Month: January 2011

One of the most powerful elements of publishing with Outskirts Press is the flexibility granted to the author regarding pricing and profit. We are one of the only publishers that pay 100% royalties (100% of the profits), but as you will see in this posting, the actual “dollars and cents” depends upon three other factors: The Retail Price, The Discount, And the Base Copy Price, or in other words, the single copy production price.

Most publishers enforce all these prices without giving you any say in the matter, but you will see from the pie charts below, that can significantly affect YOUR profits and your retail price.  At Outskirts Press, we only set the base copy price of the book.  The retail price and discount (we call it a “Price Plan”) is up to you.

Book pricing is complicated because everyone has an opinion about what they think “the best” pricing is.  So what better way to demonstrate the flexibility of our pricing by allowing our social community the chance to vote on the Pricing Option they like best for the Facebook Anthology, Fandemonium?

Below are 4 different pricing options. Scroll down to the Polling box and vote on your favorite. The pricing option that receives the most votes at the end of the polling period will be the pricing we use for Fandemonium.

You can click on the charts to enlarge them if you need to see them better.

Pricing Option 1 has a retail price of $16.95, a price plan of 25, and a profit of $7.38 for The American Red Cross every time a book sells.  This is the price plan we recommend for this book. Even though we give the power to the author, we always make recommendations to help the author select the best pricing for his or her goals.

Pricing Option 2 also has a retail price of $16.95, but has a price plan of 50.  This means 50% of the retail price goes to the wholesalers and retailers who are involved in selling the book (Ingram, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.).  As a result, the profit for the American Red Cross is lower ($3.16).   Physical bookstores often require significant portions of the retail price in order to be compelled to consider selling the book, but online sites like Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com don’t. 

Pricing Option 3 demonstrates the powerful flexibility of publishing with Outskirts Press. Yes, you can set the retail price for this particular book as low as $7.95.  But you will notice the majority of the “pie”  goes toward the production cost of the book ($5.33) as a result. Even with Ingram/Amazon only getting $1.99, that leaves only 63 cents of “author profit” for The American Red Cross.   Since the “pie”  is smaller ($7.95 instead of $16.95) all the pieces are smaller, too, with the exception of the production price, which stays the same in all four options.

Pricing Option 4 has a retail price of $12.95  and a Price Plan of 25.  The base copy price is the same in every scenario, which leaves $3.24 for wholesalers/retailers and $4.38 for The American Red Cross.

What pricing option should the Facebook Anthology have? Vote here: