buy « Robin Writes

The short answer is this: I’ll be darned if I know!

The long answer, however, is this: Many, many factors.

First, you have to have a good story, and/or a book with wide appeal. Second, it must be well-designed. Third, you have to get it to market.

A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Something to hook the reader and let him in, hoping to discover more and wanting to know more.

A book with wide appeal is something to which many people can relate. In fiction, that can be all over the map, so to speak; in non-fiction, it could be as simple as cooking, or self-help, or entertainment, or information on a common illness or disorder.

That simply means that it must have universal appeal—a book about your family will be interesting to your family, but not necessarily anyone else (unless you’re famous). A book about something you overcame or your own life story may be intriguing to some, but not to many (unless you’re famous).

And of course, you can’t price it too high.

Timing helps too—you don’t want to release a holiday book in the spring, for example.

Then you have marketing. This means exposure. If you don’t have a website or do nothing with it, if you don’t have a blog or never post new material, if you only market to other writers, etc., etc., you will not sell books. If you never do events or festivals or appearances or speaking engagements, you will not sell books.

If you do all these things, consistently, you will sell books. Probably.

The single biggest factor for marketability is luck.

Just stop and let that sink in for a moment.

You’ve all seen really crappy books, or even just a short story sold as a “book,” that climbs the Amazon charts. Ugh. And good ones, from unknown authors, that just sell and sell and sell.

WHAT THE HECK?

Luck. Pure and simple. Like winning the lottery. I can’t explain it and neither can you—if you have the awesomest story ever, and the most brilliant illustrations, but sometimes that just can’t compare to this type of luck.

What does this mean? Not a thing. It certainly doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t write or draw or try to sell books—that won’t get you a darned thing, and that’s for sure. Keep trying, keep working on it—why?

Because that’s who you are.

“How do I know what price to put on my book?”

As a former bookseller and a current publisher and author, I can tell you two things for sure:

If your book is priced over $15, it won’t sell.

If your book is priced below $8, you won’t make any money.

Now, I’m speaking of paperbacks, of course. E-books are bit different. First, you need to look at prices on the top sellers in your genre. Next, consider value for dollar.

Yes, it’s a book, yes, it’s a work of art. Readers still want value—that’s why, when your E-book is listed as “free,” so many people download it. At least half of them, maybe more, just want something for free.

With paperbacks, you shouldn’t price a 150-page book the same as a 300-page novel. You won’t get many sales. There are a lot of choices out there, a lot of reading material. Make it easier on your customer.

If your book is priced at $24.95 and someone else’s cost $14.95, that’s a huge difference and guess which one is more likely to be purchased?

If you sell directly, and your novel is priced at $14.95 with a printing and shipping cost of about $6.00, you’ll still earn about $9.00 per sale. If you want to sell directly to bookstores and other venues, you need to offer a discount of at least 40%, which means you earn about $3.00 per book. Still not bad, when you consider that authors’ royalties range from 10-18%.

Let’s look at the other end: an $8 book. Still the same cost to you of $6.00 and you earn $2.00. Selling direct. If you want to get into stores, you’ll have to discount those books to just under $5.00 and you make diddly. Now, if your book is only 150 pages, you might earn .80 per sale.

E-books are different, because there are such low costs associated with “producing” them. On KDP, you’ll garner 70% of the selling price; sometimes, yes, there downloading costs charged to you of a few cents.

A .99 book will earn .69. A $2.99 book will earn $2.09. Why would you offer your hard work for only .99, unless it’s for a promotion, for a short time?

On the other end, hardly any reader will pay $9.99 for an E-book unless the author is very, very well known. Some bestsellers can ask much, much more.

It’s value for dollar. Plain and simple.

RHP’s books run from $10.95 on up to $14.95 for paperback, $2.99 to $3.99 for Kindle. Authors make money, the house makes money, and readers are happy. And they buy books.

Short stories, usually just available as E-books, also seem to be popular. To me, downloading a story that runs a few pages, even for .99, seems more trouble than it’s worth; then again, I don’t read a lot of short stories. I prefer to dive deep into a novel and stay there for a while.

As an author, you can certainly whip up a short story and upload and sell it for .99—some authors make a killing that way. Particularly certain genres, such as erotica. I do not personally know of any professionals who do this, but I’m sure some do—perhaps under pen names.

And, since I have no experience with this, perhaps one of you would like to weigh in?

You could also combine your short stories into an anthology—same pricing guidelines as for novels.

If you keep your prices between that margin of $8 and $15, you should be able to sell books, if they’re well-written, formatted, and edited, with a good cover. Keep your E-book prices in the middle, too, and you should be able to sell your books and make money at the same time.

Of course, if you use one of those vanity presses that I constantly nag about, you’re going to have to raise prices in order to make even a couple bucks. So, yeah, another reason to avoid that!