Pricing your book properly may be the most important marketing decision you will make as a publisher. The price you choose will determine your sales, revenue, profits and opportunities for long-term growth. However, there is a big difference between pricing for sales through retail stores (including bookstores) and to non-retail buyers. You can improve your business significantly if you price your book correctly foe retail or business-to-business (B2B) sales.
Most publishers price their books for sale through retail stores, particularly bookstores (brick and clicks). They consider their costs (production, distribution, shipping, operations) and the desired profit, and then set the price. This is placed on the rear cover and included in al metadata. It tells consumers how much the publisher values the content, and it sets the point from which distribution discounts are calculated.
Today, there are authors of every stripe, from those in time-honored fiction and non-fiction categories to business people and professionals who've learned that writing a quality book is essential to building their brand.
In 2012, Americans self-published more than 391,000 books, according to market research giant Bowker. That's a 400 percent increase since 2007. Also in 2012, traditional publishers released nearly 302,000 titles for a whopping total of nearly 700,000 new books. In one year! With the glut of new books being released each year, promoting just one can feel like a mission impossible.
Reinvent Your Publishing Company for Sustained Growth
By Brian Jud
One difficulty that inhibits the growth of book-publishing companies is that they think of themselves as book-publishing companies, selling books through bookstores (bricks and clicks) and to perhaps to libraries. However, the advent of Amazon.com, ebooks, social media and more demanding customer expectations challenges that philosophy.
If you think this is another article pushing you to finally open up a social media account to promote your book- it is. I will go even further to say that you cannot publish your book without social media.
I know many heavy readers and scholarly type individuals who do not have time for social media. They cite the time wasting factor that everyone is turned into a voyeur, and finally that it doesn’t lead to sales anyway- so what’s the big deal. The truth is that establishing your presence on social media (and I’m including a personal website in my definition) is a critical step in publishing, marketing and selling your book. For all of the reasons listed above to not set it up and more!
Read on to find out what your readers want, and why you have to use social media to deliver.
1. Readers want to know you are real
Here are four simple options for reviving book marketing – and sales!
1. Release it in eBook: This should be your first – and easiest – step. If a traditional house published your book, check if they have the rights to your digital content. Many old contracts don’t have this provision so be sure and check. What next? Most savvy eBook folks can work with a PDF of the book, and course, a Word doc works well, too. Just convert it to a digital format and you’re done! It’s pretty easy. If you do this, consider adding some new reviews as well.
There are many things that publishers wish authors knew before they signed their contract or even submitted their books. I know that I have had a few head-scratching interactions with potential authors, from being told "I don't read books" to "I didn't know I could talk about my book". Here are 7 Things Publishers Wished Authors Knew, and sometimes are a little perturbed at having to explain:
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I was watching Mike and Molly reruns the other day and I bumped into a real life scenario that I could relate to in the episode, “Buy the Book.” It was a refreshing contrast to zombies, murder, and scientific thrillers. Molly gets the first copy of her published book and is thrilled as a new mother holding her newborn for the very first time. Creating something from scratch and watching it take its first breath puts us as close as we are ever going to get to our own creator. That’s why it has such an intense effect on us.
Once that moment of euphoria is over, reality sets in and we remember that we must sell books because you did receive a sizeable advance from the publisher in expectation of you doing so. Even though Molly is thrilled to see her book in print, now comes the difficult task of trying to market it. If you are a new author and want to get a practical picture of what happens when you start to market your book, I would recommend you look at this episode.
What is an elevator pitch and why do you need one? An elevator pitch is a short one- to two-sentence description about the book. It's the briefest of the briefest descriptions you can develop. The reason elevator pitches are important is that we have an ever- shrinking attention span, so you need to capture someone's attention in a very short, succinct pitch.
How do you begin crafting an elevator pitch? The first step is to look at the core of your book. What is your book about, really? Looking at the core of your book will help you determine the primary message. The next step is to look at the real benefits to the reader. Not what you think the reader wants to know but what they actually need: What's in it for the reader?
