How to Price Your Book
Here’s a hair-puller for many authors: how the heck do I price my book?
Here are 3 considerations to help you decide.
Look Around
Get to know the industry by benchmarking against similar works. Head over to your local bookstore (or your own bookshelf!) and pick up books that are similar to yours.
Consider: similar size & thickness, similar format (paperback vs. hardback, for instance), similar genre. All of these factors can help you gauge an appropriate price point for your book. What are buyers in bookstores willing to pay for books that look, read, or feel like yours?
Do the Math
When you compare your book to others’, you might start to get a sense of what variables can affect the price. Hardcovers will usually be more expensive than paperbacks. Books with a heavier paper stock might be pricier than books with flimsier pages, recycled paper, or magazine-style pages. Size and thickness of a book may contribute to its price. All of these factors come back to printing cost: how much did it cost the publisher in material costs?
If you are self-publishing or hybrid publishing, doing the math is particularly critical. Ideally, you want to sell your entire print run, and make a profit! It will take longer to turn a profit if your up-front production costs are high. That said, you may sell fewer books if you skimp on the production; you want it to look appealing on the shelf! And when a customer does shell out for your book, you want to send them home with a great product that makes them feel the expense it was “worth it!"
Don’t forget to factor in shipping. It’s up to you whether you will offer a higher list price and free shipping, or a lower list price, and ask the customer to pay shipping costs. Different online stores may also have different policies or norms that can help you make this decision. Either way, if you’re not careful, you can eat up your entire profit in the cost of shipping a book to a customer.
Let’s work through an example.
Let’s say you want to make a 20% return on the sale of your books (20% profit).
First, find out what it costs to ship one book. Then multiply that by the total number of books you hope to sell.
Let’s pretend it costs $5 to ship a book, and you have 100 books to sell. If you succeed in selling them all, you will accrue $500 in shipping costs. (5 dollars * 100 books = $500)
Second, add in your production costs: what it cost you to have the books produced and shipped to you.
Perhaps you spent $1,000. Your total cost is now $1500. ($1,000 production costs + $500 from previous step)
Third, add in your profit margin by finding out how many dollars it represents, and adding it to your total cost.
You’d like to make a 20% profit, so calculate 20% of your total costs, and add that to your total cost. In our example, 20% of $1,500 is $300. So I will add $300 (my 20% margin) to $1,500 (my costs from the previous step) to get $1,800.
This will give you the total amount of money that you will need to earn to cover your costs and make your desired profit. Then simply divide your total by your number of saleable books, and you have your per-book selling price.
To make a 20% profit in our example, we’d need to earn $1,800 (1,500+300). To make $1,800 on the sale of 100 books, each book must sell for $18 (1,800 divided by 100).
This is your pricing floor! Now you know that if you sell all 100 books for at least $18/ea, you will turn a 20% profit!
If you did the first thing I suggested (“Look Around” above) and benchmarked prices on similar books, and the benchmark is higher, feel free to price your book higher! If your benchmark shows that books similar to yours sell for LESS than $18 (or whatever number came out when you did YOUR math), you may need to make adjustments to your costs by having more/fewer books printed, finding less expensive shipping, asking the customer to pay shipping, or making sacrifices on paper quality, or you may need to make adjustments to your expectations (expect less in profits).
Know Your Worth
I recently heard a Queer Eye character say, “if I don’t shine my buttons, no one else will!”
In many cases, that is true. Our own attitudes and actions communicate our worth to the people around us. My mother used to say, “you teach people how to treat you.” This is more than just a self-esteem pep talk, it is a critical business strategy.
Story time.
A past client came to me with a pricing plan that was way too low. She wanted to encourage sales with “barn-burner” prices, but what she really ended up doing was communicating to potential buyers, “This isn’t worth buying at full price.” She didn’t think her book was as good as the rest of the bookshelf, and she priced it accordingly. Instead of making her book more attractive, the low price made buyers suspicious.
Don’t do that.
You don’t get to decide for readers whether they will like your book or not—for better, or for worse, they get to choose! Pricing your book too low is like walking into a room of strangers and introducing yourself by saying, “I’m sorry.”
You are not sorry. You are an author. You have thought deeply, worked hard, and invested much, and your book is a testament, not an apology. A reader may choose to pass your book by, but may it never be because you failed to stand tall with pride in your work!
Look around, do the math, and know your worth!
Put these three things together, and you will be off to a great start on pricing your book.
Can’t wait to see what you do!
—Betsy
p.s. Pitch Contest continues! September 1, 2022 through October 31, 2022! Pitch your book idea on Instagram (@midwinter_press) for a chance to win $300 toward the publishing package of your choice!
