The print price of our journal is $3.75
Postage is expensive. If we get enough orders at our meeting, we can share the postage between us and buy them at $4.50 including postage. But why are they $9.95 on Amazon?
- If Amazon sells our book, Amazon wants to get paid. Fair enough. Right?
- If Barnes and Noble sells our book, through Createspace distribution, Barnes and Noble want to get paid. So does Createspace (a subdivision of Amazon).
- If two people want to get paid, the price needs to include enough money to pay them both.
- Which is a pain if the author also wants to get paid…
After selecting distribution through all channels, so our book can be sold through Barnes and Noble, and Powells, and purchased by libraries, etc., the minimum price Amazon will allow us to sell it at is just below $9.50. I upped this to $9.95 so the library would get a cut of sales.
The sales price has to be fixed across all channels. However, when fewer people need to be paid, more money’s left over for the author – the library in this case. So, sales through Createspace (don’t need to pay big brother Amazon) give most money to the library. Sales through Amazon come next. And sales through Barnes and Noble etc will give the library a little less than a dollar each.
I guess I should include the Kindle price here too. I uploaded the files, reformatted etc (see next post) and tried to set a kindle price. I suspect the pictures may be what pushed our price up, but I’m not sure. Anyway, they said the minimum sales price was $1.99 so I set that as the price. Last year’s journal still sells for $0.99
More words, more pages, more book, more money I guess.