Vinnie Kinsella's Blog

When it comes to
pricing your book, there are three numbers to concern yourself with:

The suggested retail priceThe wholesale priceThe print cost

If you are working
with a combination print-on-demand/book fulfillment service like IngramSpark,
here’s how things work. When you list your book in their catalog and make it
available for stores to stock and sell, you set a suggested retail price for
the book. This is not the price that bookstores pay for the book. It is the
price at which you suggest they sell the book to their customers. You sell the
book to bookstores at a wholesale price (more on that in a moment). Most
bookstores will sell the book to customers at your suggested price, but some
will sell it for less in an effort to lure customers away from other stores.
This will not affect how much the bookstores pay you for your book.

When a bookstore
buys the book from you through a fulfillment service, you must offer it to them
at a price lower than your suggested retail price. This is the wholesale price.
The typical industry standard for a wholesale discount is 55 percent off of the
suggested retail price. That means if your suggested retail price is $15, and
you are offering stores the standard 55 percent discount, the wholesale price
would $6.75. From that price, the printer will subtract the print costs. What’s
left is your profit.

Let’s say your book
is 250 pages long with a print cost of $4.20. Here’s how the math would work
out:

Suggested retail price: $18.00

Wholesale price (assuming 55 percent
discount): $6.75

Your profit after the $4.20 print cost is
deducted from the wholesale price: $2.55

If you wanted to
increase your profit, there are a few things you can do:

Opt for a higher suggested retail price Reduce the page count to lower the print
cost Offer bookstores a lesser wholesale
discount

Although a 55
percent wholesale discount is preferred, most bookstores will be okay with you
offering them the book at a 50 percent discount. If you drop that down to 40
percent, most physical bookstores won’t stock the book, but online stores will
still list it.

Keep in mind that
these numbers pertain only to books sold through stores. When you sell books
directly to readers yourself at your suggested retail price, you keep all the
profits after the print cost is deducted.

For ebooks, you
will generally make 60–70 percent of the suggested retail price for the ebook.

Two things to keep
in mind:

A typical mistake many self-published authors
make is to increase the retail price to make more money per sale. This can do
more harm than good. If you are pricing your book higher than the norm for your
genre, people are not likely to buy your book. It is much better for you to
sell several copies of a book with a lower profit margin than one copy with a
higher one.A pricing tactic used by most self-publishers is
to their ebook at a much lower rate in the hope of driving up sales numbers
(and getting better placement in online stores). A good range for this is
$2.99–$3.99.

I am pleased to announce that Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon, is now carrying A Little Bit of Advice for Self-Publishers! Broadway Books is a great little store with big service. The owners have a long history of supporting local independent authors—including many of my own clients—so I am pleased to have my book on their shelves. If you are in the Portland area an looking for a good book, stop by and let Sally and Kim help you find the perfect read!

Broadway Books is located at 1714 N.E. Broadway, Portland, OR, 97232. You can visit them online at www.broadwaybooks.net.

 

Are you sad that you didn't win one of the five paperback copies of my book I gave away here on Goodreads? I think I know what might cheer you up: a free copy of my ebook!

Until midnight tomorrow, March 30, you can download my ebook for free through the Kindle store. Claim your copy now, and then tell all the aspiring self-publishers you know about it. Help me raise the visibility of my little book.

Download the book here: http://www.amazon.com/Little-Bit-Advi...

Join me in wishing a happy book birthday to Kathryn Scott’s Think Zebras. For this book, I performed several rounds of early editing, and then later did the book’s interior layout, cover design, and ebook conversion.*

About the Book

A lowly virus, a disturbed mind, and an internal power struggle. A common illness is killing the elderly in Revere County, but Mary Campbell, the nurse supervisor for the understaffed Communicable Disease Control Unit, is told not to worry. The increase in outbreaks is likely due to a new strain of the virus circulating in the United States. But something feels wrong. Mary senses she’s overlooking an important link. To uncover the connection, she reluctantly embraces a new strategy suggested by her department’s maligned bioterrorism coordinator. Set two years after the 9/11 attacks, Mary’s investigation exposes not only the menace behind the outbreaks, but a greater threat to her community that requires her to make a painful sacrifice.

Think Zebras is available as both paperback and ebook thought most major book retailers (ISBN 9780692661253).

*My services were contracted by Indigo Editing & Publications.

Join me in wishing a happy book birthday to my own book, A Little Bit of Advice for Self-Publishers!

About the Book

For over a decade, publications consultant Vinnie Kinsella has been helping authors navigate the complex self-publishing landscape. Now he’s brought his top tips together in one succinct volume. Ranging from the practical to the personal, these tips offer insight into what sets successful self-publishers apart from the rest. Illuminate your book’s path with A Little Bit of Advice for Self-Publishers.

You can order the book book directly at vkbps.com/book or through your favorite bookstore.

ISBN: 978-0-692-65226-8

Paperback: $7.99

Ebook: $3.99

Join me in wishing a happy book birthday to Jennifer Havice’s Finding The Right Message. For this book, I did the ebook conversion.*

About the book

Imagine if you could connect with your website visitors the moment they landed on your site. They understood exactly what kind of value your product or solution provided. And they were eager to join your email list or hit the buy button.

What would that mean to your business?

In Finding The Right Message, pro conversion rate optimizer and online copywriter Jen Havice walks you through how to ask the right questions of your customers to learn what they need to hear from you to take action on your website.

In the book you’ll get a step-by-step guide that any small business owner or marketer can easily start using. You’ll learn:

Step-by-step process for review mining so that you can paint a picture of your customers with the words they use
Best practices for conducting interviews and surveys
How to analyze your voice of customer research findings and apply them to your copy
How to write a value proposition that speaks directly to the customer’s problem and how your product of solution will help fix it
What the differences between features and benefits really are and how that affects your website copy

Finding the Right Message is available on Amazon.com.

*My services were contracted by Indigo Editing & Publications.

Join me in wishing a happy book birthday to the second edition of Kelly Melillo’s The Best Places to Pee. For this book, I worked with the author to expand the content and update the look of the book.

About the Book

The Best Places To Pee is a creative twist to your traditional travel guide. An imaginative roadmap that uses funky and fabulous bathrooms as a navigational tool for exploring the city. It’s the essential guide to an eccentric exploration of Portland, Oregon.

Beyond learning where the best bathrooms are in the city—colorful and witty narrations reveal an alluring mix of history, folklore, and personal insights from some of P­town’s most talented restaurateurs and business owners. These stories and facts are as unique to the owners as they are representative of the neighborhoods in which the businesses reside. Creating insight into the many distinct neighborhoods of Portland.

The pages of this book lead you on a journey through Portland’s hip and trendy present while also sharing parts of its past. The Best Places To Pee: A Guide To The Funky & Fabulous Bathrooms of Portland is fresh, fun and your gotta have it guide!

The Best Places To Pee is available through thebestplacestopee.com.

In case you missed the news, I have a book coming out on March 22!

You can pre-order a copy of the paperback version today and save 25 percent. Visits vkbps.com/book to place your order. You can also pre-order the Kindle version of the book through Amazon and have it delivered automatically to your device or app on March 22.

About the Book

For over a decade, publications consultant Vinnie Kinsella has been helping authors navigate the complex self-publishing landscape. Now he’s brought his top tips together in one succinct volume. Ranging from the practical to the personal, these tips offer insight into what sets successful self-publishers apart from the rest. Illuminate your book’s path with A Little Bit of Advice for Self-Publishers.

To preview the contents of the book, click here.

ISBN: 978-0-692-65226-8

Paperback: $7.99

Ebook: $3.99

Join me in wishing a happy book birthday to Della Kensington’s Courier of Love. For this book, I did the ebook conversion and cover designAbout the Book

In a dangerous quest to prove the existence of an ancient ring that was lost during a violent shipwreck and to fulfill her ailing father’s archeological dream, Christina Weldon journeys to a small island in the British Virgin Islands. Under the blistering rays of a tropical sun and the forceful currents of the Caribbean Sea, her journey will plunge her not only into the mysterious depths of the ocean and her physical own needs, but also into the lives and emotions of two very different and powerful men.

Courier of Love is available as a Kindle book on Amazon.

Join me in wishing a happy book relaunch to Kelly Running’s Medicine Wheel, the first in her Lizzy O’Malley mystery series. For this project, I did the interior layout and ebook conversion. This is an updated version of Kelly’s original release of her book.

Cover design by Olivia Croom.

About the book

A murder interrupts Lizzy O’Malley’s work as stage manager for her brother’s Shakespeare company in Sedona, Arizona. Her efforts to clear her brother’s name lead her on an odyssey of Navajo visions, sweat lodges, medicine wheels, and mysticism. The journey promises to waken her latent psychic abilities if she survives numerous attempts on her life and figures out who wants her dead.

Medicine Wheel is available through most US booksellers. ISBN: 9780692637647.