What is a fair book price?
What do you folks think is a fair price for: 1) An e-book? 2) A trade paperback (i.e. one of those 6x9 affairs)? 3) A hardback? I know the answer is likely to differ according to how long the book is.

Fair, I don't know. I guess the upper end of normal would be $6 $14 $20 for a standard novel. much mor ethan that would look odd IMHO

Pretty much what I was thinking. Paperback novels tend to sell for around $7, $10-14 for the large ones (looking on the back of Hoyle's Rules of Games which is about that size and it was priced $13), Hardbacks are going for around $24 these days in B&N.

It's been a while since i bought a hardback so that was a bit of guess.

I buy a lot of hardbacks -- prices between $24.95-$49.95. On average, around $30. I start to get squicky at $35, and it's got to really be something to go more than that. That being said, I also have been known to wait for the bargain table and remainders. And yard sales. And used book stores. I'm so far behind on my reading, I can afford to wait. But if I need it for work, $30 is about average. Thank God for that "Research materials" line item.

I stopped by the local GLBT bookstore yesterday and browsed through the SF/F section. It turned out to be a good way to compare book prices, because the bookstore carried so many small-press titles. For mass-market paperbacks (which are put out by the big companies), there's virtually no variance: they're seven or eight dollars, no matter what their length. For trade paperbacks, the variance is tremendous (even though I was looking at book that were all in the 200-400-word range): anywhere from ten dollars to twenty-two dollars. The latter price is from Harrington Press; I don't know how they get away with charging that for a three-hundred-page book. Most of the trade paperbacks were fourteen dollars, but I concluded that I wouldn't be breaking the reader's bank if I charged a couple of dollars more. Mind you, there's still the issue of the fact that buyers of online books have to pay for postage as well. By the way, the store carried three self-published books in that section, by three separate authors. The books were uniformly poor in design. Didn't browse through them to check the quality of the writing.

If I cut my royalty down to almost nothing for the sake of promoting one of my books globally (mind I do have to keep some royalty just so Lulu gets a cut--they do want a cut) I can conceivably come out with a 6*9 book of 368 pages ( a good hefty book) for about 22$ US. It's not too bad. Could be better, but it's still in a marketable range. I've seen books on the shelves here, of the same size, going for that price. But for marketing, I'd have to endure that almost useless royalty.

"I can conceivably come out with a 6*9 book of 368 pages ( a good hefty book) for about 22$ US. It's not too bad." Yes, I was talking about how could a regular publisher - one that's owned by a fairly large corporation - get away with that price. I think that consumers take into account that, the smaller the press, the higher their expenses are going to be. "mind I do have to keep some royalty just so Lulu gets a cut" Well, no, you don't, actually. Lulu will let you sell your book for the price of the production. http://www.lulu.com/help/index.php?fID=33#pricing That's one of the nicer aspects about that company, that they're willing to give up making money on no-profit books.

Right. So in the case of no royalty books, they make money on production costs only. If you look at it that way, they get paid no matter what they do, royalty percentage or not.

Yeah, the prices are steep. I wish they would lower them, but it's doubtful. Personally, I think it would be in their best interest to lower them and the shipping costs, because at this point in time, they cater mostly to a writer buying his own books for marketing purposes, and this is only a short term gain for Lulu, because if a book does happen to be good enough to have a readership, they've put it out of a reasonable price range for the readership, and thereby cut their throats in terms of long term profits on a book that really would do well. Lower prices would make easier sales. I did the calculations based on what they said for global distribution, and it hiked my 18 dollar book to 22 for me to have any sort of royalty, and the Lulu FAQ said that this price was "suggested" and that the global retailer might price it down, without touching my royalty. I don't really know how true that is in actual working reality. But from the book being only on Lulu for sale, at about 15$, to basic distribution with Amazon in the US, the book went to 18$, and then to 22$ for global. I personally don't want my book at 22$, but the shipping costs of Lulu suck so bad for people outside of the US that global may be the only way to get around it, because Lulu isn't in charge of the shipping and handling at that point. No matter how I look at it, I have a tough sell for one reason or another, shipping or book price. I don't know that any other POD service would be better, especially given I had to pay nothing up front to be published at all.

kmfrontain remarked: "So in the case of no royalty books, they make money on production costs only. If you look at it that way, they get paid no matter what they do, royalty percentage or not." Let me rephrase myself: They pinch you less that way. :) The question of how much they pad the production prices is one I've heard debated. As I recall, Lulu is not the printer of their own Basic Distribution books, and their proponents claim that they don't earn anything over what the printer charges them. Their opponents claim that they do. There's no way of telling, as far as I can see, short of going to the trouble of tracking down their printer and finding out how much that printer charges other people, *and* making sure there's no secret connection between the printer and Lulu Press. vincentdiamond wrote: "Too risky, too expensive and not enough credibility for me as a consumer." I have to tell you that I would never have ventured into self-publishing if I didn't already have a small-but-faithful audience for my online fiction. And even then, I've made the decision to simultaneously co-publish my novels on the Web. From the marketing point of view, it's simply easier for me. No risk for the consumer, and the only risk for me is that the reader will only be interested in the free version. But I think that the number of links that one can get in such a case are much larger than if one only publishes a pay version. kmfrontain is doing something similar by offering a free e-version of the first volume in her series. kmfrontain wrote: "I think it would be in their best interest to lower them and the shipping costs" I know that the situation in the international shipping costs remains bad, but they've recently added domestic UPS shipping. Has any American here bought a book from them recently and know how expensive it is to ship? As for the production costs, the killer is the cover-and-binding cost. The per-page cost (two cents) is actually quite reasonable, but the cover and binding cost four dollars, which is three dollars more than with Global Distribution. That suggests that some cost-cutting could be done. If they don't cut costs, someone else will. This is a competitive market. Free or nearly free alternatives: Café Press. No up-front fee. Seven dollars for binding and three cents per page, so it works out worse than Lulu. http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/books.aspx Diggory Press. A UK publisher with USA distribution. Up-front fee is thirty pounds (fifty U.S. dollars) plus. It was the "plus" that worried me - there are extra charges connected with stuff like ISBNs - but this press has some satisfied customers. I'm darned if I can figure out off-hand how their book prices compare to Lulu's; their calculation is rather complicated. http://diggorypress.com/product_info.php?cPath=160&products_id=263 http://diggorypress.com/product_info.php?cPath=216&products_id=268&osCsid=9fc05b12fccf6487dbcdab9b615b4c9c Why I'm sticking with Lulu is the level of customer support for authors. If something goes wrong, I know I'll be able to track down the resolution at Lulu.

Yes, they do have the customer support. And despite the flaws, they're more upfront than most places I checked out. Whatever the down sides, I'm not sorry I chose Lulu. :D

Ah, very interesting to learn that it's the cover/binding, not the per page, that sucks up most of the cost. That would probably explain why for a given small press, the price of a 200 page book and the price of a 380 page book are the same. Dusk mentioned that "kmfrontain is doing something similar by offering a free e-version of the first volume in her series." kmfrontain, have you found this to be a successful marketing tool -- do the majority of people who take the free first volume come back and buy the rest of the series? Alternatively, do you (or anyone else here) find it useful to put up the first chapter of each of your published books so that it's available for free on a download site or your website?

I have people who've told me they're now waiting for Cheating Chance to come out. I put up one chapter (I've got it as Chapter 3 but that might change once all edits are done). All the people (and it ain't scads) hit my web site after getting one of my shorter works from TQ and read that. I think it don't hurt as part of an overall marketing plan.