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By Mark Coker, Smashwords

Smashwords today introduced Global Pricing Control, a new feature that gives authors and publishers control over their ebook pricing in 248 different countries and in 152 local currencies.

Pricing control is now in your hands, where it belongs.

If you’re running a BookBub ad where you need your book priced at $.99 in Australia, Canada, and the US, and ‎£ .99 Pound Sterling in the UK and 99 Rupees in India, you can now lock down these special prices with with a few clicks.

If you want your ebook priced at € 5.99 Euro in Germany and € 2.99 Euro in Spain, Italy and Portugal (where the median per capita income for each of these last three is less than half of Germany’s), you now have the freedom to price for a specific market.

The new feature is available now from your Smashwords Dashboard. Click to Global pricing to set custom prices for any country.

When you enter a custom price, the screen will display the USD equivalent as a reference point.

Click the lock icon to lock the price in. Once a lock is activated, the lock icon turns green and the custom price is transmitted to retailers.

You’ll see a summary of your locked prices in the right hand panel.

Your custom prices will remain locked until you unlock them.

Prior to this new feature, Smashwords set foreign currency pricing automatically by converting the author’s US Dollar price to other currencies based on foreign exchange rates on the date of the author’s upload or most recent update. For authors who choose not to lock in custom global pricing, Smashwords will continue to set global prices based on current exchange rates.

Global pricing control is helpful for authors who have to deal with Amazon’s draconian price match emails when Amazon’s own pricing gets out of sync with actual exchange rates.

The new feature is also boon for authors who want to sculpt their pricing to appear more appealing to customers in each local market.

Most authors will probably opt to set pricing that ends in .99 increments in the largest markets.

According to psychological pricing theory, a price ending in .99 is more appealing to consumers than a price a couple cents higher. This is also known as “charm pricing.” The theory holds that 4.99 is significantly more appealing than 5.01 because most consumers will consider a 4.99 ebook within the $4.00 price range and the 5.01 book within the $5.00 range.

For countries where different Smashwords retailers or library sales outlets price in different currencies, you can lock down multiple prices in multiple currencies. For example, Kobo and Gardners both sell ebooks in Australia, but Kobo prices in Australian dollars (AUD) while Gardners prices in British pounds (GBP). In this instance, you could set custom prices in both currencies for Australia.

Enjoy!