The challenge of setting your book price.

[Linda L Wagner]

I just signed a contract with a self-publishing company formy first book, a children's picture story book - 48 pages. The PH said it was going to cost them 10.83 just to print the 8.5X11 lamenated bound book. Their suggested price is 23.95. I feel that is high compared to what is in book stores. Any suggestions on pricing? What is the average percentage that bookstores require on a book? I did buy a returnable policy and did a POD on the book. I do have the option to print the book at other places included.

[Rita Hestand]

Hi there,
Okay, if you are self published, you have the option of pricing your book, unless it states otherwise in your contract. The facts to take into consideration are the cost of the book to you and what margin of profit you have to make to pay for the book itself.
Books do cost more now than ever. Profits are low if you lower your price. To get started as an author, you might have to lower your price until you have established a name for yourself. Then you could raise the price
accordingly.
What they are telling you is to make a profit you have to charge a bit higher than your out of pocket costs.
If you are distributing your books, they take a chuck out of your costs too, so then again you have to raise the price of the book, so you can pay the distributors.
Being an author doesn't automatically make you a rich person nor does it make money for you all the time. Self published is even harder, because no one will give you a foot in the door.
If you want to make money, yes, the high price is for your benefit, however, the sales will suffer because your book is too high priced. However, lowering it to a price that will cost you money isn't wise either.
You have to find a balance. By self publishing, you are agreeing to doing all the work, firguring all the angles, which is a lot harder.
Figure all your costs for the book itself, not including advertising. Then price your book so you have a couple of dollars profit for it. $2 to $4 is a good profit for a print book.
Amazon and different places may charge you to carry your book. You have to figure these distributors in on the cost.
Yes, you can lose money on a book if you don't watch it.
I've not had the problem about putting God in a book, most of my romances mention God in them and give credit where credit is due, but I've never had anyone challenge me on it. Now if your book is Christian, in other words, if you are teaching a philosophy about God to children in your book, you do have to watch what you say,
don't ask me why. But if it is a Christian based book, then it should be advertised as such, and not camaflouged as a regular children's book. Just having the word God in a book shouldn't cause concern. Preaching about your book, could have.
When you chose to self publish though, you should know that it will be harder to sell your book. Having a good website is a must for self published. Having a shopping cart, or paypal purchase choice is great too.
If a bookstore sells your books though, they charge for this, and this fee has to be figured into the price of the book or you will lose money on the book itself. If your book cost you $10, and you sell it for $8.00, then your book is going to cost you to sell, and you won't make a profit. But when you self publish, there is usually a fee with this and paying for this comes from your book profits.
I suggest a compromise. These people are not trying to cheat anyone. They are trying to make a book for you to sell at a profit. This is hard to do when it cost to produce the book itself.
You are in business for yourself when you self publish, what they recommend is usually high because in order for you to make any profit off the book, your books will cost more because they aren't coming through a publishser.
This is still a very hard business to make money at. You wrote the book, you are entitled to make some profit for it. Yes, it is high, but that is what you have to deal with when you self publish.
For two of my print books I went with Publish America. The reason, they are basically just a printer too, but they don't charge anything for getting the book out, except the cost of the book. And that runs me about $10 a book. For a paperback, that is high, to make a profit. On line, the books sell for $16.99. When a bookstore or distributor takes your book, they take another chunk of your profits. So that is why the books cost so much, and why as a self published author you have to raise the price of the book, or take a loss.
Basically the way to re-coop your losses would be to e-publish your book and sell at a reasonable price.
E-publishing is much cheaper, and profits can be had that way.
You can format these books into PDF, and HTML and sell them on your site, and reap the entire amount to you. That's a profit.
If your site doesn't get much traffic then you need to add your site to search engines, buy advertising on line.
This is my opinion. Good luck.
Love and blessings
Rita

[Rita Hestand]

Just one more thing. You cannot compare a regularly published children's book price to yours. You are self published. And yes,I have seen prices this high. But being self published means you have already put money into your book and to make a reasonable profit, you have to sell at a higher cost. Most people that publish books know that self publishing means more money out of the author's pocket.
The self publishing printer is not trying to cheat you, or the reader, however, to do a book this way means the cost is higher for your book.
POD is higher. However, it does have benefits too. You only pay for the amount of books you want to sell. If you have an author signing and you think you can sell twenty books, you order twenty books.
There are a lot of pitfalls but to avoid them, you need to research your POD. You need to know what is going to happen to your book before it does. When you approach these companies, you need to see other books they have done, see the prices. Your won't be much different.
Since the coming out so to speak of POD, books are handled differently. But you can never compare your publishing to a regular print published author's.
You are in an entirely different category of published authors.
Self publishing isn't for everyone.
Blessings
Rita

[Linda L Wagner]

That's very true, but isn't people like us that know this type of information understand why the price is higher? The average person that sees the book just looks at the price and says WOW!!! They don't know the history behind how that book was made.

Since I have the option of printing with another printing company, I may go that route, but I really need to unload what I have already. I had close to 80 people that requested to review my book. Didn't send to all, but I did quite a few. The reviews are great, but proof is in the sale. You can have wonderful reviews, but you have to have it at a price that the consumer will want to buy.

I have people that write me and say, why don't you write about this or that etc and they are all wonderful ideas, but I have held back to see how this one does.

Some have had it printed over in China because it is so much cheaper, but then I have heard horror stories about that, so who knows what the right thing to do is.

Linda

[Linda L Wagner]

Thank you for your letter Rita.

I wanted you to know that I did go the self-publishing route. I think that this book being a colorful picture story book that it made the author cost go up including tax, S&H to almost $12 made for a slow start for me. And to think I have written 10 other children's books that need to be illustrated.
My web site is www.lindawagerbooks.com


The only thing that I have said about God in my book:

God wanted Flatterley to learn how to thrive,
So He gave her instincts on how to survive

God knew if a butterfly she wanted to be
She must break that cocoon that hung in that tree


This was in reference to a bird coming along and leaving the cocoon alone because Lady Flatterley needed to learn how to come out on her own. Then at the end when Lady Flatterley has built her cocoon and she comes out being this beautiful butterfly, she pauses:

Flatterley looked up to thank God above,
For His creation of her she most surely did love

Now you have seen how butterflies are made,
Caterpillar to cocoon then to butterfly, tis God's loving way.

I didn't feel I was being overly promoting God in the book.

Yes, I am up in the ratings under Christian Children's Books. I do have a web site and I have lowered my price on the book $8 from what the publishing company is asking. I have the option of selling the book on my own for any price I want and also having it printed elsewhere. This is written in my contract. So the PH is asking 22.95 and I am asking 14.99. It's just getting people directed to my web site. I have even sent out emails telling about my book and asking them to pass it on to their contacts and then to other contacts just like many emails go. It's like a forwarding email.

I was just taken back my a librarian’s response to me coming in and talking to people about publishing a book and she was worried that I may want to promote God and that isn't allowed. I understand that, and that isn't where I am. The book to me says it all. I don't need to get up in front of people and say what the book already says.

I will mention to my web page designer to see if putting this in e-book format that this may be a way to get it bought. I just thought people would like to have it in their hands. But even with e-books, you can download them and print them out yourself. It just isn't in a book.

I forgot to mention that with the PH, my royalty after the 50-55% trade discount is $1.24. That was as low as I could get it without owing them money.

Linda

[Rita Hestand]

Don't get me wrong,I'm certainly not against God, in fact my books mention him too, sometimes a couple of times. But no one has ever called me on it. And my romances aren't considered Christian romances because they touch each other when they kiss, now that is kinda silly, you have to touch someone when you kiss.

But the Librarian was probably just making sure due to rules of the school policy.

Writers are not paid enough, never have been. And unless you have a name and can sell on that alone, making a living at it is very hard. Accept freelance of course, they can make a living on it if they are good enough.

You will find, having your print version done the way you are going, that it will be your e-books that actually make the money for you. Because of the high price. No, we can't go into detail about why, except to kinda say "It's printing cost." Which is true, it is.

Children's illustrated books are terribly expensive to do, in self publishing, or POD for that matter.
But my advise to you, and I know that a lot of authors disagree, is to try Publish America. They don't charge you for anything but the printing of the books when you order them. Yes, they charge a high price too, but your cost out of pocket is zilch. Unless your printer only charges for the books printed and no up front fees for self publishing, Publish America might be the way to go. I've investigaged LULU too, but for children's they are high. Publish America uses Lightning Source, which is an excellent printer. Their work is beautiful. I love my books. They are too high, but they do run occassional sales on them. I wait for the sales to order my books.

The problems on this, like I was saying is in distribution. Distributors charge too. So then you have to divide cost against distribution against what you want to charge. It's a no-win situaiton right now, but I think it will get better in the future.

Also, word of mouth for sales is good, but you need to reach massive amounts of people to sell well, and to do this on the internet you have to submit your site to search engines, so people can find you. It's the best way. Submit at least ever 6 months to about thirty or fifty search engines for two or three years and then your site will come up first when you put your name in a search.

Best I can tell you. If you can make any profits with children's illustrated books, it's in e-books.
Because it cost little to produce them.

Truthfully, I think getting a real publisher (print publisher from New York) is the best bet. That means query and submit, until someone sees it and likes it.

Scholastic told me once I was doing well with the children's books, to let them know. Well,
why would I need to...then? You know.

maybe we need massive prayer for the writers of this world.
Love and blessings
Rita

[Linda L Wagner]

You are a wealth of knowledge Rita. Scholastic has a good name. Kudos’s to you girl. When you mention about publishers in New York, do you mean that I should send them a copy of my book as a reference? I guess it would as a reference and them to look at my web site for other ideas of books. What about other publishing companies. See most of them all like to have agents approach them and not you. Some of the books I have that I have searched through will allow you to submit to them. They are more the traditional publishing, but they are up front when they say it takes 18 months even to 3 years to get a book published. Man to be so popular!!!

I am such a green tomato at this it isn't funny. They didn't teach us any of this in nursing school. Ha!

I have heard of Publish America before also. Maybe I need to start writing more like stories, chapter books for children versus picture storybooks. What a challenge this is for me.

Outskirts that did my publishing uses Lightning Source. They do a good job. My first run was a flop and had to be returned because of printing error, but the second run was fantastic. I have only found one book that they left out a couple of pages. Makes me wonder sometimes how many others this happens to so I have been checking each book.

Girl, I am learning so much from you. Thanks for taking the time to share with me.


Linda

[Rita Hestand]

Hi LInda,
I know that some New York publishers want you to have a agent, but not all of them do. I think I wrote down about twenty or so that didn't require agents. I have a children's illustrated series coming out, andi'd love to get it print published by a real
New York publishing firm. Mainly because with children's it is expensive to self publish and you still have to do all the work yourself, which is sometimes a pain.

I even considered going to Kinko's and letting them print it and me sell it at Libraries.
School libraries, have the parents come and by the book for the kid. Give a little show for them and sell the books.

I think I priced Kinko's at $6.00 a book in a massive quanity. So you could take the book into the school libraries and tell the kids all about it, maybe have someone dress up like a character to entertain, then sell the book there in the library to the parents.

That would be fastest way to get book sales for children's. Of course if you are New
York published, all the better. If you buy a big quanity of books, you come out cheaper per book, then sell it for $10 and make a $4.00 profit on each book, which is good for print sales.

Lulu wasn't too bad, but the better quality the book, the more it cost you there, so that sorta depends on what you want.

At Kinko's you get the spiral binding, but I've seen many books with this binding in the libraries and am wondering if it wouldn't be good enough.

I'm just throwing ideas out there at you because I have researched all this stuff till I'm blue in the face and it is wonderful to be able to talk to someone who is interested in doing the same things.

I have a series of seven books for children that I want to get out there. I've had artist trouble for years. If I sold to a New York publisher, I wouldn't have this problem at all.
Problem is, you have to sell it to them. An agent would be better if you know how to write queries and all for them. But agents are as hard to get as publishers some times.

Another way is to attend a librarian kind of conference and meet these publishers in person. I know a librarian and I may try this method. I am threadbare myself trying to get my children's series going well. I do have one book with an e-publisher and I just found out that the book is in the Hawaiian library and several others. The book also has sold to Japan, Germany, England, and several other countries.

But so far the series isn't going far and I want to work on doing something positive with it.

Another thing you can do for name recognition and getting people interested in your books is give them a free copy. But only when you have other things to sell, because you want that copy to lead to a sale down the line. This is hard work.

Writing is so much more than just a job of writing a book. It's pounding the pavement and trying to make a success out of your work. Because these days very few others are going to pound the pavement for you. HOwever, if you do manage to get an agent, you have more a chance at print publishing. So keep trying, and submit to those that don't require you to have an agent too.

Best of luck to you.
Love and blessings
Rita