This video is for self-publishing authors because if you traditionally publish your publisher sets the price. You can ask them the price. When you self-publish you decide the price. How do you now what to charge? That’s for you to discover.

I see this question of what to set the price as for the book or what to charge in a few contexts. One is just a general, what should I charge for my book. The second is when someone is setting up their ISBN via Bowker asking what price to input.

I’ll answer that second one first: in Bowker when you are assigning your ISBN there is a prompt for the price. You can enter an estimated price, the actual price if you know it, or you can set it to no price. The pricing metadata can be amended. So don’t panic when you don’t know the price yet. Save the ISBN info to get it processed, and you can update the price information later.

Okay, now onto the more general. “What should I charge for my book.”
The keyword here is general. As in people as me what they should charge for their book when I have no idea what their book is about, who it is for, how many pages, or the trim size.

Instead of redoing my masterclass of pricing, which covers way more in detail, I am going to give you two key guidelines to consider when setting the price:

What are other books in your genre or subgenre charging? That is what your readers are expecting to see, roughly. They may tolerate a slightly higher price, they may not get suspicious of a slightly lower price. It’s okay to fit in when setting the retail price.
Calculators are available for every self-publishing platform to help you determine the print cost of your book. eBooks have a small distribution fee depending on the size of the file, usually, it is small and you don’t have to worry about your price not covering the cost. For print books, you at least have to set your retail price high enough to cover the print cost. I have all the calculators listed below for you to find. The two biggest high-cost variables that will drive up the print cost of your book are color ink as opposed to black and white and premium paper over standard. Remember, if one page is in all colors, the entire book is printed with color ink for print-on-demand self-publishing services.

Masterclass Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNRRaO3gBZg

KDP Calculator https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/royalty-calculator
IngramSpark Calculator https://myaccount.ingramspark.com/Portal/Tools/ShippingCalculator
LuLu Calculator https://www.lulu.com/pricing
BookVault Calculator https://quote.bookvault.app/
B&N Press Calculator https://press.barnesandnoble.com/
Draft2Digital Calculator https://www.draft2digital.com/podcalc

What other questions do you have for me?

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