How Much Would You Sell Your Book For?

[IndigoShirtProd]

Random question, just popped in my head. No, I'm not asking about if you were going to sell it to, I don't know, a publisher, a distributor. Nor am I talking about the rights to your book, novels or comics. Like if you going to sell it in a storefront, on your own website . Also if your were going to sell a pdf. copy as well. You can consider the cost of production, but you don't have to.

What would you sell it for?

For me, for the full first volume of the book, maybe $13.99-14.99 USD for the .pdf and $18.99 for a paperback and $21.99 for a hard copy. Is that reasonable?

[VibrantFox]

probably around the same depending on chapter/volume length so something like $10-15 for digital and around $20+ for any kind of physical copy. Mainly coz it's around the same that they charge for traditional comics so it seems pretty reasonable

[Caro]

There are industry standards for pricing books but it gets tricky when it comes to self publishing. Obviously there are things to consider like page count but there are also times where paper is more expensive so printing becomes more expensive. There’s also the type of printing you’re doing. For my previous books with publishers I’ve asked for them to be printed on the same paper manga is to be able to print them cheaper and to sell them cheaper. One of those is a little over 140 pages and I’m able to sell it for $14.99 for a full color book. The next book was closer to 200 pages and sells at $20. My newest book is a little over 200 pages but not on manga paper and that one is $24.99. I like the manga paper because its cheaper, lighter (which helps with shipping costs), and I just like the way it looks and smells. Also, since you’re self publishing you can get away with charging a little more because you probably won’t be doing print runs in the thousands so your per unit costs are just going to be higher and its fine to account for that.

Personally, I’ve never cared for the price of digital comics and I care a lot about accessibility so when I can I put up pdfs for free/pay what you want. When I’m pushing the pdfs properly I tend to get anywhere from $300 to $600 despite also giving the option to have it for free.

[IndigoShirtProd]

I’ve never cared for the price of digital comics and I care a lot about accessibility so when I can I put up pdfs for free/pay what you want.

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. And since I'm already posting the thing for free having a paywall for the completed version does seem a little unnecessary.

[Caro]

My feelings exactly! Most of my work is available online for free anyway it would feel weird to charge almost the cost of a physical copy for something thats already available.

I think pay what you want is a great option because a lot people just want a cheap way to support the work and when the option is there they will take it. And I like it better than donation links because they’re also directly and immediately getting something out of it.

[cherrystark]

So, I have experience here!

From a self-publishing POV, you have to price your work based on the "average" of what your equivalent books are selling for. For example, a lot of Kindle ebooks are between 2.99-5.99 each depending on the size of the book. Many people shop the Kindle pages for new things to read, so an expensive book might be a turn-off. I make 70% royalty off my work, so I earn $2-3 per book.

Then when it comes to physical copies, you have to think of what you want your take-home pay to be. Depending on your distributor, they can charge anywhere from $3-4 USD to $8-9 USD or more to print the book. Hardcover books have a higher print fee. Then you have different costs for paper and cover printing. So you have to account for that when pricing your work too.

[abigaillmartin]

15 US dollars and in the UK I have no idea.

[SoaringMoon]

As someone who has written and tried to sell a book.

12.99 USD generates 3.46 USD in royalties on Amazon. 13.99-14.99 is an appropriate price for a novel length trade paperback of about 250-300 pages (70k+ words). If you have a novella, I wouldn't bother printing it for any other reason than seeing it in print. Color print books are more expensive, manga style books are much cheaper. That is just how it is. Hard cover print on demand books can be quite expensive to produce. Going closer to 30 USD.

Unless you have a sizable following already or an effective marketing strategy already, you are going to be disappointed as to how many copies you are going to sell if you are self-publishing.

Try to get a literary agent, then you never have to think about book prices again.

[RedLenai]

Personally I won't know, if it is a pyshical copy I'll make sure to price it just a bit higher of the production cost so I can have some kind of extra income besides obtaining again what I invested in it. Of course, pricing would depend on the Editorial or Printing House you're working with, last time I did a fanzine was almost a decade ago and 100 copies of a normal printing paper 15 page comic was 250USD in Argentina, so if each fanzine was being sold for $20 ARS then..... ugh... it was $2 dolars approximately

For digital I won't know, I'll somewhat try to to come up with a price based on amount of pages and time of work. But I don't think I'll go higher than $10 if it is a comic that can be read online, the PDF would be mostly to compilate things and kept them organized and that's it. Unless of course you make extra content.

So I think your prices may be good, I don't know if you could go a bit higher than that... but I've seen 7 page fancomics pdfs being sold for $15 so... yeah

[darthmongoose]

At events, I've been selling Errant book 1, which is a full-colour perfect bound book of 180 pages, covering the first four full chapters plus extras, for £10 GBP (roughly $12 this morning, though it often fluctuates), though my partner keeps pushing me to raise it to £12 or even £15, since a lot of people are charging more like £15-£20 for books of the same length and quality.

For me though, the book's unit cost is only about £4-5 or so, so £10 is already a 100% markup from unit cost. People are telling me I should sell them for more, but that's difficult for me, because I'm like... but the markup is already good, I'm already making a good profit on these! That said... it's a tricky one, right? Because sometimes, weirdly, charging more makes a thing sell better because it's perceived as more valuable.

[Lensing]

I´m planning to self publish a comic drawing book for kids.
I will sell it to schools or other organisations when they hire me to
do drawing classes for kids and I take 15€ (around 17$) for a book.
I think that´s a good price that everyone is willing to pay for a 50 pages
tutorial book. I could live with taking 10€, but you always have to consider
that you will give some away for free, some can get damaged or lost
when shipping etc and before you know it, you make no money.
20€ is too much for a 50 page book without a hard cover but I´m not 100%
sure about it yet

[river121693]

It would cost me $3700 to print and ship 500 books to myself (so this doesnt even include cost to ship to buyer), each with 180 full color pages on Mixam. So that's ~$7.50 a book.
I'd need to sell it at $15- 20 atleast to cover my cost and labor+ make a little profit.

Comic Book Printing - The Best Price & Quality

On a related note, does anyone know where else to print comics cheaply?

[rumpenstiltzkin]

I just printed the first 4 chapters of my comic to sell at a convention this weekend, I sold mine for 250sek (about 24ish usd?) Its 154 pages in color and I make a very small profit of it selling for that price so I felt I couldnt really lower the price, since I at least want to get back the cost of printing it.

I do sell a pdf of my chapters as well but I sell them pretty cheap and its just if readers want to support me a bit extra, but I also throw in some extra stuff in the pdfs, like concept art and progress shots of how I do my pages and stuff.

I always find it hard setting a price on stuff.

[sushy00]

I based upon the printing price of my comic books, I did it times 2. Later on I had to raise the price again because shipping became so expensive that I actually made a loss when someone purchased the comic and got it shipped (I added an extra fee for shipping but it was not enough, so emberassing)

[Inspector]

For mine, I'd say about 10-13 (us) dollars for paperback. I'd rather keep the price as low as possible so people could afford it.

[TheLemmaLlama]

I would handcraft 5 printed copies of my comic in scroll form and auction them off to the highest bidders

[CarltonIsaac]

Two of my best selling paperback books for over a year now on Amazon are selling for
$19.99 ($8.92 Royalties) and $7.99 ($2.64 Royalties) after printing cost and Amazon's cut.

Amazon's printing and paperstock costs are going up by 15% from June 30 this year, which means less royalities if I don't up the selling price and risk losing my market. Bummer!

[cherrystark]

Amazon's printing and paperstock costs are going up by 15% from June 30 this year, which means less royalities if I don't up the selling price and risk losing my market.

I'm not looking forward to the price hike either because you know they're going to blame the hike on the writers.