13. How to Price Your Book | The ShuttleSmith

Setting the price of you book is an important consideration.

You don’t want your book to be too expensive that potential buyers may choose not to spend their money to buy it.
But you want to make a bit of a profit on the publication of it too. After all you put ALOT of time and energy into writing it and getting it into print form!

For a long time, when I was in the preliminary book-writing era, I wasn’t sure that I could ‘afford’ to have my book printed, let alone have any monetary margin to make a profit. However, finding CREATESPACE as my print-on-demand company to physically print my book was the key to my success at becoming a published author . I was able to physically print my book & still have the potential for making a profit. (Plus I was able to retain all rights exclusively to my book and not have to outlay any money for the ability to print this way). I did not have to come up with a large amount of money to get a (larger than I probably wanted) bunch of books printed. So the Print-On-Demand (POD) print-model was the ‘cost-effective’ approach I needed.

However, that being said, POD is a slightly more costly way to print books (cost per book) than off-set printing methods.

I knew that as a self-publisher, I would have to market the book myself.

My marketing plan includes the following groups and conditions

Direct to consumers (tatters in my case) @ full List/Retail Price
Wholesale to lacemaking suppliers @ 40% discount off List/Retail Price (minimum purchase 5 books)
Wholesale to a wholesaler @ 50% discount off List/Retail Price (minimum purchase 50 books initially, then 25 books)

This means that if I want to make a profit, I have to be able to have my books printed (my cost) and still be able to sell them at a 40% or 50% discount.

I have to be able to make a profit selling my book to a wholesaler who is expecting a 50% discount.

To understand what it will cost to have a POD book printed with KDP follow the following directions. Note that the two big factors in the final cost of your book are: 1. Number of pages in your book; 2. Whether the interior of your book is black & white or full color. Ink color (black vs. color) is a all-or-nothing situation—if even one page of your interior features color ink or images, the book is a ‘color ink’ book.

All covers are/can be color at no extra price, even if the interior is black & white (black ink).

Go to Book Price & Royalty Calculator and click on ‘Download Calculator’. An Excell file will download to your computer. Open the Excell file and click ‘Enable Editing’. Enter in: 1. Enter interior type–‘color ink’ versus ‘black ink’; 2. Enter number of pages–estimate the number of pages your book will have; 3. Enter anticipated list price–quess for now. You will get the following information: 1. ‘Printing cost’–the price you pay to buy a copy of your book; 2. ‘Minimum list price’–the lowest retail/list price that KDP/Amazon will allow you to sell your book for; 3. ‘Amazon Royalty’–the royalty payment you will receive if someone buys a copy of your book from Amazon.com; 4. ‘Expanded Distribution royalty’–not sure about this at the time of this writing—I need to do some research, sorry.