The pricing of your book is the same as the pricing of any commercial product in that it is very important. Both the retailer and the consumer must feel they are getting value for money, even though they are each viewing your book from opposite ends of the transaction.

If we take the retailer first, their decision on whether or not to stock and sell your book is a relatively easy one. Initially they want to know if your book is a good read. Once they’ve determined that you have written a very readable and interesting book, they then want to see what profit there is for them if they sell some of your books. Remember, retailers need to make a profit on everything they sell in order to stay in business. If by selling one of your books they are making less money than they would by selling most other books, guess what their decision will be regarding stocking any copies of your book. I know that sounds mercenary, but retailers are in business to make a profit, they are not charitable organisations!

Secondly, you rightly want to be paid for your time, creativity and perseverance in taking your book from an idea, to a rough draft, to a manuscript and finally to an edited, rewritten and possibly re-edited manuscript. What is an average royalty for an author? Like most things in life, to get to an average of anything there are highs and lows to be considered. A best-selling author will obviously command a larger royalty percentage than a first time novelist with no track record as to the saleability of their work. Another important factor in determining the wholesale price of your book (and therefore your royalty percentage) is the cost of printing. We utilise two printing methods, print-on-demand (see print-on-demand section) for small print runs of 150 books or less and conventional litho printing for print runs of 1,000 copies and more. Here are some examples of what royalties you can expect to achieve and what retail prices you would need to charge to attain those royalties for both printing methods.

As you can see from the above example the royalty you receive is 22.8% of the retail price of the paperback book and 12.77% of the hardback book. However, the retail prices (especially the paperback book) are quite a bit higher than you would find for the average book.

Both of the above litho prices include delivery to one UK address.

As is evident from the above examples the retail price is significantly lower (and more in line with the usual retail pricing, especially of paperbacks) and the royalty figures are still very reasonable.

However you must be sure of selling the 1,000 copies of your book before investing £2,080.00 (paperback) or £2,850.00 (hardcover) for the costs of printing.

A sound suggestion might be to initially use the Print on Demand facility to print a small number of books and gauge how they sell. If your book sells well in these “trials” then it may be prudent to order a larger print-run of 1,000 or more, but if sales prove to be difficult you won’t have spent a large amount of money on printing a 1,000 + books that you can’t sell. Remember at the end of the day you want to sell all of the books you have printed and not have hundreds of copies gathering dust in your spare room or garage.