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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/40610
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I’ve heard from some authors that setting your book at a low price without making it clear that it is a sales/giveaway price tends to devalue your work and makes people assume that it is of low quality. Is that actually true?

I used to assume that most people had enough common sense to know (or guess) that many self-published authors would want to make their books cheap so as to encourage people to buy them and therefore build an audience. I thought most people naturally understood that a low price like 99 cents doesn’t necessarily mean the book is actually of that value.

But, based on the advice I’ve seen from some experienced authors, it seems I was wrong and that most people automatically assume, when they see 99 cents, that the book must be of that value and therefore of poor quality. Do people actually make that assumption?

[This question is not a duplicate of the one asking about free books. In this case, I am asking about lower prices in general. Important difference.]

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