Marketing Basics Part 4: Price

How much should your paperback or ebook cost? If you are accepted for publication by a trade publisher, then they will set the recommended retail price for your book. The actual retailer may discount that price, but a good contract will ensure that royalties are based on the RRP, not the actual selling price.

Looking at the Christian novels on my bookshelf, most are priced at $12.99 (all prices in this post are quoted in US dollars unless stated otherwise), with prices ranging from $11.99 to $15.99.  Category romances are less expensive - paperback Love Inspired titles and Barbour novella collections are $7.99.

Now, obviously, I’m based in New Zealand, so the retail price I pay for books includes shipping from the US. Most full-price novels are NZD 24.99, NZD 27.99 or NZD 29.99, with some small-press books priced slightly higher than this – which means they might miss out on my purchasing dollar because I perceive a NZD 33.95 book as ‘too expensive’ – especially when I consider the price of e-books.

Ebook Pricing

I own both a Kindle and a Kobo, so can purchase and read e-books from all the major online sellers. New release Christian fiction generally retails for $8.99 to $9.99 on Amazon – or less than half the price of the ‘dead tree book’ at my local Christian bookshop, even with Agency pricing (a current debate which I will cover in another post).

Older Christian ebooks by established authors are even cheaper –  $3.99 and $4.99 are common prices, and the author may be getting a bigger royalty from that than from the full-price dead tree version. Joe Konrath (who reportedly makes $50,000 each month from Kindle sales) believes that the ebook pricing sweet spot is just $2.99. He makes $2.04 off each sale, compared to $2.50 off the sale of a trade-published $25 hardcover or $0.75 off a trade paperback.

If you are published through a small press, subsidy publisher or choose to take the self-published route, you need to understand what the market price is. You also need to understand that you have to charge less than this. Why? Because these tight economic times mean readers have less to spend, so they are more likely to spend their money on a known author – why pay $17.99 for a published or Print-on-Demand book from an unknown author, when you can buy a paperback from a well-known Christian author for less? Or an ebook for $2.99?

This is where the economies of scale and marketing presence of the trade publishers can have a positive effect. I might not know who Camy Tang is, but I can see that Protection for Hire is published by Zondervan, who also publish a lot of excellent Christian fiction as well as the New International Version of the Bible. On that basis, I might be prepared to spend money on a Zondervan book by Camy Tang, where I probably wouldn’t spend money on an unknown author from an unknown publisher without having had the book or the author recommended to me. Which brings me nicely to the subject of the next post… Promotion.

Marketing Basics Part 3: Product

First, and most important is the product: your book.

The single most important thing anyone can do to succeed in any job, in any profession, is to do the job to the best of their ability. Before you release your product, your book, onto the market, it needs to be the best you are able to produce. No excuses.

Keep working at it until you get it right. This means revising, editing, getting assessments and critiques from people you trust, more revising, more editing, getting more feedback from readers, still more editing, proofreading, editing those changes, then proofreading again to make sure the editing and proofreading hasn’t added any more errors. When you are 99% sure that this is the best you can do - that’s when you seek publication, either directly or through a literary agent. 

As I said in the post on Trade Publishing, if you are fortunate enough sign with an agent or get published with a traditional royalty-paying publisher, much of this will not apply to you. But if you decide to self-publish, you are going to be responsible for everything.

Once you have made the decision to self-publish, you then have to decide on the format: hardback, paperback or ebook. There is a view that you are not a “real” author if your book is not published in hardback. Virtually no Christian novels are published in hardback any more – the exceptions are large-print books and reprinted anthologies.

Your initial set-up costs (editing, cover design, book design) are the same as for hardcover, paperback or ebooks. If you decide to publish ‘real’ books, you have several choices:

• Subsidy publishing, which I don’t recommend without serious investigation into the publisher;
• Traditional offset printing, which has a lower per-unit cost but requires an initial print run of 1000 books or more, and you have to pay for them whether you sell them or not. Only recommended for those who know they can sell that number of books, e.g. publishing a non-fiction book that is a compulsory textbook for a university course so you can guarantee the sales;
• Print-on-Demand (POD), from a company such as Amazon CreateSpace or Ingram LightningSource, which has a higher cost per book but no minimum print run.

Click here for a handy graphic that explains the economics of POD vs. offset. On that basis, the best piece of advice I can give you is: sell e-books. The more you know, the less likely you are to get burned.  Author Joanna Penn is firmly in favour of ebooks and POD (click here to see mistake 4 on her list).

AAP Book Sales for 2011

The Association of American Publishers (AAP)  has just released the total sales figures for the 2011 calendar year, and there have been several blog posts commenting on this, at Shelf Awareness, Paid Content, Teleread and Passive Voice. 

Overall sales were down on 2010, but the highlight?

Ebook sales increased 117% over 2010. While the year-on-year growth for December was only (only!) 72.1%, that should be compared against a year-on-year drop of 3.5% for all categories of book sales. Only three categories of books experienced growth in 2011: ebooks, downloaded audiobooks, and religious books.

It should be noted that these figures are from the member publishers, so exclude self-publishing, which is dominated by ebooks.

So, authors of Christian fiction, you are in the right place (especially if you offer your book as an ebook)!

Will Amazon Destroy Publishing?

In a recent post on Amazon and the future of publishing, self-publishing giant JA Konrath says:

“Treating authors like ****, when authors are essential to the process, is bad business.  Treating readers like ****, when readers are essential to the process, is bad business.  Bookstores and publishers and distributors are NOT essential to the process. You should have evolved.”

Wow. (Except for the bad word, which I’ve ****’d out. It wasn’t a really bad word, just one I don’t use, hence the ****).

That pretty much cuts to the chase, doesn’t it? Authors are important, because they write the books. Readers are important, because they pay for the books. But you can cut out at least two of the intermediate steps.

Christian literary agent Rachelle Gardner made similar points, commenting on the downfall of Kodak because they didn’t keep pace with the changing way consumers were taking and sharing photos.

As a reader who lives in New Zealand, these posts are relevant to me. Most of the books I’ve bought in the last year have been e-books (from both Amazon and Kobo), because they are cheaper. The paperback that my local Christian bookshop sells for NZD 24.99 to NZD 29.99 costs no more than USD 9.99 online, and many are free.

My Kindle has over 300 books, and I estimate I’ve paid less than NZD 50 for all of them. Now, I admit I haven’t actually read a lot of the freebies – but there sure is a selection of all kinds of books waiting for me. If I feel like serious Bible study, it’s there. If I want light-hearted romance, it’s there. If I want nail-biting suspense, it’s there. The only remaining advantage of a ‘real’ book is that I can loan it to other people.

So, will ‘traditional’ publishing last, or will Amazon (and other e-book publishers) take over?