowing for sure.

That's it for this week.

Thanks for reading. See you next Saturday.

To Your Success
– Matt