I'm having trouble on what to price my autobiography. Since it is an actual nonfiction book about myself word for word on events, I don't know how much people would pay to read that. If I made my life written in an interesting way and not just in a blog rant form maybe it could pass as a story. I've been thinking about making it $1.00, or $1.50, or should I go by the amount of words? I feel like I've been through some really traumatizing events that could help others get through similar experiences so because of that, I don't know if I should make it $2.99? I'd have to make the length 50,000 words or so for that I think. Some people have reminded me to not sell myself short on my writings so I'm trying not to do that. Have you written an autobiography yet, if so how much did you price yours?
Unless you are already in the public eye, you really have to ask yourself, "who will care, and how much will they care?" I realize that sounds harsh, but when were you last tempted to buy the autobiography of someone you've never heard of?
That is true. However, with 13,400+ views on my blog by itself and 500 subscribers when I talk mostly about my life anyway on there leads me to believe they would buy my book about my life because I've often been told by anyone who knows me my life is boring but interesting at the same time and they have said they would actually want to read more than the short stories I post on my blog so I decided to write a whole autobiography since they have complained my autobiography posts were too short. I was thinking about posting it for free, but I thought maybe I could post it at some value because getting through a lot of struggles is worth some price to me to live to talk about it.
Mine is very short but covers an extremely niche area. It's only about 80 pages and I priced it at £1.99 which works out at around $3.12 so I would say you were spot on. Like @Cogito says, not to be rude but unless you were/are famous or in the public eye, (for something good or bad) then charging anything over $5.00 would definitely turn readers away (in my opinion).
An autobiography is really just a story that happens to be about the author. The fact that it's autobiography shouldn't really factor into the price. If it's a well-written, interesting story, people will want to read it. If it's not they won't. Of course, people can only want to read it if they know it exists and have some reason to believe that it will be a well-written, interesting story. And that's where marketing comes in. It seems that $2.99 is somewhat of a sweet spot for a lot of e-books, so that's probably a reasonable place to start. There are all sorts of marketing ideas where you do promotions for free for short periods of time, which boosts your algorithms on amazon and make your book come up higher in searches, etc. The price shouldn't generally be based on the number of words, but some folks do seem to feel shortchanged if they pay for something and receive something very short. It seems to me that you're saying your autobiography is less than 50K words? That is, indeed, very short. I would expect something more in the 80-120K word range, unless you're really pitching it based very specifically on the traumatic experiences you indicate you've endured and presumably focus on in the book. (Even then, I'd still expect something novel-length, but again, there may be some sort of niche in your particular experiences/blog followers.)
Oh, I definitely don't even price my regular fiction books that high, $5 lol, unless I wrote 200,000 words. I think I'll try to make it longer and then maybe leave it at $2.99. I believe the blurb I wrote for it is very catchy and will interest people. They seem to like my rants about my long distance interest and my autobiography is an extended version of that. I'm crossing fingers that will do the trick. It's not just talking about bad people and bullies, but even sort of adding a love interest in it, too.
I've bought quite a few self-published ones, but they were mostly by people who served in the military, and $2.99 or less. If the OP has an interesting life history, there are people who'll buy it. One of my favourites was by a guy who was a nuclear missile guard in the Cold War, something I'd never read about elsewhere... plus it helped that his story was often very funny.
