Today’s show discusses pricing for ebooks and the POD (print on demand) paperbacks most of us will be dealing with when we self-publish.
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Show notes:
Paperback pricing
- Upfront costs are low with POD, so no need to pay for an entire print run or anything crazy.
- My POD publisher is CreateSpace, and I’ve been quite pleased with them (quality of books, customer service, etc.), but some indies also like Lightning Source.
- Typical range is $11.99 to $16 (production costs don’t allow you to set a lower price) and makes it hard to compete with mass market paperbacks priced at $8, so don’t expect a lot of paperback sales, but you can certainly make some.
- Author copies tend to be in the $6 range at Createspace (that’s what mine are, and I have 320 page 6×9″ books — about 105,000 words), so hand-selling is a possibility if you’re into that!
Ebook pricing
- Best royalty rates (~ 70%) at $2.99 to $9.99
- Reasons why people give away books for free or 99 cents (I have the first book in my series priced at 99 cents, so people can try it inexpensively, and then if they like what they read, they can go on and purchase the following books for $3.99)
- An example of an indie author who did well (to the tune of $25,000 in one month) with ebooks priced between $4.95 and $6.95: Michael J. Sullivan (his wife and the marketer in the family, Robin Sullivan, runs the Write2Publish blog — well worth checking out)
- Thinking about this as a career and not getting too hung up on pricing and sales, especially for your first book.
This was really informative! It’s great to hear advice from someone whose results I can realistically (with a lot of hard work) attain.
I enjoyed Flash Gold and will continue on to others.
Thanks for checking out Flash Gold, ES!
Yes, we’d all like to be Amanda Hocking and John Locke, but it’s nice to know you can make decent money as a self-published writer these days even if you’re not a huge hit.
Wow, minimum wage would be a fortune. lol
I’m still debating pricing strategy for the novels … the free story I was planning to put out may end up being novel length, which then may change my strategy. Will see how it goes … For now, will just keep writing.
Hehe, I haven’t checked to see what minimum wage is these days, but I think I’m there.
It definitely helps to get more books out there.
Yeah, you might want to charge a little more than free for such a substantial story!