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Writing and Publishing, Part 36:
Becoming your own publisher:
Marketing:
Setting the Cover Price:
In this essay, I just want to address how we can set the price
of our book. Although we take this up in marketing the price of
the book must be determine before it goes to the manufacturer.
This means that we must resolve this issue as soon as we know
the basic facts about the book. These facts are just the genre
of the book, it's size, and the binding method.
Once we have determined the price, we will want to use it in two places on the book. The first place is within the bar code. To meet bookseller's requirements, the book must have a bar code. One part of that bar code will contain the price of the book in machine readable format. This information should be provided to the bar code manufacturer when the bare code is ordered. In addition, the price of the book should appear on the back cover or spine of the book. The customer will not want to guess at the price. It should be there even if the bookseller covers it over with a little discount sticker.
Our price setting effort is critical because it will directly affect the marketability of our product. I should point out that this is an area where I have been in serious error. I will take one of my books as an example. The book "Supreme Commander George" cost me almost $2.60 per book to create. That is the actual manufacturing costs without any pay for the author, artists, editors, etcetera. A big publisher, who could afford to put out the hype for a book like this and sell a million copies, could manufacture them for less than $1.00 each. Think about that difference in price. I paid 2&1/2 times as much or more than the big guy would for my book.
Some of the books on self publishing are not forthcoming about this. They will try to make you believe that you can sell a paperback book for 5 to 8 times what it cost you to have it manufactured. That is patent nonsense. These formulas for determining what the market value of a book should be are not useful to us. They are based on large volume production. The formulas are for the big boys.
Using that 5 to 8 formula, I would have had to price Supreme Commander George at $13.00 minimum, up to as much as $20.00. In fact, I think I have it priced too high at $12.00. For the small publisher, it is necessary to figure out what the public will be willing to pay for what we are offering. Then, we must offer it for that no matter how much it costs us to make it.
The best way I have found to price a book is to go to a book store and see what other books like that are selling for. However, don't check the latest hot author. Those prices are likely to be inflated because of the name on them. Check the others. Check the good, but not hot titles.
Concerning price, we must realize that different kinds of people will pay different prices for books. As one example, I wrote the "Wesoomi Gardening Journal," and I will never do another gardening book. I have discovered that there is no way to market that type of book at a profit. Gardeners will never pay what the book is really worth based on cost. They like to describe themselves as frugal. Cynical people might have another word for that.
In that, let's remember that there are real gardening books, and there are coffee table books which are described as gardening books. These are two different genres. We should not confuse the two. The large books filled with full page color photos and little bits of text are for admiring the pictures. They can be priced high because they are purchase by dilettantes for show not gardening. Gardening books have lots of text and enough photos to make the point. Gardeners expect to used them and put dirt flavored finger prints on the pages.
So much for gardeners and gardening books. Technical people, on the other hand, may grumble about it, but, if they want the book, they will pay the cover price whatever it is. Hobbyists will also pay big bucks for what they want. Thus, technical and hobby books, if we can market them well, will always be more profitable than fiction and gardening books.
The important thing is, like it or not, your book will be competing on price. You may think you have written the greatest novel since Steinbeck wrote "The Grapes of Wrath." You may even be right. It does not matter. Mass market paperbacks sell for less than $10.00, sometimes a great deal less. You must compete with that if you want to sell your book.
Next time, I will get into a discussion of websites.
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