Price it so you don't lose money is the simple principle that I would advise.

What that price is will depend entirely on you. How much can you can get your books printed for? What cut will you give to a distributor? (Whether as a PDF to someone like RPGnow, or selling at a reduced rate to a shop.) What value do you put on your work? What overheads do you have to cover? Where do you want to place your work, in monetary terms, in the marketplace? Do you want to make money, lose money or break even?

These are all rhetorical questions, by the way.

I recently had to undertake a course on avoiding price fixing, being part of a cartel or taking part in bid-rigging. What that course told me was that it is illegal for us to arrange a "standard" price to keep the cost of books high -- it is highly anti-competitive (and the penalties range from fines to imprisonment). So, I cannot tell you what price you should shoot for. The books on the Collective Endeavour stands, for example, are all priced individually by the owners and I can't say how each one of them came to their prices.

There's loads of ways to do it - and as Gregor alludes to, you can really price whatever you want, so essentially it is up to you. You will have an idea in your head about how much you think your product should be and its probably a decent idea. You should cover some basics however...

If you are wanting to make a profit on the transaction, then you need to have an awareness of your costs and have an idea of the number of sales that you want to recoup your costs within. This will allow you to work out the unit cost of your book.

Now understand how much profit you want to make - which can, again, depend highly on your personal views. Again, assuming you actually want to make a profit, pick a price. Now look at your distribution outlets and the cut that they take. Deduct that. Now take off your costs. If you have a negative number, you might want to raise your price!! If the number is positive, only you will know whether it is enough...or too much!

Its actually quite a complicated process to explain in text!

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

At general level, not so much.

There are two factors.

* Costs. You need to be aware of your costs and set the price at least high enough to break even.

* Market. You need to be aware of what the market will bear (with reference to what similar products go for), and not set the price so high that no-one will buy it.

So you tend to end up with a spectrum between these two points, within which you can choose your price point. Problems come, of course, when costs dictate a price higher than the market will bear.

Specific considerations come in with things like where you get the book produced and where you're selling it. For instance, Lulu's different costing for different formats; or, if you're selling at IPR, needing to price so you can make some profit on retail sales (where your return = 0.44 x sale price).

You probably need to tell us something about your plans and ask specific questions.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

I kinda thought it was a combination of many factors, but its very useful as check list to have these factors written down for me.

Tim- don't take this the wrong way but I'm going to keep my own plans for Monkey to myself for now since they are rather vague and half formed.

Regards

;O)Newt
D101games -An Imaginary Company

I'll just be over here with a twitchy nose ;)

Definitely looking forward to this one.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

Hi,

I just finished publishing my book (on lrp combat) and did it through the print-on-demand site lulu.com.

Upside is that it's cost me absolutely nothing (as books are only printed one copy at a time in response to customer orders).

Downside is that copies are more expensive than they would be if I'd paid for a print run (my book is about £13 for an A5 paperback with ~250 pages). I did all the formatting and cover art myself, which can be a real pain.

That is an insane price!

LULU will make an A5 B&W 250-pp book for >£10, however...

You can be cute about this. Make it as a 6x9 book instead (a minimal change) and the 250-pp book comes out at ~£5.50.

The message here is to be canny about the format and not just picking "the size it ought to be".

Switching it to 9x7 (landscape) makes the same extent... £3.88.

Even A4 is £6.21 a unit for a 250-pp book.