A big question for many authors is how to determine the retail price of their book. In some businesses, conventional wisdom says to set the price of a product by at least doubling your cost. Since that’s the case, if it cost you $10 to print your 150-page book, you should charge $20, right? Wrong! The book industry is not conventional, and the conventional wisdom thus does not apply.

There are many different factors that impact the price of your book: genre, page count, binding (hardcover/paperback), and competition all dictate the best price for the retail market.

            There are three things you need to do to find your book’s retail price:

1. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What would you pay for a title by an unknown author in the same category as your book?

2. Visit your local bookstore or go online to Amazon or BN.com and look up recent books in your genre. For books with the same binding as yours and with page counts and trim sizes close to yours, what is the general price point?

3. Determine your production costs and if the retail price determined by the above factors does not allow you to at least break even on a per-unit-sold basis, you may need to go up one dollar—but no more than two dollars. Believe it or not, due to increasingly tight budgets at the chains, a two-dollar price increase can easily cause a corporate chain buyer to pass on your book. However, if you’re anticipating mostly online sales (or are in a strong niche market), you can probably get away with it. (Be sure to check out this post on how to compete with Amazon)

One of the biggest mistakes some authors make is pricing their product out of the market. In a hyper-competitive market, you have to give yourself every advantage when it comes to selling books, and that includes having a price point that appeals to bookstores and readers. To make up for a margin that may be slimmer than you hoped for, push demand and sales as much as you can and build your audience.

Better yet, focus on how to use your book to drive other revenue-generating programs like coaching, speaking, and memberships. With tight margins, you may not make much money on the first title, but it may very well come back to you on additional print runs or new titles down the line. 

There once was a time, not so long ago, when book buyers had bigger budgets and publishers and distributors could reasonably count on being given a not-so-insignificant amount of shelf space in what was a very large and spread out network of competing bookstore chains.  If a particular book was not well-received by the buyer at one chain, you had options for moving big numbers in a small amount of time through the decision of another buyer with another big retailer.  By the same token, if the buyer at one chain absolutely loved the book, that information could be leveraged in a major way with the buyer at another chain.  Strategies like this could often lead to even bigger buys and sometimes a spot in the highly coveted co-op space in the store. 

We recognize the important role that indie stores, nontraditional outlets, and online retailers like Amazon are continuing to play in our industry but we are not going to address those accounts here. This is about giant bookstore chains in the brick and mortar world.  And in that part of our book-selling world, things have changed.  Smaller is the order of the day and that begs the question, is bigger really better?

Back in the day of bigger buys and big-time bookstore distribution, prepublication efforts were rightfully targeted heavily at the retail buyers.  After all, those individual buyers held a ton of power in regard to the potential for sales success of any book.  Now that the number of chains has dwindled, that power is even further concentrated and potent.  Or is it?   

If you think your only shot for success is to get massive amounts of product placed on bookstore shelves, then a retail buyer’s power is more potent than anything else you’ll be up against.  If, however, you consider the new retail reality and learn where you should be focusing your efforts—on you—it won’t really matter what that buyer does or doesn’t do with your book.

The reality of this retail landscape is that you cannot put the emphasis on bookstores because, frankly, their numbers are dwindling, their budgets are shrinking, and their buys are getting smaller and smaller.  Besides, simply the act of placing books on their shelves alone is not the answer.  Never was.  (More on that here.)

It is always easy to get excited about a really big buy from a really big retailer, and there are still many reasons to get excited about it.  It shows that your book impacted the buyer so strongly that they are willing to spend lots of budget on it and they ultimately believe in their qualified opinion that your book has what it takes to sell.  So, what’s the down side?

The flip side of the big-time buy in scenario can be a big-time return scenario down the line.  Don’t forget that this part of our industry is essentially consignment so any book that doesn’t sell fast enough is subject to being returned for a full refund, and sometimes comes back damaged to boot.  When you put a ton of inventory out there, there is a high risk of returns and if you are solely focusing your efforts on impressing the retail buyer instead of your reader, you may be setting yourself up for this outcome.

 These days, we have fewer buyers to impress and they have less money to spend.  The unavoidable outcome, therefore, is smaller buys.  Less exciting at first glance, but could this really be in our collective best interest?

Smaller buys mean lower risk for everyone involved.  Let the bookstores start small, sell what they buy, and order more.  It’s a long-term strategy that will help you immensely in building something much bigger than one book that gets its 30-90 day run on a bookstore shelf. 

What is this bigger thing an author should be pursuing, then, if not sales of his or her book?  We’ve always known that creating demand among your audience was paramount to all other pursuits in order to sell books, but the socialization of the web and the ease with which your competitors can get content out there for sale right next to yours has changed the game.  It’s no longer just about your book.  It’s about you. 

You have to focus your efforts on your audience, your reach, your visibility, your brand, your expertise, and your content in all its various forms.  You have to focus on you and sales of the book and your other services will follow.  You have to build a platform and make that, not a spine out position on a shelf, your primary target.

So, what is an author platform and why do you need one?  Learn about that in our three-part series on platform development. 

We all know how hard it is to assign a value to something that took years of work and your heart and soul to create.  To the author, the content is often priceless.   If you want to sell books, though, the retail price you set should be carefully considered and chosen with caution.

Traditional publishers will typically arrive at their price point by taking into consideration the costs associated with producing, distributing, and marketing the book.  It’s tempting to take the same approach when self-publishing but self-published authors don’t normally have the same economies of scale that make this method work. 

For instance, a traditional house will be looking at print costs based on a print run in the hundreds of thousands or at least in the tens of thousands, while most self-published authors are looking at much smaller initial print runs.  This affects the cost per book and hence would drive your suggested list price way up and out of the market norm. 

Instead of following the example of a traditional house, what method should a self-published author use in selecting a price point?  Below are some factors that any author should consider when making this important decision.

• Comparable Title Research:  The first and arguably most important strategy to employ in setting your price point is comp title research.  Find books that are like yours in terms of subject matter, audience, page count, and format.  Make sure you have books that are recently released.   You want to price your book in line with these titles that consumers will be comparing your book with when shopping.

• Retailer Price Sensitivity:  Retail buyers are pitched hundreds and hundreds of books week after week.  In today’s tough economic climate, you can bet they are price sensitive!  They are not willing to pay even a dollar more for your book when they can get what they think is the same thing for less from another publisher.  It is not unusual for a retailer to come back to a publisher and ask for a lower price in order to buy the book.  You may as well set yourself up for success from the beginning.

• Niche Content:  Do you have a book that fits a very specific need to a very targeted audience?  If this is the case with your book, you may not be overly concerned with retail shelf placement and instead be focused on directly reaching your audience.  There is a case to be made for a higher than typically recommend price point with books that truly match this description.  But be careful!  All content should be differentiated, but few books fall into this very niche category.  Think “Underwater Basket Weaving for Single Dads that Live in Virginia” kind of niche.

• Once it sells, your price is set for good:  As soon as your book is selling, it’s unadvisable to attempt changing the retail price for many reasons (unless you assign a new ISBN with the new price).  You’ve already sold copies into the trade at a particular price.  If you change now, any returns you get will come in at the different price and if your new price is higher, you’re losing on each return.  If it’s lower, get ready for a squabble with the retailer or wholesaler that is returning the books.  (Don’t think you’ll see returns? Sorry, Charlie.) Secondly, with notoriously slow payment schedules on book sales, you won’t be getting paid for book sales for quite a while.  Having multiple price points thrown into the mix can cause a real accounting nightmare.  Finally, it is really hard to get a change like this to stick within all the systems once your book is set up for sale.  You will be dealing with an ongoing maintenance issue that will show up again and again.   The exception to this is the release of a new edition with a new ISBN.  That new edition can have a different price without any of the messy consequences discussed above.

Taking these tips in mind will help set you up for price point selection success.  It is an important decision that can have lasting impact on the performance of your book so choose carefully and set yourself up to compete successfully!

Writers dream of plastering the words “Bestselling Author” next to their name on business cards, resumes, books, blog posts, photos, and virtually every other place their moniker appears. And they can’t be blamed—that phrase counts for a lot, especially for authors hoping to attract customers with a “national bestseller” banner on their cover. But what exactly does it mean to be a bestseller? And how much does it really matter?

Books are traditionally considered bestsellers when they meet one of three unofficial requirements: (1) placement on the New York Times bestseller list; (2) placement on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list; or (3) placement on the USA Today bestseller list. And, if we’re being frank, the biggest prestige comes in making the illustrious New York Times list.

So what does it take to get on one of these things? The number of sold books required to achieve bestseller status is virtually indefinable. The numbers necessary are relative to which other books are in the market the same week as yours. Books on the very same bestseller list can have drastically different sales counts. In his blog post “Bestseller: How Many Copies Do You Have to Sell to Become a Bestseller?” Jeffrey Krames sites a week in August 2010 in which Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love topped the lists, selling 140,000 copies. The fifth bestselling book that same week sold less than 11,000 copies—a 129,000 difference from the first-place seller.

Genre lists are an entirely different ballgame. The New York Times separates books into categories, and the number of books sold required to hit each of those genre categories is immensely different. For that same week in 2010 Krames discussed, Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 topped the business category, selling just over 9,000 copies. Number two on the list, The Big Short by Michael Lewis, measured in at 4,200.

It’s also important to note that bestseller lists only reflect velocity of sales—not overall success of a book. A title could be a “tortoise seller,” moving eight hundred books per week for an entire year but never making any of the lists. Not all sales are reported to the lists, either. Each list has its own way of determining quantity, usually through a catalog of sales reported to them by selected bookstores, and none of the lists are comprehensive. In fact, sales through specialty stores like Walmart, Target, and Christian bookstores are usually not collected, and for some authors, those can be the locations of the majority of their sales.

In some ways, bestseller status is becoming less relevant in this age of ebooks, apps, and digital downloads. Can a free ebook downloaded 100,000 times in a week be considered a bestseller? Not according to the New York Times, but it certainly must have been one of the most-read books of the week. In the long run, that will matter a lot more.

The Times only recently started including ebook sales on their list, and ebook sales for advice books, how-to books, children’s books, and graphic books are not captured at all. Although ebooks only account for about five percent of overall book sales right now, that number is sure to rise.

The Times list is also backlogged by several weeks. Sales for the week ending August 6 won’t appear in the print edition of the Times until August 21. In our digital world, trends can rise and fall with almost terrifying rapidity (silly bands, anyone?); sometimes what was selling three weeks ago has no bearing on today.

Amazon, on the other hand, does update its list hourly, and the site recently separated free ebook lists from paid. This likely reflects actual popularity a little more closely than the Times list, but being an “Amazon bestseller” doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it. But will it eventually? Or are bestseller lists on their way to obsolescence?

Being on the New York Times bestseller list is still a great way to build sales and does hold a lot of cachet—we can’t deny that. But in the end, authors should concentrate on the longevity of their book and its cross-revenue potential.

Our advice? Don’t measure your success solely in book sales. Keep in mind the long-term strategy for your book—increased exposure for yourself and your company. If you only sell three thousand books but those books translated into more clients and, ultimately, more profits for you, then “Bestseller shmestseller!” we say. Slow and steady can and will win the race.