My Blog

Experiments with pricing

Posted on April 15, 2026 in Self-publishing

Today I put the ebook of Phosphate Rocks: A Death in Ten Objects back on sale through Barnes & Noble and KOBO, removed it from Kindle Unlimited, and updated all print pricing.

The prompt came from Barnes and Noble (B&N) press

Minimum Retail Price for Printed Books Barnes & Noble Press print books must have a retail price of $14.99 or more. Due to increased shipping and printing fees associated with Print Projects, this change helps ensure that authors can cover the costs and earn royalties on the sales of their books. Starting April 22nd, 2026, our platform will not allow the creation of new listings for less than $14.99. If you have any titles retailing for less than $14.99 on May 14th, 2026, we will begin removing those listings from sale. To avoid your projects being removed, you can change the price at any time by logging in to your Barnes & Noble Press account and updating your project’s price.

Now, while most of my print books are sold via local bookshops (big shout out to Jenna at Book Corner in beautiful Saltburn for being my top outlet last year), I’ve only ever made a handful of sales through any online outlet* other than Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

Phosphate Rocks Online Orders (Kindle Direct Publishing)

Phosphate Rocks Online Revenue (Kindle Direct Publishing)

Phosphate Rocks ‘free’ page reads (Kindle Unlimited)

The ‘free’ page reads with Kindle Unlimited (KU) don’t seem to affect sales one way or another for this title – but as they’ve fallen to zero recently, it makes no sense to restrict the option to sell the ebook via other outlets, including Nook (B&N) and KOBO. (It’s a condition for enrolling a book in KU that the title is not available as an ebook elsewhere).

As far as I can tell, there’s no link between price and volume when it comes to online sales for this particular title – time to put that to the test!

I do not subscribe to Kindle Unlimited but I confess that it’s VERY rare I pay more than £1.99 for an ebook, so this price increase may be commercially unwise – but hey, what’s the point of self publishing if you can’t play around and test the water?

The great advantage of  the real-time sales data is to test future promotions and special offers.

Watch this space…

*Apart from B&N, I use Ingram Spark to supply Gardners to supply bookshops too far away for personal delivery. Note that Bookshop.org in the UK make it practically impossible for self-published authors to sell via their platform, even though many would welcome the opportunity to support their local bookshops.