The median price in Romantasy is $12.99. In Dark Romance it's $3.99. If you're pricing without knowing your subgenre's benchmarks, you're guessing.
Most authors price their books based on what they've seen others charge. It's understandable — pricing is uncomfortable to think about, if we're being honest, and so copying the market feels safe. But "what I've seen others charge" is an unreliable sample, and it varies dramatically by subgenre in ways that aren't actually that obvious unless you're looking at the data.
Romintel tracks median prices across the Amazon top 50 in each romance subgenre daily. Currently: Romantasy sits at around $12.99, Romantic Suspense around $6.99, Historical Romance around $5.99, Contemporary Romance around $4.99, and Dark Romance around $3.99. These are medians, which matter more than averages, actually. A few outliers (a permafree first-in-series, a high-priced box set) can pull an average well away from where the market is actually anchoring. The median shows you what readers are used to paying in your corner of the market.
Current figures are at romintel.com/dashboard and update every morning.
In subgenres with high KU penetration, your list price is largely irrelevant to most of your potential audience because they're accessing books through their subscription and effectively paying nothing at checkout. Dark Romance is around 82% KU right now, which means pricing at $5.99 instead of $3.99 doesn't earn you more from most readers. It just signals value tier to the minority who buy outright.
In lower-KU subgenres like Romantic Suspense (around 30%), more readers buy directly, so the price anchor matters more. These are meaningfully different contexts, and pricing decisions that don't account for them are working against the market rather than with it.
Check the median price for your subgenre at romintel.com/dashboard. Check the KU% while you're there. Then price at or near the median unless you have a specific strategic reason not to, like a permafree to drive series read-through, a promotional window, or a deliberate decision to position above or below market. The point really isn't to blindly follow the data but rather to know what the market expects before you decide how to respond to it.
See the data for yourself — free.
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