I recently put up second editions of my Teaching IELTS Listening and Teaching IELTS Writing e-books. They cost three pounds and five pounds, which might not seem shockingly cheap until you notice that they have over 500 and over 300 photocopiable pages . I’m fairly happy that such ridiculously low prices suit my own purposes (see below). However, I do sometimes worry that I might be helping to bring down prices in the already extremely undervalued profession of ELT, so I’d be interested in hearing what other people think.

My pricing policy is in no way supposed to suggest that other people’s self-published e-books are overpriced. My actual reasons include:

• I’m guessing that for my e-books the main competition is my own free photocopiable stuff, so they need to be cheap enough to not make people think they’ll just use the free stuff instead
• I’d also like them to be cheap enough to be worth buying even if teachers only want to use an activity or two, even if that means that people who use much more of it get a crazy bargain
• I’d also like it to low enough that people who don’t even need any of the books might think about getting a copy to thank me for my free stuff in a Patreon kind of way
• A penny a page is a nice round number that saves me wasting time thinking about it or explaining it
• As a full-time teacher who also has some regular writing work, I can’t imagine e-book sales ever being a big percentage of my income, so anything I get is more about the nice warm feeling than about changing my life
• More than making loads of cash, the main motivations in writing and publishing my e-books are to motivate myself to share more of my many unpublished materials, really polish up stuff which I’ve put up for free before, and improve materials that I might use again in my own classes