Should Self-Published Books Be Cheap?

Should Self-Published Books Be Cheap?

I’ve been writing a mini-series on misconceptions about self-publishing. Here’s the picture that started it all:

From that, I got a list of key misconceptions about self-publishing. Here they are:

• Self-published books have poor covers or no covers
• They contain no editing or poor editing
• Price competition – self-published books should be cheap
• Self-published books should have no reviews and self-published authors pay for fake reviews
• I don’t know the last point? Sneaky self-published authors masquerade as a publishing company or something?

Today, I’ll talk about why whether a book is self-published or not shouldn’t have an effect on the price.

What Goes Into The Cost Of A Book?

As with all the articles in this mini-series, I’m going to break down the aspect we’re discussing for both traditional and indie publishing.

This time I’m going to breakdown where the costs of a book come from.

Elements that go into the cost of a book for a traditional publisher:

• The advance (ha!)
• The royalties (ha ha!)
• Cost of creating the book (printing and binding)
• The cost of distributing the book
• The cost of marketing the book
• Paying for other branding stuff/author development (if you’re an A-lister)

It breaks down into three neat packages:

1. The author hopefully not starving to death
2. The cost to create the book
3. The cost of marketing the book

For a publisher, all of these costs are weighed up in a financial decision: Is the profit from a book going to make back the above costs plus a return on the investment?

If yes, then it’s probably a go. If no, then you’re not getting that book deal, kids.

For an independent or self-publisher, look at what goes into the cost of making a book:

1. You getting paid
2. The cost of the book’s creation
3. The cost of marketing the book

It’s practically the same, whether you have a contract or not. These are the major factors for pricing your book. Ultimately, traditional publishers and self-publishers need to work to the same formula:

Does the profit I’ll make from this book exceed the costs of creating it?

However, there are differences, so let’s talk about them.

What Is It That Traditional Publishers Pay For That You Don’t?

Traditional publishers pay for your book. They’ll have certain costs that you won’t have as a self-published author.

However, too often people justify these costs as though they should impact the price of a book. “Oh, well, traditionally published books should cost more because they have to rent out office space in downtown New York.”

That’s not an excuse. Give me a break.

I’m going to list the differences and why they shouldn’t impact the pricing of a book.

Advances: Traditional publishers will pay you an advance. That means you get paid before the book is earning money – although in practice you get your advance later in many cases anyway. This does not matter to the end user – the reader – because it’s not the reader’s concern if the author gets paid.

Seriously, they don’t care and it’s none of their business.

Royalties: Traditional publishers pay you next-to-no royalties considering you, the author, created the god-damned thing. This is again a non-argument because the end user doesn’t care.

Marketing: Traditional publishers blow all of the royalties they don’t give you on champagne parties for New York business idiots. The idea that traditional publishers should charge more for these “marketing” efforts is a joke. The book doesn’t change in value no matter how many culture vultures talk about it.

Book Covers, Editors and The Like

I talked about these things earlier on in the series. They should be worked into the cost of the book, sure, but you have to do that as a self-publisher anyway. The fact that traditional publishers think they have a monopoly on “good book covers” is again, a joke.

(Time-Out. Here’s the article on covers and here’s the article on editing.)

Price and Quality

Being a dastardly copywriter, I know a fair bit about pricing.

Here’s the thing when it comes to book pricing: None of it is a necessary expense. If you’re talking about digital books, there are next-to-no costs involved. It costs pennies to send something digitally, there are a whole host of vendors who deal with the customer support and delivery for you, and assuming you sell more than 2 copies, your costs for creating a cover are next to non-existent.

Pricing is something you need to test. More on that in a minute.

However, here’s a key point that I haven’t discussed yet: The price of a book is determined mostly by two things:

1. The quality of the book’s content
2. The cost of putting it on the market where it can sell

There is nothing about this that changes dependent on whether you publish yourself or whether a publisher does it for you.

A book that sells for $10 that’s worth $1 won’t sell many copies. It doesn’t matter if Jim from down the road has published his toilet-inspired musings or whether it’s the next fad-chaser at Penguin Books.

You can have a fantastic book worth $10 and publish it yourself. You can have a book that’s worth next to nothing and a publisher can throw millions of dollars into it and it’ll still be worth nothing.

Who publishes the book is irrelevant to the reader and to everyone else.

Why Self-Publishers Need To Play With Prices

The landscape is shifting on a regular basis. We’re living in the Wild-West Age of digital publishing right now.

I personally know people who:

• Go wide and sell to over twenty different vendors and make money
• People who rely solely on Kindle Unlimited borrows
• People who price their books at .99c for full novels
• Guys that refuse to sell at less than $3 for a short story and $20 for a full novel

All of those people make a lot of money with books. They’ve all got their own strategies to make the most out of the environment they choose to operate in.

If you self-publish, there’s nobody to tell you, “This is what we do because it’s what works” and thank god, because the traditional publishing companies almost bankrupted themselves trying to do that. They literally tried fixing the price of ebooks so that they were no cheaper than paperbacks in order to try and retain market share.

Big mistake.

Look, the ground shifts rapidly with publishing at the moment. You need to figure out pricing and don’t pay any attention to anyone who says, “Traditional publishers should charge more because…”

It’s rubbish.

I’d usually end with a concluding section here, but the last couple of sentences sum up my tohughts pretty well, so see you tomorrow!