This is a copy of the Blog I wrote for the "Adopt an Indie" about setting the price for our work.


As an ‘Independent’ author, whether you are new to the game or an old hand, sooner or later you come to the realisation that writing the book was the easy bit and perhaps your decision to go it alone might have been a little hasty.
Well take heart for you are not alone, we’ve all been there at one time or another and had the same nagging doubts and worries that perhaps we should have waited a little longer or tried a little harder to follow the mainstream to fame and fortune.
So I hope it reduces the ‘Niggle Factor’ if I say that even if you found a willing agent and were lucky enough to get signed up by one of the ‘Biggies’ chances are you wouldn’t be any further forward than you are now.
You see it is a complete fallacy that once you are signed up that your fortune is assured, nice dream but it just doesn’t happen like that. It’s all about economics and where the Big Guys think they are going to get the best return for their PR Marketing budget. Or as the Yanks put it, “Get the best Bang for their Buck!”
Therefore as the new kid on the block they will send you forth with a couple of general Press releases and tell you to go forth and promote yourself, or words to that affect.
Difference between them and us.... We are working for ourselves, we put in the effort and hard work we reap the rewards. Our counterparts, on the other hand are part of the machine, they do most of the work and get only the same small royalty they would have got if someone else had done all the work, only we know there is nobody else working on the project.
OK, now you’re starting to feel better about your decision, onwards and upwards we go. We are on our own, just another little fish in a vast ocean so we now have to take off our ‘author’ hat and put on the ‘marketing’ one instead.
Of course here I am assuming you have done all the other important little bits like getting your book properly and professionally proof-read and edited. Thus making your book the best it can possibly be. Everything about being an Independent author hinges on the word Independent, we either do things for ourselves or we arrange to have someone else do it for us, for a fee.
In that regard I cannot stress strongly enough the importance of ‘Proof-reading and Editing,’ get the best professionals you can afford. You owe it to yourself and every other genuine Independent author out there to improve the public’s opinion of us and help remove the stigma associated with Self Publishing..
Now come the choices, you have chosen how you are going to set up the book, using the likes of Smashwords or Lulu, chosen the format, book cover Etcetera... and now it comes to setting a Price.
Here we enter the realm of yet more soul searching decisions and of course, as usual, there are no hard and fast rules to follow, get used to it, it doesn’t get any easier, trust me.
A lot will depend upon what type of book it is, who the target audience is and how you intend to market and sell the book once it’s ready.
One of the first crucial decisions to make is whether to print the thing at all, now if that sounds a little silly given that we are talking about books here, bear with me for a second while I explain.
We are firmly in the technological digital age where it is now possible to read books on any number of devices from PC’s to mobile phones and a wide range of E Book readers in between.
There is no doubt, in my mind, that digital is the way of the future be it in word form or, if we wait a while longer someone will finally come up with a way to go from ‘Text to Speech’ on these devices without it having an American or Japanese accent or sounding like Stephen Hawking.
So whatever else you decide you will have to create an E Book and decide if you want and/or need a print version as well. Not the other way round, unless of course you just want half a dozen copies to dish out a Christmas presents, in which case you should stop reading and go put the kettle on.
With practice or a little help both formats are easy to achieve and you might feel a desire to have the best of both, however there is a plus and negative side for you to consider and this will involve the price of your book.
If you decide you really must have your book in print, you have two choices, Hardback or Paperback ! Again there are no rules here, the choice is yours but obviously the cost when it comes to actual printing will be higher and this reflects the final cover price. Forgive me if that sounded like a privileged glimpse of the blindingly obvious but I’m writing this blind and so it’s aimed at the novice rather than the seasoned veteran.
The rub with ‘Print on Demand’ (PoD) printers is one of those Plus or Negatives of Self Publishing, on one hand it’s great you can print off just one book. On the other hand the printers cost are going to be a lot higher per copy than say if you ran off a thousand copies.
The up side is if you only actually want one copy then you don’t have to build a garden wall with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine !
However by going down the PoD route you have little control over your cover price, this is going to determined by printing cost. You can of course select the cover price from a set of parameters and it will show you the return you will get per copy. (Assuming they sell of course ). This price will undoubtedly be higher than an equivalent sized book in the High Street. That is a disadvantage to us Independents and puts us immediately on the back foot when it comes to hard copy book sales.
It looks a tad arrogant when someone, not in the know, points out that your book is more expensive that a top ten best seller by a top named author, and believe me they will point it out !
So that’s a fairly important Pricing decision and one you cannot seriously control, true you can set the price low enough where everyone else is getting paid and therefore happy and you get nothing. However again I’m assuming you’re not here for the benefit of your health or as a charity worker on behalf of Amazon and the PoD printers.
Of course if you are selling online to your home market or you fancy hacking round the little book shops book signing circuit then you may have no choice but to print off a few books.
Now back to the Digital World of E Books, here the rules are completely different and the playing field is not only level between us and the big Publishing houses but dare I say it, it is actually tilted slightly in favour of the Independent.
Here we can not only take them on, on equal terms we can actually take the higher ground and all because of PRICE.
The big guys were very slow off the blocks in the digital market, just as they didn’t learn their lessons when the likes of Amazon took on and beat the High Street retailer when they reinvented the way books could be bought and distributed. Adopting the same casual approach the big publishing houses dismissed E Books as some sort of passing fad.
Here we take over the whip hand because if we are clever we are now in control and there is nothing they can do to take it back. Why, I hear you ask ?
Like a Horse Race, they are carrying a huge handicap one that they cannot shake off and that is the size of the empire they carry around with them.
True if they want to they can still magically create a Best Seller over night with lots of hype, all it takes is money. However, to do that requires a mighty machine and a lot of staff, all of which has to be paid for out of book sales.
Now, if sales figures are to be believed then E Books are starting to out sell Print, a Sale is a Sale is a Sale, as it were and if you look at the top name authors you will see the price of the E Book Vs the Print version is more or less equal. Why ? Because the Big Boys have to maintain the same margins to support the machine.
Here’s the Good News ..... “We Don’t !” So not only can we under cut them we can chop them off at the knees.
Now I know there are a lot of discussions going on in Author Internet forums and chat rooms about setting prices and under valuing our work by setting our prices too low and there are both good and bad points being made on both sides of the argument.
I did tell you the problems don’t get any easier and there is no easy answer because in reality both sides make excellent arguments in support of their opinion.
However, to save you oodles of time going through it all let me see if I can put the various points together logically and so help you see, if not an answer, at least a way to find it.
One school of thought is that you have spent years creating your masterpiece and you should not under value your efforts and set a low price.
The other side is the WalMart argument of ‘Stack it High Sell it Cheap.’
Now consider these other points:
We are totally unknown in the market so who in the right mind is going to buy an E Book from a NewBee with a price set as high as a well known author ?
Ask yourself would you rather sell 1,000 copies at £1 or 10 at £10 ? Try to realistically calculate the possibilities of making sales at either price.
We may like to think our work is worth £10 but it’s not what we think that matters it’s what the buyer thinks that counts.
I have three books out there in the Amazon Kindle Store, Book One is set at an ‘Eye Catching’ $1.99 (Or equivalent ) with the other two a little higher at $2.99.
I set these prices after a very successful $0.99 cent Summer Promotion Sale. The idea being ‘what’s a dollar ninety-nine’ cheaper than a cup of coffee, but it’s a gamble, if they take the small risk and buy Book One... like what they read and want more....
I could set the prices for books two and three a little higher and there is absolutely nothing to say that what I’m doing is right, or someone else who flatly refuses to set a low price is wrong. The only sure proof of any marketing theory is in sales and I have to say that since swallowing my pride and lowering my prices I am making sales.
I could just as easily left the price down there at $0.99cents, and maybe a few months ago I might have, however I feel sure you are aware that there is a movement in the E Book market where a portion of it has been taken over by a group of morons who think that all you need to be a writer is a keyboard and access to the Internet. They have taken over the 99 cent slot on the assumption that if you rob someone of just $1 they will not complain or demand their money back.
Needless to say this has all but ruined the $0.99cent promotional deal for serious authors because good readers are not going to plough through page after page of dross looking for the odd nugget of gold.
Hopefully the morons will tire of their idiot games and remove themselves when they find a new con to amuse themselves, perhaps Amazon will come up with a Crap filter and give us back an important marketing tool.
Either way it is important to learn that Price is an important advantage that we Independent authors have; Use it wisely.