How I Price

I was asked, today, why His Belonging - An Erotic Tale had its price go up after it came off of its free days. So I figured I'd explain how I'm doing my pricing.

First, I define the stories by word count:
Shorts: up to 10,000 words
Novellette:  10,001 - 20,000 words
Novella: 20,001 - 40,000 words
Novel: 40,000 + words
Technically I should have epics and what not listed also but I have no intention of writing anything that long for release as a single Ebook.

Now, my pricing is based on length plus a couple of other variables.
Base pricing:
Shorts: $0.99
Novellette or Novella: $2.99
Novel: $3.99-$5.99

Variables that can affect the base pricing are niche and effort involved. If there is less demand for a certain niche that I write something in I am liable to price it higher. If something takes me five times as long to write because I had to research information for it repeatedly then it is liable to be priced higher.

Finally, when I introduce a book I'll normally drop its price category by one level. So 'His Belonging' which is priced at $2.99 because its word count is over 10,000 was dropped to $0.99 for its first week, then it had a few free days and once it came off of the free days I put the price to its normal level.

When I was asked the pricing question I was also asked why "His Belonging" isn't searchable from the 'all' category on Amazon. Even if you search by author name in the 'all' category it doesn't come up. I don't know why that is occurring unless it is a side effect of editing the price. I'll have to contact Amazon support about that in a week or so if it stays that way.

Jan, 2013
A. Morrel