How many pages should a paperback have?

How long is a piece of string?
(It is all down to customer expectations)

One of the most noticeable differences between the content inside a paperback book and an e-book is obviously the lenght. People who pay £6-£7 for a book in a store will expect it to be longer than 40 pages, even though that is the minimum number of pages for a perfect bound book.

Where as you would happily pay $47 for a 50 page e-book the same is highly unlikely to be true for paperbacks. If you are selling a technical or IT related book the book price expectations go up and the page numbers become less relevant. You can sell a 120-140 page book quite easily for £8-£9 on amazon, but at £10, you'll only receive £4 from Amazon per book sold as their advantage program demands a 60% discount.

With lightning source and lulu you set the discount but you still have to justify the price more than what you have to when you sell just an ebook. Which is another argument to use people like them rather than anyone else to get into the traditional book selling channels.

One of our books is a 124 square paged paperback and we sell it for £12.99 simply because we are the only one's providing relevant information from market insiders to this particular niche.

someone I know and respect posted on his twitter the other day that the easiest way to make $60,000 is to sell one item of something for that or more to someone desperately willing to pay that for what you have.

So the page count is really a calculation based on what your customers would expect and what sort of profit you would like to command on sales through the regular book channels.

I should say that lightningsource have told us that if you publish with them you can set the discount rates you are willing to offer to the distribution channels, and as such would not be at the mercy of the Amazon Advantage terms.

How true this is I don't know and I can only speculate on how this would impact your sales volumes.

Price

I suppose you have gathered by now that page numbers and minimum price is closely related. A 140 page book will cost £3.66 to print after the 28th of October. If you want to make say £3 profit on every book sold then that gives you a minimum wholesale price of £7.26 and then you'd need to double that to get the suggested retail price. £7.26 includes the 20 percent profit commission that lulu so graciously charges and in this example, it accounts for 60p.