Friday 29 April 2016

A Guide to Self Publishing - Final Considerations

Pricing

If you stay within the 2.99-9.99 price range for your eBook, you should be OK. At either extremity, the royalty rates start falling and so you'd need to look into the impact that will have on your sales and profit. A lot of established authors sell eBooks at 4.99 so you should be cheaper than that if you are an unknown but you don't want to appear too cheap or you will risk looking like your book has no value. I pitched in the middle at $3.99.

So the question was, If I was happy with the profit from the sale of every eBook, why wouldn't I be happy with the same profit from the POD printers? The profit (say its $2.00) from e-sales out of 3.99 seems better than the profit from $8.99 which is what you would have to sell the print book for to generate the same income. I know people who get upset at the print profit because the royalty rate is lower by comparison but the bottom line is that you sold one copy of your product and your profit is $x regardless of the medium. Print just has higher overheads. I found a profit level I was happy with and adjusted every medium sale point to provide that profit. Depending on how the sales go, if I have resistance at $3.99, there is still the ability to drop to $2.99 on the ebook and the equivalent profit point on the print book. Below $2.99 I believe is the point where buyers start seeing your book as low value and the eBook retailers start decreasing your royalty percentage.

Proofing

When you have uploaded your images to the eBook distributors, you can review your artwork immediately on screen because you know whatever is onscreen is what other people will see. For the print format, it's different. You can't really get a good impression of your cover artwork until you see it. I ordered proofs from both Createspace and Ingram before I was willing to approve the final files. I noticed imperfections in the artwork in the first set of proofs (my fault!) and had to update the artwork document because I was not 100% happy with it. Remember, this is something you need to be happy with for the rest of your life (or at least until the next edition)! The proofing stage is frustrating because you are right there at the finish line, two approval clicks away from completion but it's not done until it's done well. I took the time to get it right and I'm glad I did. Perhaps if you could colour print your cover artwork you could circumvent the proofing process, but I'd actually recommend a proof. That way you know what your customers are going to get and I have to say, it's amazing when you see your work in paperback for the first time!

Useful Links



Amazon Author Page

I see this as being worthwhile. It makes your Amazon page look more professional and depending on your photo, more appealing. The Amazon Author Page is how you link eBook and Paperback versions to a single page.

In Closing

I hope this article has been useful to you in deciding how you will publish you eBook. The ability for anyone to be able to create high quality print and electronic versions of their work is an incredible thing and if you do undertake the process, I wish you every success in your writing and (self-)publishing career.


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