By Michael Evans October 17, 2022.
As subscription authors, we often worry about whether readers will pay for our offering. Is early access to our stories to the tune of a few chapters a month really worth $5 or $10 a month when readers can read unlimited books for $9.99 a month in Kindle Unlimited?
We know the answer to this question — it depends on your relationship with the reader and how much getting that juicy story of yours is worth to them.
But there’s a little-known pricing hack we can deploy as subscription authors to make our subscriptions feel like a steal to our readers, and subsequently get them to convert to tiers that pay us more money monthly as authors.
This pricing hack is called price anchoring. Price anchoring is establishing a price point that customers can refer to when making decisions. The beauty of subscriptions is that we can set up multiple tiers, aka multiple price points as authors, that orient the perceived value of our subscription accordingly to our readers.
$5 a month for early access to your new books that you serialized may sound like a lot of money. But when they realize that $10 a month gets them early access to serialized chapters in an author’s latest novel, access to an exclusive community, and the final eBook copy for free when it’s done, $5 a month may sound like an even better deal.
Thus, authors can leverage their higher-priced tiers to drive people to their “lower-priced” tiers that may not be that low-priced at all.
Subscriptions also have another form of price anchoring across your author brand. Almost in all instances, authors who monetize through subscription also sell their eBooks on retailers among other formats. When a new reader finds your subscription, your eBooks which may be full-priced at $4.99 or even more expensive, may look cheap in comparison. A bargain! Even though compared to other eBooks in your subgenre that might not be the case.
For most authors who utilize a subscription membership as part of their business, we engage in price anchoring without even realizing it. But an awareness of this powerful pricing hack can lead to us using it even more effectively :).
If you want to check out a real-life story about how an author made $37,000 in one month using the power of price anchoring, then you should check this out.
And for examples of fiction authors that deploy price-anchoring especially effectively, I’d look at Michael Chatfield, Willow Winters, and Amanda Kristin.