The sh*t no one tells you about book pricing
I have made some mistakes...
First, news of the weird
When it comes to Ill-Behaved Women, there’s playing by your own rules and then there’s sh*tting all over people who aren’t even in your game. In this edition I’m calling out some of the latter camp. Regardless of your stance on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland withholding an unredacted taped interview with President Joe Biden, I’m giving a thumbs down to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (?/GA), Jasmine Crockett (D/TX), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D/NY), and Anna Paulina Luna (R/FL).
After Crockett asked Greene, "Do you know what we are here for?" the conversation took a worse turn.
Greene responded, "I don't think you know what you are here for ... I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you're reading."
AOC to the rescue. "I would like to move to take down Ms.Greene's words. That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person? Move her words down," she said.
But when Greene commented to AOC, "Are your feelings hurt?" Her reply escalated things. "Girl. Baby girl, don't even play ... We are gonna move and take your words down."
Still, it took a few minutes for Crockett to fire back. But when she did?
"I'm just curious, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's bleach-blonde bad-built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?"
Ouch.
Then along comes Luna telling Crockett to calm down. Never in the history of women have the words “calm down” been effective, so I have to give a thumbs up to Crockett’s reply: "Don't tell me to calm down because y'all talk noise and then you can't take it... " We’ve all been there.
To my knowledge, none of them has apologized.
Books books books
In the lead up to my debut novel, Florida Girls, I have changed my book’s price twice. That’s two times too many. Here’s where I went wrong so you don’t have to.
After reading the advice to price it like the competition, I started at $23.99. Then I started noticing books far less expensive than mine and panicked. I’d also read that you should consider physical copies of your book more like publicity than income, and that’s true whether you’re traditionally or indie published, so I dropped the price to $19.99.
What I wasn’t thinking about? How much it would cost a bookstore to sell my book, in part because the primary distributor for indie books, IngramSpark (IS), is not transparent in its pricing. Nowhere does it report how much bookstores pay per copy. That leaves me to guess what there margin is. WHY?
At $19.99, it seems that bookstores can’t afford to sell my book. To make this easier to visualize, let’s pop in some numbers.
LAST FRIDAY I discovered that IS was keeping 15% of the discount I have on my book. That meant that bookstores were only realizing about a 33% margin on the $19.99 price. That’s not affordable for a retail store. The only way they could carry my book would be if it was ordered by a customer or if I cart over a box to sell on consignment.
When you input pricing into IS, you set the discount and return policy.
Okay, that a 5% difference on a $20 item changed the royalty by $1 should have been an immediate clue. I have a lot on my mind right now.
Moving on…
It’s just not obvious what pricing threshold allows a bookstore to be able to afford to stock your book. (Real talk: If I had to lay odds, I’d bet that different bookstores have different deals. The other uneven part of the playing field is the printing cost—trad publishers print books in bulk using different printers, and so their costs are lower.)
After much hand-wringing and looking around at the competition, I landed on $21.99 as the price. Here’s why:
One clue that this pricing will work better for retail stores is that it’s showing a higher royalty than at the $19.99 price at a 55% discount, but lower than it would be on the same price/book with a 50% discount. $2.88 is 13% of $21.99 vs. the 15% that $3 amounts to on $19.99.
At least I think? If I pop that into this Shopify margin calculator, the numbers looks like this:
I’m not sure how accurate $13.32 is, that’s simply the price it took to get close to $21.99 and $19.99. If I take IS’s stated cheapest cost to print my book and add my royalty + their 15%, the cost should be $12.97. (On these margins, that’s a lot).
All I can say with confidence is—and I don’t mean to besmirch anyone who wants to make a living through books—the author makes the least amount of money per book sold.
Some real talk about the traditional publishing pricing structure:
Though a traditional publisher does all this work to figure on pricing and much more, the numbers still aren’t great. If a book sells for $20, your royalty rate is .07%, that’s $1.40 to the author.
If that author got a $20,000 advance, they’d have to sell 14,286 books to “earn out.”
After paying your agent 15%, you have $17,000 left.
Assuming it takes a year to write and edit spending 40 hours a week, the author earned $8.17/hour before the book comes out with its endless bonus hours for publicity needs.
Assuming their cost to print a 360-page book is $5.73 (wild guess but a high one), on that same quantity the publisher would earn $183,861.22. I’m fairly certain bookstores still pay the freight on trad pub shipping.
And so…
While it’s true that trad books generally outsell indies, and because the publisher is handling pricing and distribution and design and setup and editing, which gives the author has that “extra” time outside that 40-hour week (with no holidays) to teach classes and give talks and do other things to supplement their writing income, the math is tough either way.
There’s also that other math, the gatekeeper math.
I spent years looking for agents and publishers for my memoirs. I’m grateful to them all, and still, as an elder GenXer, I don’t have 7 years to spend trying to get out a new book. If I get back to what I meant to do today, work on the follow-up to Florida Girls, I will have two books out this year! Besides, learning how to do all this stuff has been a lot of fun for this weirdo. Bonus, I get to have a closer connection to my readers, too. So, despite my mistakes, I’m glad I’m here.
Book news!
I finished the first draft of Vegas Girls, book 2 of The Queenpin Chronicles and the follow up to Florida Girls. OVER THE MOON! Now the hard work of editing.
That said, I’m already cooking on the third and final book, Havana Girls, but I don’t see that out till later in 2025 (I started working on book 2 last April. With all the research, it takes about a year to get out a historical fiction novel, which is where the estimated timeline for book 3 comes from.)
Freebies!
These free offers are going away soon, so check them out!
PS: Since my book is out tomorrow I’m rushing this out so please forgive sentence fragments or other weirdness that may have slipped in here! xLL
Your turn!
When do you think this appalling public behavior started? Some have suggested it’s a consequence of social media, but I think it goes back to 1998. (I’ll tell you why if you comment!)
What did you read this weekend?
Where are you vacationing this summer?
Reading ALL FOURS A novel by Miranda July. Not halfway thru but great story. Marketed as a menopausal tale but I think that’s a ploy—a great one—but it’s a stretch. She’s a filmmaker. I think you’ll like it. Sorry to hear about the book business. My publisher would not allow returns so Books & Books wouldn’t stock my book. Bravo for you getting deep into the mud.
I didn’t realize how complicated pricing is, but you may have explained why my book is not interesting to bookshops. I could never understand why paperbacks retail at such high prices the US. In the UK they’re usually £9.99, £10.99 max in bookstores. Since most things are more expensive here, I’m surprised books are cheaper!