- Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad
of booklaunchers.com.
We help professionals and entrepreneurs
write, publish and sell a fantastic nonfiction book.
Now when you self-publish, one of the essential things
that you have to figure out to sell your book,
is what price point to offer it at.
When you're trying to figure out the price point
of your book, it's one part art, one part science.
First you want to figure out
what is the ultimate goal of your book?
What are the distribution channels?
And what is the value you are offering to the reader?
By the way, Amazon's really what you need to
pay attention to as a self-published author.
That's where more than 80% of your
book sales are going to come from,
even if you have book store distribution.
So really, you're figuring out what's going
to make you stand out
and keep that Amazon monster fat and happy.
But how do you figure it all out?
Well, let's take a look.
Let's head on over to Amazon and I'll show you
one approach for figuring out a range
that you may want to price your books at.
All right, so here we are on Amazon.
Now let's say you've decided that
Start With Why by Simon Sinek
is a good comparable for your book.
So I've gone ahead and pulled it up on Amazon.
Now what you want to do is a couple things.
First you're gonna pull the price for the Kindle.
You're gonna pull the price for the paperback.
And there is in fact a hardcover available.
So you're gonna take all those prices
and put them in a spreadsheet,
just like I did over here.
So spreadsheet, put book title, category,
Kindle price, as you can see all these at the top.
And then you're going to input information here.
So book title, category, and then most importantly
you're putting the Kindle price, the softcover price
and the overall sales.
So we're gonna scroll down.
I'm gonna show you where you can find the sales numbers.
The Amazon Best Sellers Rank,
so it's 148 overall in Books.
Now I want to look at the categories,
because this is where I might find
some other books that are similar to it.
So I'm gonna click on this, it's a hyperlink,
and I'm going to go ahead and look at
other books that might be in this category,
to see if there is something else that might be
another comp for my books.
We'll just say Blueprint To Business might be it.
So now what I want to look at is number of reviews.
This one doesn't have very many reviews
so I probably won't use it as a comp.
You want to look for somebody with
probably 50 or more reviews, and 4-star or higher.
Because that's really, again,
you're looking for pricing comparables.
You don't really want to compete against somebody
who has no reviews, the book isn't selling,
because that's not going to be a great comp.
So you want 50 or more reviews and you also want to
have books that are in multiple formats.
So let's say this book,
The Code of an Extraordinary Mind,
was only available in Kindle.
That wouldn't work for our purposes.
We want books that are available in Kindle,
and ideally softcover as well as hardcover.
And then you're just going to take all this information
and keep inputting it into the spreadsheet.
When you have at least 20 to 50 comparable titles,
you're going to take an average of the Kindle price,
and average of the softcover price,
and see where you come out.
You may even want to take a mean and a low and a high,
and just really start to take a look at the range
of books you'll be competing with.
It might be tempting to just think about
how much profit you want to make from every book
and calculate it, but that would be a mistake.
Doing this exercise for another book project
that we're working on, we came out with
a $9.99 average for Kindle
and a $17.99 average for the softcover book.
Based on that, it depends on where you want to be
and how you want to compete with those books
in the categories that you were comparing yourself to.
You could take that average and add two dollars
or subtract two dollars.
It depends.
But if you haven't already seen my video
on selling your book too cheap,
then you definitely want to check that one out
before you make your pricing decision.
Now one thing you're probably thinking
is I haven't touched on how you're going to
figure out which categories are the right ones
for your book.
But this gets you started on pricing.
And of course if this seems like a giant pain in the butt
and you wish someone else would do it all for you,
our platinum level clients get this work done for them.
That's just part of our service to help you
write, publish and promote your book.
We'll talk about category selection and keywords
in the future, because it matters a lot too.
If you have a question, go ahead and post it
in the YouTube comments below.
If you want to share how you're going to approach
pricing your book, because there's more than one way
to do this, please share below.
And of course, when you do that you can tell us
about your book project if you want.
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I'll see you on the next video.