Every book on this site is priced at £2.99, and that number isn't a guess — it's a deliberate choice that sits inside the pricing band Amazon pays its higher 70% royalty rate on, roughly $2.99–$9.99 (or the local-currency equivalent), rather than the 35% rate that applies outside it. Price a book at 99p to seem more tempting, and you're often taking home less per sale than at £2.99, sometimes for a book that took a year to write.
Beyond that band, the pricing conversation splits into a few genuinely different strategies rather than one right answer. A higher price, £4.99 and up, signals a longer or more ambitious book and works reasonably well for a well-reviewed backlist title with genuine social proof behind it. A lower price, or permafree, is a different tool entirely: it's not meant to make money on its own, it's meant to be the low-friction entry point into a series, recovering its value on book two and beyond rather than book one. I haven't gone permafree on The Eagle's Rise yet, but it's the obvious next experiment for a four-book series where the real revenue lives downstream of book one.
Discounting deserves more intention than most authors give it. A launch-week reduced price rewards early buyers and can help a book gather early reviews and momentum while retailer algorithms are paying closest attention to it. Occasional promotional pricing — coordinated with a paid promotion service, or just announced to your own list — works best as a rare event rather than a permanent state; a price that's "on sale" every month stops meaning anything.
One wide-distribution complication worth knowing before you drop a price: Amazon will sometimes price-match a lower price it finds for the same book at another retailer, which can undercut a price change you only meant to apply somewhere else. If you're distributing wide through a service like Draft2Digital, the safer move is to schedule a price change across every connected retailer simultaneously through the distributor's dashboard, rather than changing one platform at a time and hoping the others don't notice for a while.
The other pricing lever entirely under your own control is direct sales — a Gumroad listing like the ones on every book page here isn't bound by retailer price-matching rules at all, which is one more reason selling direct is worth doing alongside wide distribution, not instead of it.