Practically every author thinks and wonders about this a lot. How do people come up with just the right price for their books? Well, maybe the prices that are printed on their books are not actually working for them, and that might be because they used the stab-in-the-dark method of pricing. Let’s see if we can figure out the best, most rational, price for your book.
There are two main factors at work here. One is to set a price that is comparable to similar books. And the other is to set one that will give you enough returns to pay your expenses.
Comparable price. When you took that field trip to the bookstore, you wrote down the prices of all your competing books, along with the number of pages in each one, and anything remarkable about any of them. So at this point, you probably have a very good idea of how many pages your book is going to be, and whether you have more features than the other books, or maybe fewer. Pretend you are a visitor to the bookstore, picking through all the book titles. Would you base your purchase on price alone? On the quality of the content (maybe more helpful illustrations or sidebars)? On the thickness of the book (more pages per dollar)? On the irresistible cleverness of the title? Sometimes even the trim size is a factor—a travel book might be more desirable if it will fit in your pocket, for instance. Probably some combination of the above, right? Unless your book is outstanding in a way that is obvious at first glance, it should be priced somewhere in the middle of the pack, according to all the factors mentioned above: quality, number of pages, and other features it may have.
Reasonable return. Add up all the expenses you’ve incurred in producing your book. This should include fees paid for services such as editing, design, indexing, illustrations, etc. And printing. Now divide that total by the number of books you’re having printed. Yikes! Maybe that comes to $300 per book! If so, you probably have no hope of recovering all of it anytime soon. But many of you can set a goal of making enough revenue from sales to cover your first printing. Then if you come out with more copies in the future, your only expense will be for printing, and you will start to make a profit.
Another wrinkle to keep in mind is that bookstores will take about 50% of your cover price, and Amazon will take 65%. This may start to seem like a donkey chasing a carrot, but with persistence, you’ll make it to profitability.
If you balance the two main factors above, you should be able to come up with a price that you will be comfortable with. You’ll know why the price is what it is, and you’ll have a reasonable sales goal to attain. Now get out there and sell your book!
Read more: Your field trip to the bookstore » shows you how to compare your book to others.
And more: Book distribution 101 » explains how books get from the printer to the consumer
And even more: Finding your book subject categories » explains how to use this little label on your cover to find your audience.
Book Design Made Simple. You can do it yourself.
hello! I’m reviewing several topics here. Very informative so thank you!. just quickly, in your remarks near the end on amazon taking 65% of a book price, you must be referring to their top line Advantage program or something I don’t know. When reviewing their options, it seems they offer a system where you set up your own storefront, send them the books to store for you and then they take X$ per month or about 1$ per book sold and 15% of the cost in exchange for ‘fulfillment’ by Amazon, – ie, they handle CS, returns, shipping elements to chose from, including Prime – etc.
So can you please explain where the 65% idea comes in? Things like this are important as I move forward and plan ahead for my photo book. Thanks! C
Hi Cathy, we wrote this article back in 2014 and things have certainly changed at Amazon since then.
In general terms, the cost of selling books hasn’t really changed all that much over the years. Bookstores still get a discount of around 50% (they’ll pay you half of your retail price and sell at full price). If you use a distributor, they’ll take a 65% discount (50% to pass on to the bookstore, and 15% for their distribution).
When you use Amazon for fulfillment (i.e. set up your own storefront and ship books to their warehouse for distribution), they charge you 15% of the retail cost for distribution. That is a standard cost for distribution. Back when this article was written, we didn’t have the choice of setting up a storefront at Amazon. Instead, Amazon claimed the standard distributor’s discount of 65%.
I hope this helps! Fiona