How Much Do Kindle Deals Cost
Most Kindle deals are free: about half of every promoted deal costs nothing. The next most common price is $1.00 to $1.99, and the $0.99 ebook people wait for is one of the rarest prices there is.
Where do Kindle deal prices actually land?
| Deal price | Deals |
|---|---|
| Free | 48,469 |
| $1.00 to $1.99 | 22,898 |
| $5.00 and up | 10,670 |
| $2.00 to $2.99 | 5,702 |
| $3.00 to $4.99 | 4,550 |
| $0.01 to $0.99 | 673 |
Free is 52.1% of priced deals. The $0.01 to $0.99 band is 0.7%. Free books outnumber it by 72 to 1.
Why does $0.99 almost never happen?
- Below a dollar, an author keeps very little per sale, so the price stops earning its way.
- Free costs the same and moves far more copies.
- The two useful thresholds are therefore free, and a dollar and change.
- A book that is not free is more likely to be $1.00 to $1.99 than under $1.00.
How deep do the discounts go?
- Average discount, where both prices were recorded: 63.8% off.
- Typical book: $10.56 down to $4.69.
- So a discounted book is usually still a few dollars.
- The savings are real rather than cosmetic.
What do readers actually pick?
Free books draw 14.7 times the clicks of discounted ones. A discount gets attention; free gets action. If you are choosing what to put in front of people, or what to spend an evening on, free wins by a distance that no discount closes.
Common questions
- Are most Kindle deals actually free?
- Yes. Free is the single most common deal price, at 52.1% of priced deals. If you only ever download free books, you are still seeing most of what is on offer.
- Why is $0.99 so rare?
- It sits in the smallest price band of all, 0.7% of deals. Authors who drop below $1.00 usually go all the way to free instead, because free moves far more copies.
- How big is a typical Kindle discount?
- Where both prices were recorded, the average discount was 63.8%, a book that normally costs $10.56 going for $4.69. The savings are real rather than cosmetic.
- Should I wait for a book to get cheaper?
- If it is already $1.99, probably not. Deals run for days, not weeks, and a book that is not free is more likely to land between $1.00 and $1.99 than to fall below a dollar.
- Do free books get read, or just downloaded?
- We can only measure clicks, and free books draw 14.7 times the clicks of discounted ones. A discount gets attention; free gets action.
- Where can I see today's prices?
- On the retailer's listing. That is the only reliable source for what a book costs right now. Our deals page links straight through to it.