Pricing an e-book is too complicated. There is a simpler solution.

For the last 18 months, we have been on a mission to help writers make money and we have been successful at it. Amongst many things that we have learned along the way, one of the most important ones is how difficult it is for writers to decide how to price their e-books or posts that they want to sell as a one-off.

We understand why this is difficult:

  1. How do you calculate value of your time?

    Writers spent hours/days/weeks to craft a story. Most of the writers we have talked to have a hard time deciding how to put a price on the time spent. A deep rooted reason here is, traditional publishing has always under valued a writer's time, and the need of social media to give away content has made this worse.

  2. What will readers/fans pay for a story or e-book?

    There is no right answer for this, and finding the right price will require some experimentation for a writer. The law of " a nice, round, low number" usually helps. It's more of an art than science when you first start.

    It's possible to take the guesswork out of monetizing your content. Writers and creators should start with accepting contributions - this is what you commonly hear being referred as tipping, support, etc. On stck.me, we call it Support.

    The idea is a very simple one - let your fans/readers decide how much they want to pay you. Our key learning over the last year is, fans/readers are very generous when you ask them to decide what to pay you.

    Our data shows that an average Support is at least 10X higher than what a typical e-book or a story would be priced at, and at least 4X higher than what a monthly subscription would be. That's significant. It means that with Support, you can create a sustainable income source with a lot less paying fans/readers than depending on paid content or subscriptions.

To enable Support for your stck.me account, just click on Edit Profile and it's right there. Remember to remind your fans/readers to support you every time you create content for them. मांगे बगैर तो माँ भी खाना नहीं देती!

If you want to tap into more useful guides based on our learnings and expert advice, make sure to follow Creator Guides on stck.me.

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