$10 - eBook
$75 - limited edition signed personalized illustrated trade paperback (limited to 250)
$250 - limited edition signed personalized illustrated hardcover (limited to 100)
I'd like to start taking pre-orders for the book (mostly 'cause people have started asking me, and also because I'm doing a reading in the city Thursday night and it'd be nice to have a sign-up sheet there). I have NO idea how to price it. Any suggestions? It seems a little weird to price the eBook more or less than the $10 somehow. But on the other hand, I wasn't planning on doing the other editions at anywhere near those numbers. I was thinking more something like:
$10 - eBook
$25 - fancy trade paperback
$40 - fancy hardcover
Does that seem high? Low? I have no idea.
I should note that I almost never buy fancy editions of anything -- I'm happy with the cheapest used paperback money can buy, as long as it's in good condition. I am not the target audience for the print editions, clearly. But I also do prefer print to electronic, most of the time, so I'm not the target audience for the eBook either. Hm. Maybe I need to do a cheaper mass market edition for people like me, priced at $10 or so?
I'm almost certainly going to be print POD, just because I didn't really budget enough money to do proper print runs. So a fairly high per-unit cost for each book. But with POD it's also relatively easy to do many different editions -- just have to pay my layout person a little more for each one, I think.
I would buy a hardcover at $30 or maybe even $35, but not at $40, FWIW.
I just did a quick survey of some books I’ve bought in the past couple years. For ordinary-length novels published by major publishers and small presses, and bought in bookstores or at cons, I’m used to paying on the order of $15-$20 for a trade paperback, and $25-$30 for a hardcover, before sales tax.
(Extra-long books, like Gardner’s Year’s Bests, cost a little more. I didn’t check the extra-short books.)
But those aren’t fancy editions. I think limited edition signed personalized illustrated books can cost a lot more. Then again, I think limited editions are usually intended for the collector market, and collectors will pay a lot. Then again, I suspect collectors are often expecting really fancy production values: special paper, ribbon bookmark, slipcase, etc.
Re ebooks: New ebooks from major publishers appear to be running about $7-$13 from the iTunes Store, with a lot of them at either $10 or $12. Didn’t check Kindle. I think Night Shade ebooks (from a third-party ebookstore) tend to be much cheaper, but I don’t remember for sure.