Just a quick blogpost here about the pricing of novels (for fellow authors). I have to admit, I found this quite a difficult decision, as I find profit margins can actually be really small on self-published books through Amazon. I’m not doing this for the money, I genuinely love writing and being read, so a low pricepoint for e-books was a no brainer for me, but the difficulty came with hard copies, which a lot of people, me included, prefer as a rule.
The headline of 70% maximum ‘royalty’ for paperbacks sounds great at first, but when you get to the detail, and take away printing costs, having a reasonably priced book gives me about 79p a copy at best, which means I’d have to sell hundreds to come anywhere near covering my costs. The platform naturally wants higher pricepoints, and I’ve found the levels I’ve set mean I’m not eligible for expanded distribution (through other bookshops) on most of my novels, and I’ve had to put a higher price on tEXt me than the others because of it’s greater pagecount. It still isn’t high enough to allow expanded distribution, which naturally limits availability in some markets.
I mention this for other writers for two reasons. First, I personally don’t want my paperbacks to cost over a tenner, as I think it puts people off taking a risk on a new author. Second, it’s a prompt to think about your eventual pricing early. The pagecount is key to your costs, and there are minimum levels needed for the expanded distribution which only gives you 40% on sales, so think about the trim size when planning. I like compact paperbacks myself, and produced my first ones accordingly, but that puts pagecount up, and hence costs, meaning the price I charge has to be higher. For my next book, the size will be ever so slightly larger (not much), but it could make all the difference in being appealing and getting a wider market share when it comes to setting the price, even if it means costs are only fractionally lower.
Stay safe,
Kit