how to price paperbacks?

A question on Facebook this weekend:

“So out of relative curiosity, how do your paperback prices compare to ebook prices? I automatically assume anything in print will be at least slightly more expensive than the ebook edition.”

That is a good question!

Basically, print prices will always be more expensive than the ebook prices, but it depends on the physical size of the book.

(One exception: if you encounter an ebook that costs more than the print version, it means that the publisher is trying to artificially stifle the ebook sales to drive up the print sales.)

I use CreateSpace for all my paperbacks. Based on the number of pages, CreateSpace does a calculation for the minimal acceptable price (see the screenshot for this post). For GHOST IN THE RING, which was 332 pages, the minimal acceptable price was $12.08.

It’s generally best to set the price so it turns at least a $1 royalty on Expanded Distribution, which is non-Amazon bookstore sales. If it is below $1, small bookstores might refuse to order it for customers because there will be absolutely no profit.

So, paperback pricing comes down rather straightforwardly to page count. FROSTBORN: THE SHADOW PRISON was $19.99 because it was nearly 500 pages, but GHOST IN THE RING was only 332 pages so I could price it at $14.99.

Generally, paperbacks will always be more expensive than ebooks because there are hard costs that can’t be avoided – paper, ink, printing, binding, shipping, and so forth. CreateSpace probably has the most efficient book printing system in history, but the hard costs are still there.

That said, that is one of the nice things about self-publishing. You can get all 19 ebooks of THE GHOSTS/GHOST EXILE/GHOST NIGHT for about the cost of two (2!) traditionally published hardcover books. 🙂

-JM