Setting the Price for a Printed Book

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SETTING the PRICE for a PRINTED BOOK

The size of a book plays a role, so does whether or not the book is hardcover or paperback and whether it is fiction or nonfiction in determining the price.
The average fiction novel that gets published tends to be right around 350 pages.These books can run from $24.95 to $34.94 if they are hardcover. Softcover or paperback books are much cheaper, typically being around $9.95 to $18.95. Nonfiction books are unfortunately a little harder to price since it is more dependent on the actual content.


Nonfiction books will often contain charts, diagrams, quoted research, and statistics which makes it vastly different from pricing a fiction book that simply tells a story. The best bet for determining a price of a nonfiction book is looking at other similar books and seeing what they’re selling for, but even this can sometimes cause a wide range for pricing.





If you are self-publishing, then you have to take into account the percentages that will be taken out of the sales price by companies like CreateSpace, Lightning Source and Lulu.
If you’re printing yourself, you’ll need to consider the percentage taken by distributors and/or bookstores for they will want at least 40-55% of the sales price.
This will help you in negotiating with your printer, as you will need to keep the actual production costs as low as possible so that you can keep your pricing competitive with other titles.


If you have a publisher, they will take a percentage of the sales price. So, working backwards from there, should help you arrive at a percentage that you will receive as the author.


In this electronic age though there are plenty of self-published books that are being sold online and don’t actually have a physical form, which means that the traditional pricing rules wouldn’t apply. Part of it is dependent on how many other books the author has published, as many authors will set their book on the lower end of the price spectrum because this will naturally be more appealing to readers.


As unromantic as it sounds, setting a price that readers will accept, and still leave yourself enough money to live on is a delicate balance, so setting the price for your book is an important step.