Factors to Consider When Pricing Your Book
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One important factor in self-publishing your book is price. The price point you choose involves a number of factors. You will want to consider the formats your book will be released in, the genre, and if you are using Amazon, their pricing guidelines.
Format:
Paperback, hardcover, audio, and ebooks all have different prices that consumers are willing to pay. Usually people are willing to pay more for a hardcover than for a paperback version of a book. Of course, you don't have to offer every format, and plenty of self-published authors only release ebooks. Ebooks have no printing cost and can be easily updated, but consumers won't pay as much as they would for a paperback.
Genre:
Genre will be a big factor in your price. Consumers will expect to pay more for a textbook than they would for a young adult book. Comp titles come in handy here. A comp title is a book that is similar to yours, and preferably has been published in the last 2 years. You can use comp titles to estimate sales, but make sure you choose a realistic one--it can be tempting to pick a book with a lot of sales, but those are often published by larger houses and if you are self-publishing you won't have all of the same resources available. So look at self-published books in your genre as close as possible to yours in topic and theme. However, Amazon doesn't share their sales data, so if you are going to sell your book there (and most will) you won't be able to use them for any sales projections. I've found a calculator here that can estimate book sales based on their overall best seller ranking.
Amazon:
Amazon is the main place most self-published authors sell their books, and they have very specific pricing guidelines. They also offer different plans for different formats. For example, ebooks have the option of a 35% or 70% royalty rate. The size of your ebook factors into it, but to get the 70% royalty rate your ebook has to be priced between $2.99 and $9.99 (for the US at least). You can find more info about Amazon's pricing guidelines here. If you want to sell on Amazon, it's very helpful to read through all of their info on the help site. You can also find comp titles to see how they are priced.
It can be overwhelming to navigate the publishing process by yourself, but there are a lot of resources out there to help you! If you're not sure where to start, pick a specific topic and start googling.