How to price your ebook: genre bands, royalty cliffs and a launch ladder

Start from the genre band, not the word count

Readers do not price books by effort; they price them against the last three books they bought on the same shelf. So the starting point is always the band your genre actually trades in. As working guidance for UK indie ebooks (bands, not rules — check the current bestsellers beside yours): romance £1.99–£3.99, crime and thriller £1.99–£4.99, fantasy and science fiction £2.99–£5.99, literary and book-club fiction £2.99–£6.99, memoir £2.99–£6.99, practical non-fiction £4.99–£9.99, children’s and middle grade £1.99–£4.99. Non-fiction supports higher prices because it is bought for a result; fast fiction supports volume at the low end.

The five-minute market check Search your subgenre on the store you care about, note the prices of the ten most recent well-ranked indie titles, and drop the highest and lowest. What is left is your band this month — more current than any guide, this one included.

The two royalty cliffs that bend every price

Platforms do not pay a flat share at every price, and two thresholds matter more than everything else. Amazon pays 70% only between £1.77 and £12.99 in the UK (the band that widened on 7 July 2026); below or above it pays 35%. Kobo pays 70% at £1.99 and up, 45% below. The practical consequence: at £1.49 you keep 52p a copy from Amazon; at £1.99 you keep £1.29 — two and a half times the royalty for a price 50p higher. Above the top of Amazon’s band the same trap returns: a £13.99 book earns £4.90 at 35%, less than a £12.99 book at 70% (£8.99).

That is why every suggestion in the price calculator lands on or above £1.99, and why premium-priced books (box sets, technical non-fiction above £12.99) often route around Amazon’s ceiling via Kobo, Apple, Google or Ebokio — none of which caps the 70–90% rate. The full per-platform rules are in ebook royalties, explained.

What you actually keep at common prices

Net per copy at the prices indie ebooks actually use (1 MB file, UK reader)

Amazon: 70% in band minus £0.10/MB delivery, 35% below £1.77. Kobo: 70% from £1.99, 45% below. Ebokio: share of net receipts (price − 0% UK VAT − ~2.9% + 25p card fee); Pro is £19.99/mo. Rules checked 23 August 2026 — recompute any price in the royalty calculator.

Two readings of that table matter. First, between £1.99 and £12.99 the platforms pay broadly similar shares, so within the band your price should be set by readers, not royalties. Second, at the edges the platform choice changes the answer — at £0.99 Apple pays double Amazon’s rate, and above £12.99 the uncapped stores win outright.

Series pricing: the ladder that does the marketing

A series turns pricing into a funnel. The first book’s job is acquisition: price it at the bottom of the band (£1.99–£2.99 is common) so a stranger’s risk is trivial, and let its back matter sell book two at full price. Later books sit in the band’s upper half — the reader’s trust has been earned. A box set of books one to three at roughly the price of two volumes earns more per reader than any single book and re-advertises the series each time it is promoted. Standalone books skip the ladder and simply sit where the genre band and your goal (readers vs revenue per copy) put them — that trade-off is exactly what the calculator asks you.

Promotional prices: visit, don’t live there

£0.99 and free are tools, not addresses. A time-limited 99p promotion on book one — ideally amplified by a newsletter feature such as BookBub’s Featured Deals, whose price sheet varies by category and deal price — buys a spike of readers who flow into the series at full price. A permanently free first-in-series ("permafree") can work for long series in voracious genres, but it forfeits all royalties on the door book, so it needs at least three books behind it to pay. What promotions cannot do is rescue a book priced above its band all year: if conversion is poor at £6.99 in a £2.99–£4.99 genre, the promotion is a detour, not a fix.

Launch, measure, and move in £1 steps

Price is the easiest lever to change and the worst one to thrash. Launch inside the band (the calculator’s suggestion is a sensible middle), then hold for four to six weeks while reviews and rank stabilise. If the book converts poorly against comparable titles, step down £1 and hold again; if it holds rank comfortably, test £1 up. Change one thing at a time — a price move during a promotion tells you nothing. On Ebokio the publish wizard previews your exact net at any price before you go live, and repricing everywhere takes minutes: the discipline is in not doing it weekly.