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I like cheap indie books, and I love free ones. Because of this, I price anything I sell for as cheap as 50 cents to 1 dollar for royalties and give out free copies a lot. It boggles my mind when people price their EBOOKS for $30+...I could only see the need for that if there were 10 pages for every cent charged.

How do you decide how much to charge for your books? And do you offer free copies, like in the goodreads giveaways?

I agree. It is hard to offer competitive prices on indie books when we use POD publishes, so I keep my royalties to a minimum (no more than a $1), so the reader can get the best price.

I basically went to the bookstore and priced books of similar size and content. I "pictured" where it might be shelved and then compared myself against the competition. I have also researched other self-published authors who have done booksignings and such with similar books and compared their prices as well. I figure that I can always use discount codes and give away freebies if I want to do a sale, but I wanted to at least give the appearance that the reader is receiving something that is the same value and quality as any other book. I don't want to give the appearance that a self-published book is worth less just because it's self-published, therefore I must discount it up front. So far, people are more than willing to pay the $14.95 which I had to charge given the length of the book and the cost to produce it. I am planning giveaways here and on Shelfari and Library Thing though.

But at the same time, I'm certainly not going to list a price like $20.00 for a trade paperback or $30 bucks for an e-book. That's not very smart whether you publish through traditional channels or not.

I agree with you, indie books should have a have the same pricing rate as mainstream books, but at the same time I think the only way to be competitive is to make our prices lower (off the top discounting for the bad editing!)

Besides, unless I HAVE to have a book I am never paying full price for it. I will only pay under $5 for used copies, and that's hard for indie books because there aren't as many copies in circulation.

In our family everyone reads a lot, so we buy tons of books used. It is easier on the wallet and helps the environment. I think new authors should offer their books to the reading public as cheaply as possible, because we do not have any copies available to buy used (most of the time) and to help our books break into the market.
I see a lot of indie books priced too high, in my opinion, especially mentioned above overpriced digital downloads.

I try to keep mine as low as I can get it while still being in the guidelines for either Lulu or CS rules. I try to keep my royalty about .46-.75 cents and the e-books that price or free since it costs me nothing to produce those. I've seen books with 46 pages that cost $20 and I just marvel at the idea.