Price Point

createspace

I use Createspace and when you do, there's a minimum you have to use as set by them during process. You can go higher, of course, and have a greater profit margin.

Createspace's price point will depend on pages after a base price as they need to take their cut and then you have actual printing costs. With the pro plan, I can order books (350pp) for about $5.50 with a minimum public price of $6.88, so you can see I can price this puppy anywhere above and set my own profit margin accordingly. I've opted to go for a bit higher than I needed so I can run a lower price/special via my website.

Sales for self-pubbed being what it is, I can't tell you if price has any effect; you'll need to have someone with good to great numbers give you the skinny on that. But overall, I think if you've got a good story that wants to be read, if you keep the price in the fair range, you'll get readers/buyers. JMHO

You're not going to approach mass market/trade prices from offset printing, so don't sweat it. POD gives you the advantage of not having a lot of your $$ tied up in boxes of books sitting in your living room or in a warehouse, but you pay more to print/distribute. Pick your poison, ya know?




Hope this helps.

Michael

When pricing my books, I always look at what the market will bear. For the non-fiction book I published, others in the same category were selling for between $22 and $40. I decided to go for $25, as it wasn't the lowest price (which is sometimes associated with lower quality), but was still within the lower end of the scale.

For my novella, I did the same. $2.99 is a pretty standard price for indie published ebook novellas, so that's where I started. When I release the second book in the series, I'll drop the price of the first one to try to draw in more readers.

Right now I'm pricing as follows,

5k or less - $0.99
10k - $1.99
25k - $2.99
25+k - $4.99

When I published my print books with Createspace, they had to be at least $10 on Amazon, so I priced them at $12.99. I've left them at that price, because I'm really not focusing on print anymore, and they don't sell anyway.

I've played a lot with ebook pricing. At first, every ebook I put out was $5.00. Then all the other indies started publishing at $2.99, and I began to wonder if $5 was too much for an indie ebook. So I'm in the middle of a pricing experiment, with my books between $.99 and $3.99. Thus far, pricing is making a negligible difference in my sales, but if you head over to Konrath's blog, I'm clearly an anomaly, so...

For me, it doesn't make a difference what length the book is, it's all about how much money I can make from it at whatever price I set it at. So my two longest titles (both around 90K) are at $.99 right now, in the hopes of increasing sales. The sales, thus far, are not increasing, however, so they'll probably go back up to $4.99 in April. If I'm only going to sell 2-3 copies of each a month, I'd rather make $3 on them than $0.35.

My best selling ebook (which is steady at about 30-ish copies a month) is $2.99. My $.99 ebooks are not selling like hotcakes. (Though my vampire novella did sell about 14 copies last month. I released it midmonth, so that was about one sale a day. I thought the $.99 thing was working, but...this month, it's only sold 3 copies.)

Overall, my sales are in a holding pattern, which is about 100 or so copies total (of all my books) a month since December. This has not increased (much) by adding more titles, or by screwing with price. In other words, I have no freaking clue what to tell you.

It's really a guessing game. What price will make you the most profit in the long run? Will a low price attract a large number of sales? Will those people be willing to buy your other books at a higher price? One title at $.99 cents makes you peanuts. I think the $.99 strategy is better used if you've got other books, especially in a series, which are priced $2.99 or higher.

I chose the price based on comparative books. They say your book's price should be at least 5 times the cost of production per book and I've made sure that I didn't violate that also. Of course in the one case, that caused me to go with a very large print run, which would have been okay IF I had a robust marketing plan, which I didn't.

Are you trying to figure out pricing for an ebook or a printed book?

I think this is the #1 topic no matter which site I visit. Konrath's blog talks about this a lot. He's doing a variety of pricing experiments with different books.

I had no idea where to price mine. 99 cents? $2.99? I wanted to be competitive, so I decided on $1.99. No one talks about $1.99 much.

It does seem that a lot of Indies who have multiple books out, put one of them in what some call a 'loss leader' price of 99 cents. But, if that's a loss leader, go tell that to some authors making a living off 99 cent books.

In short, you'll have to just pick what you think might work from you and go from there. Maybe put it at $1.99 or $2.99 for a bit and the run a sale of 99 cents for a month or two. Or, just pick a good price and see what happens. You can always adjust later.

This is fascinating to me. I'm just starting to dip toes into the idea of indie publishing (based on the realization that my periodic questions to myself about submitting, waiting on feedback, wondering if I'm a good fit for a publisher or that publisher's readers, and 35% royalties were coming up closer to, "why am I not doing this myself?"), and the big question for me thinking as a reader and a writer is "where is my comfort level in spending?" as well as "where are others' comfort levels in trying out a new/small-potatoes author?"

Zoe Winters had a blog or two recently on the subject, and JA Konrath's been covering this with his experiments. I'm not sure how close either of them will come close to the reality for an average indie author, especially if they're new/unheard of.

In my mind, I'm remembering a gentler time (hahaha--snerk!) when you could get a decent paperback off a shelf for 2.99. It was a short novel, to be sure, and many weren't exactly memorable, (but some stuck with me still today) but then, it wasn't a high bet, so it was easy to try something--or someone--new.

I've bought a bunch of new authors in the 99-cent range and have been pleasantly surprised. I don't know if I would have bought as many of them (or whole series in one sitting) if they were priced at 2.99. I'll try one book at 2.99 and buy a trilogy of them for 99 cents apiece.

Although to be fair, if you're selling me something that's over 50,000 words, I'm totally okay with paying 3.99 for it. I feel a little like a criminal if you give me 100k for less than 4.99, unless it's gawdawful.

The fact that you can control price makes indie-ness appeal to me as both a reader and a writer. As a reader, I know that indie authors have a greater control over everything about their book--including the price. Knowing the flexibility comes from the creator, rather than an entity seeking to maximize profit or create a loss leader, makes a bit of a difference to me. I can't say why, but it does.

Like most thing you can equally see price point a good reason to use a publisher, who has access to a lot more data on just where the maximum profit zone really is. Some of my ebooks with epublisher have a price set higher than I would ever dare, and a very good earners.

::nodnods:: Ebooks really challenged many people to look into what they ascribed value to in a book. We still see a lot of perception that the paper, ink, pasteboard, and warehousing of a physical book theoretically make up the bulk of the expense, when it's really the intangibles--the crafting of the story, the editing, the marketing--that eat into the profit margin. None of those things go away with e-format, and they don't go away with indie/self publishing, either.

I think 99 cents is what appeals to a purchaser of "digital content" moreso than a purchaser of a "book" - people are used to paying 99 cents for a song (a "unit of digital entertainment") and are operating on that baseline--where a book is either an equivalent unit of digital entertainment, or a multiplier thereof. Digital delivery of games is the same way--29.95 will usually get you a digital download of a recent PC game with 10 to 60 hours of play. WoW costs about fifteen bucks a month (figuring you play maybe half the days of the month). So as far as "digital entertainment" goes, it's a matter of where your book falls on the digital entertainment exchange.