Setting Your Book’s Price
When it comes to
pricing your book, there are three numbers to concern yourself with:
The suggested retail priceThe wholesale priceThe print cost
If you are working
with a combination print-on-demand/book fulfillment service like IngramSpark,
here’s how things work. When you list your book in their catalog and make it
available for stores to stock and sell, you set a suggested retail price for
the book. This is not the price that bookstores pay for the book. It is the
price at which you suggest they sell the book to their customers. You sell the
book to bookstores at a wholesale price (more on that in a moment). Most
bookstores will sell the book to customers at your suggested price, but some
will sell it for less in an effort to lure customers away from other stores.
This will not affect how much the bookstores pay you for your book.
When a bookstore
buys the book from you through a fulfillment service, you must offer it to them
at a price lower than your suggested retail price. This is the wholesale price.
The typical industry standard for a wholesale discount is 55 percent off of the
suggested retail price. That means if your suggested retail price is $15, and
you are offering stores the standard 55 percent discount, the wholesale price
would $6.75. From that price, the printer will subtract the print costs. What’s
left is your profit.
Let’s say your book
is 250 pages long with a print cost of $4.20. Here’s how the math would work
out:
Suggested retail price: $18.00
Wholesale price (assuming 55 percent
discount): $6.75
Your profit after the $4.20 print cost is
deducted from the wholesale price: $2.55
If you wanted to
increase your profit, there are a few things you can do:
Opt for a higher suggested retail price Reduce the page count to lower the print
cost Offer bookstores a lesser wholesale
discount
Although a 55
percent wholesale discount is preferred, most bookstores will be okay with you
offering them the book at a 50 percent discount. If you drop that down to 40
percent, most physical bookstores won’t stock the book, but online stores will
still list it.
Keep in mind that
these numbers pertain only to books sold through stores. When you sell books
directly to readers yourself at your suggested retail price, you keep all the
profits after the print cost is deducted.
For ebooks, you
will generally make 60–70 percent of the suggested retail price for the ebook.
Two things to keep
in mind:
A typical mistake many self-published authors
make is to increase the retail price to make more money per sale. This can do
more harm than good. If you are pricing your book higher than the norm for your
genre, people are not likely to buy your book. It is much better for you to
sell several copies of a book with a lower profit margin than one copy with a
higher one.A pricing tactic used by most self-publishers is
to their ebook at a much lower rate in the hope of driving up sales numbers
(and getting better placement in online stores). A good range for this is
$2.99–$3.99.
