Pricing up a paperback book is a little bit more complicated than when you are pricing up an ebook. You’ve got a higher production cost now every time you sell a copy ( to state the blatantly obvious!) and there is also the psychology involved in the cost of paperback books.
You can quite easily find out what the minimum price of the book has to be to cover your costs by starting at the printing cost, add any other sales costs and then multiply by two. At this price you will not make any money at all through the regular book channels, but all your costs are covered.
This is because the book distributors in the book trade are in effect acting as your affiliates, and will demand a 30 to 50 percent commission. In book industry terms, this is the “discount”. The cost to the distributor or book store is called the “wholesale price”. If you want to make a profit on each copy you’ve sold you need to add a profit margin on top of all your costs and then that is your “wholesale price”.
A distributor will usually demand a slightly bigger discount than a book store, but in the UK, hardly any book chains will take in a book directly from the publisher anymore. Certainly not from an unknown publisher with only one book on their catalogue.
A $7 ebook can’t be sold for a profit at that price as a print on demand paperback will cost at least half that just to produce. You’d also have to remember that the prices on some of the print on demand sites and the custom product sites are significantly higher than what you pay per book to a regular digital printer.
For a $7 product you would then have $3.50 left to cover the cost of the postage, but then you will have to rely on your back end products to deliver your profit. If you are after building awareness or a customer database then that’s fine, but you need to charge more if you want to make a profit on each sale.
Let’s look at the pricing examples on the various websites.
# printondemand-worldwide charges £97.50 for 50 copies of a 100 page paperback. This is just under £2 per book (around US$3.50)
# lulu.com has a number of printing sizes available, but if we go for the smallest, which is traditional paperback, black & white printing, they would charge £185 for 50 copies of a 100 page book which is £3.70 (around US$5.50) (after the 28th of October the price changes to £2.98)
# lightningsource prices are not freely available, but according to the UK publishers manual (March 2008 version) a paperback book of 100 pages would cost £1.70 per copy but you would also have to pay the setup charges. For a digital paperback done to the right format this would come to £42. For 50 copies of the 100 page paperback this would total £127
For an additional £7 a year you also get entered into their print on demand catalogue and they have additional advertising options available as well.
# Blurb has a very clear pricing strategy and for a single 100 page book you would have to pay £9.95 to get it printed. That is in full colour and to be honest you are paying for the convenience of getting photos included if you wanted to. The quality of the print is pretty amazing and this is really an option for show pieces.
#Cafepress will also let you print books and according to their website the standard cost for a 100 page perfect bound paperback (the standard paperback binding) is $10 (around £5.65)
This gives you the cost of the books. If you want to distribute your book through the book industry channels you add your minimum profit that you want. Let’s say I go with lightningsource and I have no postage costs. Including the setup costs each copy costs me £2.54. If I set the price to £5.99 then I will give away up to £2.99 as a discount, leaving me with 45p profit per copy sold. That’s fine if the book is your loss leader, but it’s not something that will put dinner on the table.
Now you know why so many people talk up the benefits of selling your books directly. The book chains will have to sell 8 times as many books as you can do directly in this example for you to make the same amount of money from them as from your own efforts.
Maybe I am making this a little more complicated than it should be, because if you are selling a $37 ebook with bonuses, surely you can sell the paperback for the same? Well that is your decision. I would include the bonus books in my paperback book if the paperback book turned into only 40 pages. Although you can quite easily pad out a 40 page ebook to a 60 page paperback just by clever layout.
On a personal note, I always felt that a very easy upsell on any ebook would be to offer the paperback version as part of a bronze “upgrade” offer for the cost of the “postage”, which in this country you could quite easily justify at a minimum of £3.99
