What should you price your book?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Camden Ross on May 27, 2012 at 3:14pm

Great Seth Godin quotation Kimanzi!

I personally am struggling with pricing at the moment with some of my products, and I will likely be revamping prices and placement strategies within the next month or so.

I will be interested in reading further developments and ideas within this discussion!

~Cam

Permalink Reply by Kent Julian on May 27, 2012 at 7:16pm

GREAT DISCUSSION Kimanzi!

One reason I set my book prices higher than most is so that I can sell bulk orders and still generate decent revenue.

For instance, Who Wants To Be Normal, Anyway?! sells for $20 retail. Some might think that's a bit high. However, just last week I sold 150 in a bulk order before a speaking engagement for a 50% discount ($9.95 per book). In other words, the total of that order was  $1,492.50. If I set the retail price of that book at $12.95, the total of that sale would only be $970.50. That one little decision put an extra $522 in my pocket on this one sale.

So, as a speaker who happens to sell a lot of books in pre-event bulk orders, I definitely process pricing with this in mind.

One other thing...you can always sell a product lower than the set price; you can never sell it higher. I usually sell the book mentioned above at live events for $10...sometimes $15. If it was set at $12.95 or something, then selling it at $10 wouldn't seem like that big of discount, and I definitely couldn't sell it at $15.

Permalink Reply by Kathy on May 29, 2012 at 10:42pm

Kent is so good at realizing how to get people to recognize value and price your products. His suggestions about retail versus bulk pricing makes very good sense. You may want people to realize the value of your book by setting the cost at a fair price but also offer a discount when bought in bulk particularly to groups who invite you to speak.

They get a product at a discounted rate but you get more buyers and still realize profit. It really is a win/win and nearly all businesses mark their products similarly to this.

I did have several people tell me to price an e-book 1/2 to slightly more than 1/2 of the bound book price and that does seem to be the going opinion about e-book pricing so when you set your bound book price think also of what you might be willing to let it go for as an e-book

Permalink Reply by Lynne Watts on June 3, 2012 at 7:12am

This is a discussion that I wish I'd read before I published my first book!  I have since learned so much from Kent (see his answer) and I now price at the top of the range that I think I could get for the book.  There are several reasons for this:

1. I tend to be too modest and undervalue my own work!
2. I got one of my books in a catalogue for school counselors and they want a distributor's discount of 45%.  I still make a little on the book but I would be doing better if I had priced it higher.
3. People tend to attribute higher value to higher (within reason) price

Great discussion!

Permalink Reply by Kent Julian on June 3, 2012 at 7:31pm

Lynne...what GREAT insights! Thanks for sharing!!

And remember, we all learn from getting out there and doing it. You're ahead of 95% of the people who dream about speaking and writing because you are DOING it.

Permalink Reply by Scott Pigman on June 3, 2012 at 8:06pm

This very question is what I joined this group to get some insight on.

Does anyone have any experience or opinions on pricing technical books addressing niche topics?

I've got in mind a "programmer's cookbook" for the software systems I work with. This or this are examples of more general versions of what I have in mind. They retail for about $50 for the dead-tree editions and about half that for the digital editions. Drilling down into my specific niche there are no books of which I am aware other than the training manual you can get from the vendor only if you attend a $2,600 five-day training course. My book would not compete with the training manual, rather it would supplement it.

The intended customer wouldn't be the person who would read the book, it'd be their employer who would buy it to get better value out of their very expensive software system.

Anyways, I'm interested to hear your thoughts.