When the book is finally ready — the cover is done, the layout checked, the file sitting there waiting — it turns out there's one more question ahead, and I was completely unprepared for it. How much should this cost?
It's almost funny: I spent months thinking about the text of the book, and one evening thinking about the price. I figured it was a small thing — I'd pick something in the middle, see how it went, adjust if I had to. And I did adjust it. More than once.
At first I looked at other books in my genre — pulled up a dozen similar titles and compared numbers. I quickly realized that told me nothing. The spread was huge, and I couldn't find any logic in it: an author with one book might be priced higher than an author with fifteen. Age of the edition, the author's name recognition, the platform — all of it seemed to matter somehow, but none of it added up to a formula I could just apply to myself.
So I flipped the question around: what would I myself be willing to pay for a book by an author I'd never heard of? Honestly — not much. A reader's first purchase from a new name is almost always made on trust, not on a calculation of whether the price is "fair." Which meant my job at launch wasn't to squeeze the most out of that first book — it was to lower the barrier enough that someone would actually take the chance and open it.
So that's where I set the price — lower than I wanted, but low enough that trying an unfamiliar author wouldn't feel like a real risk. And then something happened that I hadn't expected at all: I started feeling like I'd sold myself short. Not because anyone said so — just because when you're holding the result of two years of work in your hands, any number feels small. I had to remind myself that a book's price isn't a rating of the labor that went into it. It's what someone pays for the right to read it once. What the work itself was worth is an entirely different question, and no single copy's price is ever going to answer it.
The audiobook turned out to be even more confusing. Recording it myself cost far more time and nerves than the ebook ever did, and my instinct was to price it the same as the epub, because "it's the same book, isn't it." But that's not how it works — audio has a different cost of attention for the listener, different buying habits, different competition, from podcasts to free spoken content. In the end I put together a bundle: the epub and the audiobook together, cheaper than buying them separately. That felt more honest, both to me and to the reader — instead of making them guess which version was worth the extra money.
With the second book, I approached it differently. Now that there was a first book behind me, a reader who bought it already trusts me a little more than they did the first time. I bundled the two books together — again at a discount against buying them separately — not to charge more from a reader who's already stuck with me through book two, but to make it easier and more worthwhile for them to stay with me through the rest of the trilogy.
Currency and taxes are a separate headache. I sell through Lemon Squeezy specifically because I don't want to be the one figuring out how much VAT to add for a buyer in Germany versus one in Australia. That's a sensible handoff to people who actually know how to do it, not laziness on my part.
If I were doing this again, I think I'd spend less time hunting for the "right" number and accept sooner that a price isn't math — it's a conversation with the reader. It tells them: here's how much I believe in you at the start, and here's what happens if you stay with me for the long run. So far, that's how it's working. Life will probably correct me on this too, the way it has on everything else along this road.