Best Prices for Novelettes?

[X Equestris]

Last year, I had three novelettes reprinted with a new small press. Unfortunately, this small press used AI to make the covers and made some interior formatting decisions that left me pretty dissatisfied, so I've decided to have those editions unpublished and replaced with my own self-published ones. The manuscripts are edited, fully formatted, uploaded, and my chosen artist is almost done with the cover for the first novelette, so one of the only things left to for me to do is decide how to price them.

Which presents a bit of a conundrum, because these are novelettes, so they're on the shorter side. One is 9690 words, the second is 8611, and the third is 10,608. Amazon has given me figures of 45, 41, and 51 pages for the paperbacks, respectively. What's the best price point for this kind of fiction, in e-books and paperbacks? I don't want to choose one that's insultingly high for what the reader's getting, but I also don't want to sell myself short. Profit isn't my main concern--that would be eliminating and replacing the old standalones--but I'd like to give myself the best chance I can of breaking even. Does anyone who's self-published novelettes or novellas have any advice on this front?

 

[big soft moose]

On ebooks something that short is usually 99c / 99p

In print it will be hard to do because the spine will be very thin plus the basic print cost may make it uneconomical

If they are a series I’d be inclined to put them together into one book for print and then price that in the low end

 

[Naomasa298]

Can you combine them into a single anthology?

 

[X Equestris]

Can you combine them into a single anthology?

Normally, I would, but in this specific situation, I don’t want to leave the botched, AI-covered editions associated the only thing associated with these titles on venues like Goodreads. So they need to be standalone, just like those.

On ebooks something that short is usually 99c / 99p

Good to know. I’ve seen some self-published authors seen say $2.99 is better even for short fiction because of how Amazon does royalties, but this seems like something that would only hold true for novellas or the longest novelettes.

In print it will be hard to do because the spine will be very thin plus the basic print cost may make it uneconomical

Right. The old publisher has them priced at $5.99, which seems absurd to me, but maybe that’s the lowest they can go.

 

[big soft moose]

Amazon does 35% royalties under 2.99 and over 9.99 and 70% between them

However 2.99 is too much for 10k words so you won’t get many sales and 35% of something is better than 70% of nothing

The other thing is if you also have novels you could use the shorts as free magnets to build your mailing list

 

[X Equestris]

Right. I figured that was the case, but I have seen some novelettes selling well at $2.99, so I figured I’d check to see what the market as a whole looked like. With this in mind, I’ll start the e-books at $0.99 and maybe lower them once I have some longer form titles out there.

For the paperbacks, I’ll keep them close to as low as I can, if I do them at all. I’d like to offer the same mediums the publisher did and do them right, but if it’s not economical, it’s not economical.

 

[big soft moose]

are you going into KU or going wide? you can't actually set a book to free on amazion... if you're wide you set it free on kobo or somewhere and then get a friend to report the lower price and they match. if you're in KU you can have it set to free to buy for 28 days at a time (bearing in mind that in kindle unlimited the reader pays a sub and the books are free to download for ku members.,. the author gets paid based on page reads

 

[X Equestris]

are you going into KU or going wide? you can't actually set a book to free on amazion... if you're wide you set it free on kobo or somewhere and then get a friend to report the lower price and they match. if you're in KU you can have it set to free to buy for 28 days at a time (bearing in mind that in kindle unlimited the reader pays a sub and the books are free to download for ku members.,. the author gets paid based on page reads

These won’t be in KU because the original novelettes were first published in anthologies that went wide, so they don’t have the necessary exclusivity. Does Amazon do the price matching on non-KU titles as well? I could’ve sworn I’d heard about it unrelated to Kindle Unlimited, but I know they make changes, so it’s possible that’s become outdated.