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. 

When you first become a published author there is much to learn about the ins and outs of this sometimes difficult to understand industry.  There are some aspects that seem just plain backwards, particularly for those entering the industry from a business background.  One of the hardest elements to come to grips with is the concept that a sale is not really a sale until it goes through two or three transactions.  This makes calculating expected revenue difficult, to say the least.  Add to that the returns factor (discussed here) and you are left with some confusing data to sort through.

If you’re working with a distributor, your distributor is going to sell your book to wholesalers and to retailers.  Wholesalers play a very big role in all of this and it’s not uncommon for the majority of your books to first be sold to the myriad of wholesalers out there, big and small.  (Learn about the difference between a wholesaler and a distributor here).Your distributor will report this is a sale to you and you will be paid for that sale (minus returns and reserves against future returns) but in the more explicit sense of the word, it’s not quite a sale yet. At this point, your book has been stocked in a wholesaler’s warehouse with the hopes that their customers (retailers and libraries) will purchase it from them. 

Now the retailers and library customers of the wholesaler begin placing their orders for your book through the wholesalers.  The wholesaler considers each order of your book a sale and will be paid for the books by their retail or library customer for those purchases.  If the purchaser is a library, the cycle is done and you can safely call that sale an actual sale since the book is unlikely to be returned.  If the purchaser is a retailer, however, it’s not quite a sale yet.  Your book is one step closer to really being sold, but at this point, your book has now been given shelf space in a retailer’s warehouse and stores with the hopes that their customers, actual book-purchasing and reading consumers, will purchase it from them.

When an actual consumer picks up your book from a shelf and buys it, it is finally sold.  Your distributor will differentiate between the sales to the wholesalers and retailers and the actual consumer sales as “sold in” versus “sold through”.  The sold-through number is what you are both going to want to monitor, especially as it relates to the sold-in number.  A large discrepancy can spell trouble around the bend in regard to returns.  Consumer sell through is reported weekly by Nielsen BookScan and can be obtained through your distributor’s account or through your Amazon Author Central Account.

Until a consumer actually buys your book, it is subject to being returned by the retailer or the wholesaler, so keep in mind that the act of being placed on shelves is certainly not a guarantee of sales.   You have two or three more “sales” to make before your book is actually sold through.  Focus on creating demand so those books stay sold.

Today's post is by Lynne Klippel, a best-selling author, publisher, and book shepherd. Since 2004, she's been working with coaches, speakers, and entrepreneurs who want to write a nonfiction book to showcase their expertise and build their business.  Her business, Business Building Books, focuses on the marriage of Internet marketing and publishing and has helped clients from six of the seven continents. An avid reader, Lynne used to get in loads of trouble as a kid for reading books instead of doing her chores.  Lynne lives in Missouri with her husband, three sons, a bunch of pets and tons of books.

In the business world, a service line is a grouping of all the products and services related to one particular division of that business.  For example, a hospital may have a service line devoted to pediatrics and another service line for oncology.  Apple has a service line for telephones and another one for personal computers.

It is helpful to think of your book as a service line in your business.  Let’s say you are a corporate coach who is writing a book on finding a job after age fifty.  While you may have coaching clients who are younger than fifty, your book will generate a group of related products and services especially for the older job seeker. 

Creating a service line gives you the freedom to serve many people in your business and the ability to focus in on one particular group of people with common needs.  Freedom and focus are an unbeatable combination for any entrepreneur but especially for those who are highly creative and enjoy working with many different types of people.

So how do you start to develop your service line?

The first step is to identify your perfect reader.  Then, do some brainstorming.  Consider these questions:

• How many of these types of people are you currently serving in your business?
• What do they buy from you now? 
• What do you like about serving this group?
• Can you list the five biggest challenges this group faces?
• What products or services do you have that can be adapted to service this group in a perfect way?

Next, dream a bit.  Grab some paper and imagine yourself five years from now.  Your book has been published and it is selling successfully.  You have a fully developed service line of seminars, audio programs, group coaching, workshops, and information products that follow your book. 

• What does that look like?
• How do readers engage with you in your service line before, during and after reading your book?
• What products or services bring you the most joy?
• How does your service line produce income to support you?
• Is this your only service line or do you have additional lines?

Capture your dream and future vision on paper.  This is the beginning of your book’s service line. Give yourself permission to dream big and to start small, knowing that your service line will develop over time.  It does not have to be built in a day but will evolve as you interact with your perfect readers and find new ways to serve them.

When you focus on building one service line at a time, while continuing to enjoy the freedom to serve individual clients outside of that service line, you’ll be less stressed and overwhelmed. You make more progress, and stop running around trying to be all things to all people.

Your book becomes the beginning of your service line.  Hmmm, I can see you with multiple books and multiple service lines in the future.  Can you see it too?

If you are ready to become a successful author, capitalize on your strengths and build from there.  To identify your author strengths complete the free Author Assessment at www.BusinessBuildingBooks.com.

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.