Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Progressive Pricing for In-Progress Books

If you publish a book following the Lean Publishing philosophy, which is essentially like serial publishing (but normally applied to non-fiction books), you have some interesting options regarding your book's price.

A lot of Leanpub authors choose to price their books progressively, that is, raising the price as they add more chapters to their book over time.

Why Choose A Progressive Pricing Model For Your Self-Published Book?

This progressive pricing model accomplishes three main things:

• You're rewarding people for buying your book for it's finished: in the end they'll have the full book, but they'll have paid less than the full price, because they bought it early.
• You're setting the price at an appropriate level given the number of chapters or amount of content you've written and published up t that point.
• You're giving yourself an incentive to publish new chapters and finish your book

How To Determine Your Pricing Schedule

This will vary book-by-book.

It will depend on what your planned final price will be, and how many instalments of your book you plan to publish.

Will it be ten chapters published additively, one at a time, so you're publishing your book in ten instalments?

Or will you be publishing your book in four parts? Two?

Being Transparent About Your Pricing Schedule

Probably the most important feature of adopting a progressive pricing model for a self-published book is being transparent about your pricing plans and timing.

Let people know in your About the Book description, your Teaser, and your social media posts etc. that the price will be lower at the start, and higher at the end.

That will encourage people to buy your book early and tell their friends and colleagues about it, and mitigate any disappointment people might feel if they don't buy your book until it's completely written, and learn someone else bought it for less earlier on.

Clips From The Livestream