Online Community for Authors

 The $64,000 question is . . . how are you going to price your book?

Authors often struggle when deciding how to price their book. The same factors apply to pricing a book as any other product or service. What does the competition charge? What is the cost to manufacture your book? What are the related marketing costs going to be? What kind of demand exists for your book?

The answer to your pricing question is both simple and complicated. The simple answer is that the average paperback book sells for $14.95. The complicated answer is that you need to do a little research. The first two places to go are www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com.  Look at similar titles and their prices.

Two other useful online sites for price research are www.aaabooksearch.com and www.123pricecheck.com. After searching online, the next step is go to “offline” bookstores and check the prices for books similar to yours. The reason I suggest to conduct your price search both online and offline is that online retailers tend to charge lower prices than bricks and mortar bookstores charge.

When you are doing your research, keep in mind that your price should be based on the market and not on what it cost you to print the books. Also keep in mind that the value of your book is the idea it conveys and not the paper it is printed on. This point is especially important when you are deciding on what to charge for your ebook. Many authors think they should charge a much lower price for ebooks because it doesn’t cost anything to reproduce an ebook, but I disagree with this tactic unless it is part of an overall promotional strategy.

Finding the right price point can be as simple as saying that you want to make three times the cost of your book or maybe you just say that $14.95 sounds good. Or you might take some time and research the market a little deeper. Will you stress out about the price point? Probably. But so does every businessperson on the face of the planet. One general rule of thumb is to set your price on the high-end because you can always offer price reductions if the book isn’t selling well.

Michelle Huggins, an author we helped at ZDocs, was dead-set on selling her hardbound poetry books for $19.95. But when her books came back from the hardback bindery, they looked so good I recommended that Michelle price her book at $24.95. I had no market data to support this recommendation; it was just a gut feeling.

Michelle disagreed with me and so I backed down and wished her luck at her book signing that following Sunday. On Monday morning, I called Michelle and asked her how the signing went. She was ecstatic. She said she sold all 100 hardbound books. I remember cringing inside thinking she should have raised her price. Then she told me that at the last moment she had raised her price to $24.95. By making that last minute decision, Michelle earned an additional $500.

The big wigs who run Corporate America will tell you there is a science to making good decisions. But sometimes you just need to listen to your gut. Michelle listened to her gut and it paid off for her. As a small business owner or book publisher, sometimes all you’ve got is your gut. Don’t be afraid to use it.