Small price rise for my novel - to push up sales, not decrease them!

Today, I put the price up of my Kindle ebook Smugglers at Whistling Sands from 77p to 99p in Amazon's Kindle store and the equivalent in US dollars.

I have made this decision because I feel that the minimum price of 77p may, in the eyes of the reading public, look a little too "needy" and desperate for a sale and perhaps suggest that the book is of inferior quality.

There are an enormous number of 77p books out there and some of them, it has to be said, are not the greatest of efforts. On the other hand, there are some good self-published books and I like to think that mine is one of them - certainly the reviews so far have been very positive.

For any established author, you cannot indefinitely sell your books at 77p if you hoped to make a living out of it and I don't think anyone would expect people to. But this price rise of mine is not about improving profit margins - that doesn't interest me at the moment, I simply want to get my book as widely read as possible. For the record, the price rise will only increase my royalty by about 5p or 6p per book.

It's worth a try and I can always put the price back down from 99p to 77p if it doesn't work. As for my sales, they have been very modest but they do keep coming, at the rate of one or two a day, fluctuating between zero and three most days, the majority on Amazon.co.uk, but a sizeable few on Amazon.com.

I still wholeheartedly stand by a previous blog entry in which I said emphatically that a new author must sell cheaply in order to persuade readers to give his/her book a try. What I and other indie authors must do is to use every selling strategy at our disposal to push our books - while still leaving time to write new ones, of course!