Pricing a self-published book
A price has to clear two tests: it must leave you something after costs, and it must look reasonable to a reader who has never heard of you.
That gives you a floor and a ceiling. The work is finding where each one sits for your book.
For print, the floor is not a choice
Print-on-demand manufactures one copy at a time, and it charges you for that copy. The cost is not a flat fee. It rises with page count, it rises again if the interior is color rather than black ink, and it rises again for hardcover over paperback.
Then the retailer takes its cut of the list price. What is left is yours.
Run that in the order it actually happens and the shape is obvious: list price, minus the retailer's share, minus the per-copy print cost, equals your earnings. Set the list price too low and the middle two numbers eat the whole thing. There is a list price below which you simply cannot go, and the printer will tell you what it is.
The consequence catches people out: a long book has a higher floor than a short one. Two novels in the same genre at the same trim, one 280 pages and one 520, do not have the same minimum viable price.
A hypothetical, to show the arithmetic — not real rates. Say a printer charges a fixed amount per copy plus a per-page amount. The 280-page book costs 4 units to make, the 520-page book 6.5. At the same list price, that 2.5-unit gap comes out of your earnings on every copy sold, forever. The longer book has to be priced higher, or be shorter.
So this is not only a business question. Page count is set by trim size, margins, type size and leading — wider margins, larger type and generous leading all make a book longer. Those are design choices, and they quietly set your price.
In the Interior Formatter. Trim, margins, type size and leading live in one place, so you can see what a design decision does to your page count before you commit. That final count goes straight to the Cover Maker, so the spine matches the book you actually made. Start a book → · about the tools
For ebooks, the cost is near zero — but not zero
There is no manufacturing cost worth the name. That does not make an ebook free to sell.
Two mechanics matter. Stores pay different royalty shares in different price bands. A price just below a band edge and a price just above it can earn very different amounts per sale, and crossing the edge in the wrong direction can mean selling for more and earning less. Find out where the edges are in the store you are using, in the currency you are selling in, before you pick a number.
Some stores charge a delivery fee based on file size. That fee comes out of your share. For a text novel it is negligible. For a heavily illustrated book — a cookbook, a photo book, a children's picture book — the file can be large enough that the fee consumes most of what a low-priced sale earns, and at the wrong price point you can end up paying to give the book away. If your ebook has many images, check the file size and do the subtraction.
Readers price by category, not by your costs
None of the above is visible to a buyer. They compare your book to the ones beside it.
Every category has a going rate that regular readers know without being able to state it. A 300-page paperback thriller has an expected price. So does a debut poetry collection, a business paperback, a cozy mystery ebook. Price far above that rate and you need a reason the reader can see on the page — hardcover, color plates, unusual size, obvious reference value. Price far below it and some readers read the number as a signal about the book.
Spend an hour in the category. Look at recent independent titles with a comparable page count and format, not at big-house lead titles. That range is your ceiling, and other people's books set it.
The honest trade-offs
- A lower price does not reliably sell more copies. Discounting works when something else is driving discovery. On its own, a cheap price on a book nobody has found changes nothing except what each sale earns.
- A high price on a short book invites disappointment. Readers notice thinness relative to cost, and they say so in reviews.
- Book one of a series is often priced to recruit, not to earn. The arithmetic changes completely when there are three more books behind it. With a standalone, there is nothing behind it.
A method that works
- Get your floor. Use the printer's real per-copy cost for your final page count, trim and binding, and the retailer's actual share. Not an estimate — the numbers for your book.
- Get the going rate. Ten comparable titles, same format, similar length.
- Pick a price between them, nearer the category rate than the floor.
- Revisit with sales data. After a few months you will know more than you do now.
Change the price, not the page count
A list price is easy to change — edit it in your account and the listings update.
Page count is not. Changing it moves the cost floor and it moves the spine width, which means new cover files for every printer and binding you use. Settle the interior design first, then price the book you actually made.
In the tools. Set the interior once and the page count is fixed and even; the Cover Maker re-cuts that one design for four printers and three bindings, and exports the ebook cover at store size. Previews are free and unlimited, so you can test a longer trim against a shorter one before any money is involved. Start a book → · about the tools
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Going wide, or staying exclusive · More: Choosing a trim size · Margins and gutters · Barcodes, and the price code beside them