What Price Should I Charge for My Book? Launch Prep 2

One of the more common questions I get asked is how I determine what price my books should be. This question is usually asked right about at launch time. For me picking categories and positioning is more important but pricing does play in the release of your book and is important in sales.

___Pricing, I put pricing after you have looked at the other books in your category and reviewed the best selling books.

Amazon has done a lot to drive prices down and because we are mostly releasing our books through Kindle or CreateSpace I think we can have some general guidelines. If bookstores are in your mix then you need to look a that market also. For most of us who are self-publishing then we can do our research of Amazon.com

E-Book Kindle, $.99 to $2.99, they can be more but often in this range unless you are very popular. On page 2 of your Kindle book upload area you will set your book price with either a 35% or 70% royalty. Review for the one that fits your book best. For the launch most authors price their Kindle books at $.99 and then increase it after a couple of weeks to $1.99 and then $2.99. If your book is a picture book then you will be paying for the file downloads and most likely select the 35% rate. If your book is all text then the 70% might be better.

Print/CreateSpace paperback books, I look at the competition, size, market, what my market will bear, and color. Color books are more expensive. I tend to price my 8.5” x 11” books around $9.95 for black an white and $14.95 for color. My 6” x 9” books are often in the $6.95-$7.95 range. These are rough ranges. Number of pages, size, color all matter when figuring out your price. I often try to generate around $2.50-$3.50 for my royalty payment. Again there are no hard rules on this.

CreateSpace has a royalty alculator that you can use to figure out your books royalty payments based on different list prices, page counts and the sizes of your book.

Another question I get asked when people ask me about pricing is how much money will I make, or what are the royalties for my book and why does Amazon take so much. In reality Amazon doesn't take that much, it is just that they have to maintain all the back end for our books. The sales page, ordering, shipping or delivering and tracking and sending the money. While running one of the biggest e-commerce sites on the planet. For print I usually try for $2.50-$3.50 for the US market and $1.00 for overseas, for Kindle I am in kind of the $.50-$.70 range, maybe a little more.

Click here and then select the royalties tab https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/

The above text is from the International Best Selling Book by J. Bruce Jones, Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing is available at Amazon in Print and Kindle. J. Bruce Jones is the author and creator of over 40 books and training courses for authors who are self-publishing their books.

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