How to price books when you’re the only seller

Guide to pricing books on Amazon when you have no competitors.

Why books with no competing offers are the Holy Grail

If you were to apply what I’m covering in this article just one time, for one product, it will pay dividends for the rest of your Amazon selling career.

The most coveted situation as a seller is to have a book that has no competing offers

Either no one is selling the book at all. Or, you’re an FBA seller and you are the only FBA seller for that ASIN.

In this case, you own the listing. You are unconstrained by competitors. It’s like owning the only hotel in town. If people want what you have, they have to pay you prices. You have all the control.

So the question becomes: How do you know what price is “realistic”? You can price any book for $10,000 (assuming you don’t get hit with one of Amazon’s “high price errors”), but very few books are actually going to sell for that price.

I’m going to provide some guiding principles to help you get the most you can for an item, while still setting a price that is likely to get you a sale.

What’s the best default price when you have no competitors?

Here’s the simplest answer to “How to price when you have no competitors?”

$99.

That’s the answer.

If all you did was price every book for which you are the only seller for $99, then you would make more money than 99% of sellers selling the same book.

Of course, it’s not that simple. What if its average price is more than $99?

While $99 is my default price in the Books category, this is not “one size fits all.” But if you read no further and only set a default price of $99, you’d do well.

But let’s examine what a more nuanced strategy would look like, and what I call “the four tiers of owning a price.”

Tier One: Pricing high demand books with no competition

In the Books category, I would consider “high demand” to be anything with an average rank of better than 20,00 (arbitrary number here).

For books in this strata, there is almost no limit to how high you can price. Sales volume is so high, it’s almost inevitable that someone will come along soon who simply needs this book, and will pay almost any amount to get it. In this circumstance, it’s not unreasonable to set a price of $299 or $499 and still get a sale. It just takes one person with deep enough pockets and intense enough urgency to get a sale at an extremely exorbitant price.

However, you will almost never encounter this scenario. High demand books rarely sell out. Or, the demand is invisible and not reflected in the Sales Rank simply because there is no supply. So you might have a high-demand book, but you won’t even know because the rank is 6 million because no one has sold it in 18 months.

When in doubt, the Keepa charts will always tell the story. Just overlay the price graph with the Sales Rank graph, and you can clearly see when that  ASIN last had active listings, and roughly what they sold for. When you see no line in the price chart, that means there were no listings.

Again: Rare scenario, but when you find a book like this, don’t hold back on the price.

Tier Two: Pricing high-urgency books with no competition

I’m going to teach you an imperfect science I call “urgency analysis.”

This will be specific to the Books category, but can be tweaked and applied to any category.

The premise of Urgency Analysis is this: Assessing the desperation of your potential buyer, and when the demand is deemed to be “urgent,” pricing the item extremely high.

I have sold dozens of books for $499 (my “urgency analysis” default price) using this formula.

Introducing “urgency analysis”

You can deem the demand for a book to be “urgent” when any of the three conditions apply:

1. There is unlikely to be any substitute for this book, anywhere in the world.
2. There is unlikely to be any “close enough” substitute for this book, anywhere in the world.
3. The buyer is “irrationally passionate” or “obscenely wealthy.”

When any of these conditions apply, I will price that book at $499.

This is not an exact science. It’s not possible to answer these questions definitively. But you can make an educated guess, and price accordingly.

Examples of $499 books I’ve sold:

• $499 book: World’s only complete guide to every species of mango.
• $499 book: A unique coffee table book of rare Paul Newman race cars.
• $499 book: Transcripts of speeches given by a religious cult leader.

What happens when you list a book (or anything) for $499?

One, you (probably) won’t sell it anytime soon. That’s okay.

Two, someone may underprice you, eventually. That’s okay (at least you tried).

When just one sells, it will offset all cost and storage fees for every $499 book in your inventory that doesn’t sell, and every future $499 book for the rest of your life.

Tier Three: Pricing average books (little to no urgency) with no competition

Little to no urgency? In other words, an “average” book where you are the only seller?

I’ll list at $99. And they usually sell.

$99 means I did urgency analysis, and I determined the potential buyer would not be that desperate. In other words, there are other books with similar information, or other alternatives.

$99 is a “safe” price for any book (and many other categories) where you are the only seller.

Tier Four: Pricing books with confirmed low urgency

These are books for which there are many substitutes, and it’s unlikely anyone needs your specific ASIN.

I’ll list books in this category at $25.

An example would be a random crossword puzzle book. What are the odds someone needs this specific crossword book? Probably low. So I’m going for the quickest possible sale at a decent price.

Keep in mind for every 10 books I list for $99, I’ll list one for $25. It’s rare for a book to have so many negative indicators that I’ll price at $25.

Very occasionally I’m undecided, and price at $49.99. But usually I’m choosing either $25, $99, or $499. But if I’m the only seller, I will never price it below $25.

High profits in low competition

Remember: You can’t get from a customer what you don’t ask for. When you own a listing, price it high and hold your ground. You can always lower your price later.

This short article will make you thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands) if applied consistently, and with conviction.

-Peter Valley

 

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