While completing the process of self-publishing my husband’s third book, Thrive in Overdrive, we’ve been doing a lot of research on pricing. What we’ve found is that pricing a book depends more on its category or genre rather than on its production costs. For example, business books and professional books tend to command a higher price than regular how-to books.

In the USA alone more than 200,000 titles are published each year. Making it into the top ten percent requires a book that reflects both quality and value. If you price your book too high, it may not sell. If you price it too low, the readers will see it as a low quality book. The trick is to price your book according to its content and the value to the reader.

Here are a few guidelines to help you in pricing your book.

Go to a large bookstore that sells the same genre or category as your book. Look at the expensive ones, the cheap ones, and those in between.  Look for the similarities and differences. Are the expensive books those with hard covers? Were they written by famous authors? Are they thick and have a lot of pictures? Are the cheaper ones the opposite of the expensive ones? Do they lack content? How about those in between?

Choose the books that appeal to you the most. List the features you want your book to have. Planning the specifications of your book early will help you estimate the printing costs. Printing can be the most expensive part of publishing your book.

Remember that your book must have a reasonable price for your target market. There is a maximum and minimum price that your readers will pay. Go too high and generate no sales. Go too low and the readers will assume it is useless. The readers will judge whether you’ve priced your book reasonably.

The printing cost will be your basis when determining how much to charge for your book. Some publishers price their books at eight times the production cost.

Tip for commanding a higher price

You’ve likely heard it said that packaging is everything. We all know this to be true; just go to your grocery store and look at how much is put into packaging. The same can be done with a book. Let’s say you’ve written a self-help book that you think can sell for $14.95 in paperback version. That’s okay, but what if you were to add a workbook and a couple of CDs with bonus information? Package it all up in a binder, and now you can sell it as a workshop package for $199.00 or more.

For an idea of how this is done, take a look at Anthony Robbins’s Personal Power program or Nightingale-Conant products. I promise you, these products that command in the hundreds don’t really offer that much more information than you’ll be offering in your book; they’re just packaged to command a higher price.

Think about it, and happy writing!

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