Pricing Your Self-Published Book
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I published my book, Frankenstein’s Science Project, through the Lulu platform. I have used it in the past for a running manual, Plan on Running Your Best, and a running memoir, Take 10 and Reach the Boston Marathon. Lulu has many advantages such as reasonable prices for publishing your book, wide international distribution, you control the publishing and it is pretty easy to use.
When I was ready to publish, I had to decide on the price of my book. There were quite a few elements I needed to consider. The first element was the cost of printing and shipping. My book is a softcover children’s chapter book of 136 pages with one black and white illustration for each of the 19 chapters. The dimensions are A5 (14.8x21.0 cm or 5.83x8.26 in).
The printing cost from Lulu is $5.78 per book. Shipping varies by the number of copies; if you only ship one book it would cost about $5. Lulu often offers rebates of up to 20% and they sometimes offer free shipping. Although making money is not one of my goals for selling my book, I also do not want to lose money. I would thus have to sell the book for at least $5.78 to break even.
When publishing through Lulu, you have a choice to select international distribution. They have an example to give you an idea of how much money you can make through their distribution channel depending on the kind of book you publish. I also thought about what would happen if I sold on consignment at bookstores. Bookstores, I was told, take 40%.
Another element I considered in pricing my book was how my book compared to other similar books. My competition for people’s money is softcover children’s chapter books. In order to be competitive and make sure people find my book to be of an acceptable value, I needed to be in the same price range as others. Being a new author in the children’s book market, I knew I could not command a higher price.
To gauge the competition, I went to Chapters and browsed the 9-12 year-old section. Although I did not have a physical copy of my book in hand and I did not really know what it looked like, I searched for books I thought would be similar. These included the Big Nate series, the Diary of a Whimpy Kid series, and the Rainbow Fairies series. I found the prices ranged from $5.99 to $14.99.
Considering the cost of printing, the competition and plugging in some numbers in a profit calculator, I came up with a Canadian price of $12.50 for my book. This would be about $10 US. I would then make about $0.75 per book when sold online internationally. On the Lulu platform, my book was offered with a 20% rebate making it $10 CA, a nice round number. This $10 is also the price I would offer the book when selling directly to people. This would provide a profit of $4.22 per book, if I can get free shipping.
If you check out the price online, Amazon.ca has a price of $12.46 CA, Amazon.com has a price of $9.37 US, and Barnes and Noble has a price of $9.37 US. Because of the distribution arrangements, unfortunately, you cannot purchase a print copy of my book from Chapters.
In pricing your book, you will need to consider the items above, as well as the genre of your book (e.g. fiction vs. non-fiction), the type of book (hardcover, softcover, ebook), as well as the dimensions and number of pages. You also need to determine what the customer is willing to pay and how much you want to make. Below are a few websites on what to consider when determining the price of your book.
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