The 5-Step Formula to Confidently Price Your Self-Published Book

Some authors lose sales every single day because of one simple mistake. They don't know how to price their book properly. They give books away for free when there's no benefit, and they charge less than they could or more than they should. So if you're wondering about your book pricing, well, this video is for you. Hi, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and your host here at Book Launchers tv. Book Launchers is your first choice for all things related to writing, publishing, and promoting a nonfiction book. If your book is not priced right, you're not just leaving money on the table. You might actually be pushing your readers away entirely. And those are two things no author can afford to do. Well, maybe James Clear, because man, he has a lot of readers and a lot of reviewers. Well. But don't worry. Today I'm going to give you a simple six step process so you can confidently price your book, sell more copies, and make the money you deserve while still attracting the readers that you want to connect with the most. All right, getting right into this. STEP 1. Start with your business goal. Your first inclination might be to immediately go and look at what other books are charging. No, not yet. Don't do that yet. Before you even look at Amazon or wander the aisles of your local bookstore, you need to decide what role this book plays in your business and what your goals are. Probably in order of priority, because most authors I meet have more than one goal with their book when you start digging into it, and that is okay. But you do need to know the priority. Do you want maximum reach? Do you need to generate profit on every copy? Is your book meant to drive leads and speaking gigs? Or are you looking to get your book into the hands of a reader, but that reader maybe isn't going to be the buyer of your book? Different people you might be going, yes, yes, yes, yes. Cool. But which one is number one? Because a reach priority is different than a profit priority in what you're going to do pricing wise, your goal should drive your pricing. What do I mean by that? Well, let me break down a couple of my pricing strategies. First, my number one goal isn't selling books. Of course. I enjoy seeing sales numbers higher than zero each week in my dashboards. But what do I want more than making a couple bucks per book sale? Well, I want to attract you into the community we have around Book Launchers. Our community is, of course, this channel. And we have a full free space over on the Skool platform. You can join@book launchers.com Skool S K O O L if I give you one of my books, you read it, love it, you may be more inclined to join our community and tell other people. And that is my goal. Why? Well, once somebody's in our community and loving it, they help us grow like Joel Benge, Kevin Hall, Nick Hutchinson, Imani Roberts, Becca Powers, and so many other folks who've become part of our community and told other people. Because of other people telling their friends and family about us, we can grow our business, help more people, and create more cool ways to help like our Author Launch Kit software. So that is my number one goal. And because that is my goal, you will almost never hear me say go buy my books. You will hear me say, hey, do you want a copy of something? Self, promote and succeed for free. Go ahead and head over to selfpromoteandsucceed.com audio and you can download it for free. Of course. It's also available wherever books are sold, so you can buy it there too. I see what you did there. I'd rather have you get it for free, listen and enjoy it and become part of my community, then send you over to Amazon for Amazon to make more money on my books than I do. Well, at least that's what they do with Audible. They make way more money than I do per book sold on Audible. With print books, that's not quite the case for the most part, but not the point. My pricing strategy is here human who I might be able to help with my content, go ahead and get it for free, join my community and tell other people. Beyond that, my pricing strategy is to keep my books priced at a point where they're competitive, where I can run ads without losing money on every book books sold and without making the books look cheap because I want them to have value when I give them to you for free. And if I do any partnerships with them, that aids in the discoverability and the consumption, but also the opportunities that it opens for me. So now you know your number one goal. Let's head out to figure out the print costs. Step 2 the platforms you're probably using to distribute your book have made this pretty easy to do, but you will need to know a few details. First, let's just cover Amazon first. When it comes to your ebooks, Amazon pays either 35% or 70%. 70% sounds great, but you'll lose a chunk for delivery fees per megabyte and you have to price at least 20% less than your print edition to qualify for paperbacks and hardcovers. Amazon takes their Cut and you pay print costs. As of 2025, the rate is 60% only if your list price is above certain thresholds, like, like $9.99 for a US paperback. Drop it below that and suddenly your royalty will drop to 50%. So it's important to know those numbers going in. We'll cover some examples and calculators in a minute. For expanded distribution, your royalty is just 40% minus print costs. But never, ever use Amazon for expanded distribution. If you want distribution Beyond Amazon, use IngramSpark. Okay? Okay. And for audiobooks, well, Audible basically sets the price for you. They'll discount however they want and you get your cut of whatever they decide to charge. Yeah, now you start to see why I give my audiobooks away for free. But if you want to buy them on Audible, you can. Now, the platforms have cool little tools to help you calculate all of these things. And I'm going to show you the one I use on Ingram. For IngramSpark, you'll need to know your book's trim size, what paper type you want to use, your page count. But when you know that or you can estimate it, this allows you to create some good estimate numbers for yourself. For example, a 240 page book, 6 by 9 on white paper is going to cost about $4.74 to print. Now, your costs will be higher than that per copy because of shipping. You can see here that shipping one copy brings my cost to $8.63 per copy. But now you have a sense of what print costs will be. KDP has a very similar tool, and just as an FYI, it will be less to print a typical black and white book through them. I do find their quality is slightly less than Ingram, but not noticeable to the average eye most days. All right, so now you know your print costs. Step three, Benchmark the market. Okay, now it's time to see what other books are getting priced at. This is where your category, knowing your category and having that category research is useful. So now that you know your category, go and look at the top 15 to 20 books that are sitting on the same virtual or physical shelf as yours will be. And don't just look at any book. Look at books of similar length, similar format, and definitely same audience. I would take them down and put them in a spreadsheet for each format. So I would go ebook, audiobook, print, book, and then page count. You know, make sure you note the page count and, and compare apples to apples as much as possible. This is where you can also lean on ChatGPT. Or other AI tools to do some research for you. You do need to know some examples of books like yours, the length and the audience you're targeting and bring it as much information as possible like I did here. And this is even lighter than what I would do if I was actually using ChatGPT to determine my price range. But this response is really strong and it highlights differences as well as gives me a really great range chart along with some cautions with choosing these ranges. So if you price too high, you'll get pushback as it says. And Chatty's right, especially from people who are newer in the writing and self publishing space. And ChatGPT rightfully warns that print costs can eat your margin up. Double check your page count your paper quality and any color graphics because that will all increase your costs. My recommendation is to test elasticity. So whatever you determine if you you may want to try incrementally price increasing or if you start high, maybe lower to see how demand reacts. So if you're doing it in a spreadsheet, of course, write down the prices, find the median, and then note the range. This gives you the competitive window. If you price your book way above that, you'll scare off readers. And if you price it way below, well, you look cheap and neither is going to be advantageous to you. Ultimately, you have to know whether you're going to make a profit after the distributor fees too, regardless of the range. Which means step four choose your price point. You're going to want to anchor your price range inside of that competitive range. But first, when it comes to print in particular, you'll want to make sure you know your costs. So let's go back to that Ingram calculator and inside of that Ingram dashboard and start calculating what you're going to make so you can play with your price until you're happy with the profit after fees and and print costs for your print book. I'm going to use Ingram. But again, KDP has one of these handy dandy calculators too. I'm using Ingrams because their cost is higher and they have this wholesale discount which is something you have to figure out what you're going to charge. So whatever price I'm choosing for Ingram, my profits will be higher with kdp. So I'm going to start with Ingram and then take that same price over to kdp. So go ahead and enter in the info and then enter in your price. Let's say I've determined that $14.99 is the right price for this book I'll go ahead and enter in the COVID and the page count and the paper type all over again. Okay, so now you can see you're faced with this question of wholesale discount. And you might be going, what the heck is that? And why do I have to give so much? Well, IngramSpark requires a minimum amount of 40% for US titles. This was updated in August 2023 due to retailer demands that they make more per book. This is required to participate in their full wholesale distribution. For other markets like UK, EU and Australia, the minimum is 35%, which is what it used to be for us. Discounts below these thresholds may limit or prevent distribution. Now, this is the money that goes to the retailer for their profit, but not all of it. 15% roughly goes to Ingram as their distributor fee. As you can see here, the wholesale discount makes a big difference in what you're making by dollars per copy sold. So you probably want to start at 40%. But it's important to understand that there is a trade off because 55% is the recommendation for maximum reach. Quiet, please. Shut the door, children. 55% is the recommended wholesale discount for maximum reach. It's the industry standard trade discount which makes your book attractive to bookstores and major retailers like Barnes and Noble. So going with 55% does increase the chance of physical bookstore stocking, special orders and just broader visibility. Essentially, if you're pitching for events or reviews, well, going back to those goals. Know your goal. Understanding what's your priority means you'll know what is most important here. Reach or. Or profits. If profits is number one, set your wholesale discount at 40%. If reach is most important, go 55%. Now, one strategy we use at Book Launchers is we often set the discount at 40% for authors for pre sale, and then if they want to pursue physical distribution later, we raise it to 55% post launch. This allows them to make the most profits on their pre sale and then work on the expanded distribution after. But if you're doing a big push for bookstore events in or around your launch, this won't work. You'll need 55% from the start. But wow, does it make a difference? With 55% and a $14.99 price point, I'm only making $1.79 per book. That is not pretty. Now, how much does page count play a role? A lot. If you only have 180 page book, all things being equal, you'll make $2.69 on this book. But the biggest difference is that wholesale discount if you pay them 40% versus 55, you're making $4.03 versus $1.79. So play with the calculators and choose your price. Now another thing you can consider is if my range had been 14.99 to $17.99 and I had chosen $14.99, I would probably go back and look at page count and other factors in my competition and probably play with a 1599 or 16.99 price point to start with. Again, just to give me a little bit more room to profit on the books sold because that gives me a little bit of room for marketing the book. Making money on every copy sold gives me a little bit more room for the marketing options. All right, step five Price this for your international markets that matter. A lot of authors just let Amazon or Ingram auto convert currencies. But if your $14.99 US paperback auto converts to Germany to be €1372, it doesn't look intentional and readers on that side will notice. It also might not factor in local price points. Now I don't do research for each and every marketplace, I will just round them up or down to make the numbers look normal. But when I am going to be selling books in Canada, Australia and the uk, I will take a look at similar books and what you'll find is you can actually raise the price in those markets most of the time. Now manually change it so that it's a 99 entry and make sure that you understand the rules. Because some countries like Germany and France actually have fixed book price laws. That means you set the price once and nobody can discount it. So taking a few minutes to localize your pricing where it's going to be important to you, I think that's really important. Now that was all about print. I want to give you a couple tips on ebooks and audiobooks. IngramSpark is excellent for print on demand books. I never ever ever ever use it for ebook distribution and that is because it gives 20% royalty rate. So $2 on a $9.99 ebook versus 6 or $7 on Amazon KDP or Draft 2 digital 60 to 70%. Ingram also has a $25 setup and revision fee and it's free with other companies and limited pricing control with mandatory 30 to 40% retailer discounts. Draft 2 digital or publish drive offers much better analytics and marketing tools and KDP excels for the Amazon sales and promotions. So unless you're bundling with print or targeting a niche retailer that's exclusive to Ingram's network go with Draft2Digital publish drive or KDP and we actually use both Draft2Digital and KDP for higher royalties, more flexibility and no upfront costs. Now a quick note about Free Books Free ebooks used to be a great way to hit Amazon's charts, but not anymore. Amazon Amazon has a separate free bestseller list, so giving away thousands of copies won't push you up the paid rankings. I also question whether people who get free books ever read it and your goal likely doesn't just involve getting a free download. It probably involves ranking visibility on Amazon or people reading your book so they can connect with you and review the book. Ebook sales do work better for getting a boost in rankings and also for attracting a few more reviewers. So instead of free books, consider Kindle Countdown deals or running ebook sales. You can use also scheduled promotions on Apple Books or Kobo where you can do time discounts with ads or email blasts. When it comes to free, here's when it does make sense in my opinion. Advanced reader copies to potential reviewers, influencers, podcast hosts, media Free books given out at a conference or events where your audience is in the room and giving them a free book to can help you grow your brand and your business. Audiobook or physical book giveaways targeted to not random strangers, but targeted people like here on Book Launchers tv When I invite you to get self publish and succeed for free@book launchers.com freeaudio free can work brilliantly if it's strategic, but free for the sake of free that just cheapens your work. Now speaking of audiobooks, for ACX you can only input a suggested price and not always. Ultimately they will determine your price point. Which is why I give my book away for free. Because if your audiobook is sold for $12.99 and you choose non exclusive distribution on ACX so that you can do other things with your audiobook, you will earn 25% royalty on net sales. Here's how that breaks down your retailer Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, whatever it is deducts taxes, discounts or unused subscription credits, reducing the list price by about 50%. So so we're going with a $12.99 audiobook net sales $6.50. Now you get 25% of that $6.50 which equals $1.60 per sale. A little bit more than that, but whatever. Woo hoo. So you see why I love giving it to you for free. Because I did all this work and invested in this book and they're making way more money on my book than I am, which I don't think is very cool. So with print books, there's production costs and distribution and that's a little bit more difficult. So I'm happier to pay them for that. Audiobooks shouldn't have as bad of a split in my opinion. So go ahead, download it for free and enjoy and tell a friend. And I'm happy with Spotify. For authors, I'm making more on an a la carte 40 to 50%. But then it's a percentage of pooled revenue for those that are already Spotify subscribers and that's a little less transparent. So there you have it. Six simple steps plus some complicated decisions to price your book like a pro. Remember, most authors lose sales every day because they don't know how to price their book properly. Don't be one of them. And if your book isn't priced right, you're not just leaving money on the table, you might be pushing readers away. If you want more step by step strategies to publish and promote your nonfiction book, make sure you've subscribed right here to Book Launchers TV so you never miss an episode. So go ahead and subscribe right after you like this video and say hello in the comments. Of course, I'll see you on the next video.