Starting from where we last left off, here’s Part Three! Pricing books and distribution through retailers.
Setting your book’s price
If you’re self-publishing under your own trade name, you’re entirely responsible for setting your book’s suggested retail price. This involves more than just looking at what other authors are charging for their books and setting your price somewhere in the same neighborhood. First, you need to know how much it costs to produce a copy of the book. (IngramSpark provides a formula for determining this.) Once you’ve determined your production cost per book, consider the market price for books similar to yours, then factor in a wholesale discount of 55 – 60%. The difference between the discounted price and the cost of the book is your profit per sale. Therefore, make sure the discounted price ends up being higher than the production cost of one copy of your book.
Or to put in terms of an equation:
Wholesale price (55 – 60% of suggested retail price) – Cost of producing book = author’s profit
You can set the wholesale discount lower if you wish. However, if you have any interest in having bookstores carry your work, you should set it for at least 55%, according to one bookseller I inquired with. Bookstores don’t survive on love alone. Neither do authors, for that matter.
Having set your price with the wholesale discount in mind, any profits from sales made through wholesalers such as Ingram (which owns IngramSpark) and Baker & Taylor will be paid entirely to you.
If you use an author services company, they’ll provide a formula for determining the suggested retail price. Each author services company has a slightly different approach for doing this. However, you exercise the most control over the process by publishing under a trade name through a POD publisher like IngramSpark.
When it comes to creating a print cover, an author services company can create it for you for a fee or you can hire a freelancer who’ll create it. The latter is the cheaper option. The freelancer will have to know and follow the author service company’s specs.
When you self-publish under a trade name through IngramSpark, you create a cover template for the graphic artist. You need to know the page count of the PDF text file to be uploaded, the ISBN and suggested retail price before you do this, so these details can be incorporated into the cover.
The distribution part
As a POD published author and a self-published author, the biggest hurdle you face to getting your product placed in bookstores is the infeasibility of allowing your books to be returned for a complete refund if they aren’t sold. Not to mention the penalty you as the publisher get socked with for shipping costs. The alternative is for the bookseller to destroy the books. Both a financial waste and hardly an eco-conscious approach. But it’s been standard practice for a long, long time. Unfortunately, booksellers continue to insist upon doing this and traditional publishers continue to follow this practice, cranking out large print runs instead of finding ways to use modern technology to create new solutions.
At one time, this obstacle seemed almost insurmountable. Authors were doing things like selling books out of the trunks of their cars direct to consumers. Setting up signings at book fairs, festivals and other venues, going to individual bookstores and arranging events where and when they could. These methods, although they can bear fruit with enough time and effort, are a lot of work, time consuming, and not terribly cost-effective. Then, clever authors found ways to use the Internet to sell books of various formats online. A much less labor-intensive and time-saving approach. At one time, the problem was virtually eliminated (no pun intended) with the advent of ebooks.
Ebooks are the cheapest, easiest and most logical way for self-published authors to distribute and sell their work. However, since I first self-published my fiction in 2009, the ebook market has exploded.
More than ever, this means self-published writers need to “up their game” in terms of the quality of their work.
Writing and promoting a badly-written book is like walking around with a “Kick me” sign on your back. You’re also doing nothing to advance your writing career. In fact, you may end up derailing it, if you aren’t careful.
Much of this advice depends on what you wish to achieve as a writer. Always remember that your notion of success may not match that of other “influential” authors.
Remember also never to compare your start with someone else’s middle.
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Up next, ebooks and audiobooks!
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