Thursday, June 13, 2013

Pricing How to Decide?

 


I hate thinking about how to price my Ebooks, Print or one day audio books. At least in this I'm not alone. My partner and I research our prices and plan our rolling discounts.

PRINT BOOK

Well the pricing for this has to be competitive. However, it's mainly based on whether we plan to do a small print run with our current distributor (Bookmaster) or if we plan to use a Print-On-Demand printer like (Createspace or LighteningSource). We have to think about our production goals. Usually we do 2 initial print runs with our distributor. But have found that we end up doing more. However, at some point we like to move the books to POD once the series is finished and sometimes earlier if the series depending upon budget and sales.

Also note, print prices can't be changed easily by the publisher. The booksellers can change pricing based on the initial discount they get for the book and their sales. So, if a bookseller gets your printed book that is cost at $9.99 for $5.99 they can sell it for a profit for anywhere between $9.99 and $6.00.

Therefore, number of words + number of pages + comparable title prices + estimated number of print runs + estimated pricing for Print On Demand + bookseller discounts = PRINT PRICING MODEL

EBOOK

Here is where we have the most flexibility. If the initial price isn't working, we can change it. Unfortunately, we can't change it without a fee for those titles that are held by our distributor. Initially, we decided to have several of our ebook titles distributed with our distributor because they didn't charge much to format and distribute our ebooks. Also, using them allow us to gain pre-sale ebook orders.

For ebooks sold through our distributor - we charge $4.99 because we have to give our distributor a small percentage. For ebooks that we distribute ourselves we have a main price point of $3.99 for new titles and $2.99 for older titles.

Movement of prices for our ebooks is more active because in order to change prices we don't have to pay large amounts of money to change it.

AUDIO BOOK

This is a frontier not yet traveled but planned for my books. Yet, after our price analysis we are going to use the following to decide on how to price our audio books.

Production Cost + Comparable Title Cost + Distribution = (Tentative price between $7.99-9.99)


SO HOW HAVE YOU PRICED YOUR BOOKS? Or WHAT DEEMS a price you are more likely to pay for a PRINT book, an EBOOK or an AUDIO book? 

2 comments:

Ansha Kotyk said...

I choose the prices for my books by looking at books that are similar to mine. So my paperback is $6.99. And you're right there's a lot of flexibility with the ebook. I can hold my own sales throughout the year so my readers can get a discount. I haven't attempted an audio book yest but that's in the near future. :)

Catharina said...

I believe $3.99 is a good price for a full novel of 75,000 words to 100,00. If the title is older, $2.99 sounds fair to me . . . which reminds me, I need to adjust the prices. :-)

Thank you for vindicating what I believe fair pricing for e-books.