Series Strategy ...

[Ray McCarthy]

Amazon where the percentage payable to Amazon rockets if the cover price is over £10.

The percentage the author gets DROPS at lower prices, on eBooks anyway. AFAIK Amazon don't mind higher prices.

170,000 - you had to be up at over £11 per copy to get just a couple of pennies in royalties

Depends on size of paper and font. At that number of words, on 6" x 9", the £11 might be marginal. But even £14 isn't expensive for a big paperback outside discount. Then you'd bee seeing as much actual revenue as the eBook. It's the eBook that will sell, the paper POD for SP is a just a public service and a way to have a nice copy on your own shelf, maybe also to show or loan.

Loaning an actual eBook reader to someone that hasn't got one is fraught with horrors, unfortunately.

 

[Montero]

I'd think £14 very expensive for a paperback..... (You do mean £14 not $14?)

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I did mean £14 for the hypothetical 180K, but perhaps its cost can be got down to same as 150K book, which can sell easily for $15

I'd expect typical paperbacks at $15 / €12 / £11 approx, that's possible at even 150K. 180K words is slightly more than twice size of best selling books, about 80K.
It's hypothetical, we'd need to check what cost of 180K words is today with largest feasible page size, least plausible margins and fonts etc, as POD is most depending on number of pages.

£14 is at top of what is plausible unless it's a reference work, but people will pay more for fat 180K book than a skinny 30K book.

However people will far more easily buy a SP e-Book than SP POD paperback, for a number of reasons.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Traditional paperbacks in the UK rarely retail for more than £8.99.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Traditional paperbacks in the UK rarely retail for more than £8.99.

£8.99 is £9 vs £11 Hmm. (150K word book, may be possible to be at £7.99 for 50K words?)
£8.99 should be €11 or under here. Typically €11.99 or more unless supermarket or other discount, anything "important" in paperback is much more. Allegedly differences are due to currency hedging (I had thought VAT but I'm assured that's only magazines).

However people will far more easily buy a SP e-Book than SP POD paperback, for a number of reasons.

This means that it's not just a question of matching price. For SP POD to compete on price, it would need to be at Tesco mass market pricing, which would need POD to be about 1/3rd current cost.

So SP POD is really for people that REALLY want it on paper, not eBook and not really casual sales?

 

[pambaddeley]

Several years back I played with a Createspace calculation tool where you put in word count and picked a book size (as in how tall, how deep) and from what I remember, the longer the book, the higher the price - not unreasonably - but if you've written something long - might have been over 170,000 - you had to be up at over £11 per copy to get just a couple of pennies in royalties....... (I mean pennies not percentage.) Been a while since I did the calcs and not been back to find the tool, but the numbers were depressing. So yes, people on Goodreads are right about Amazon setting the price.
You'd want to be announcing loudly how long your book is so as to show it is big and thick for the money, finding somewhere on the Amazon sales page to do that. But a lot of the public don't know what word count means, so you'd need to also be saying pages and comparing to other like books - not exactly a concise soundbite.

I seem to remember that there is also a wrinkle that at the moment there is a £10 threshold on Amazon where the percentage payable to Amazon rockets if the cover price is over £10.

I am currently reading Michael J Sullivan's originally self-pubbed Riyria series, as re-printed by Orbit, and they have two of his original books to one of their paperbacks.

Thanks. Yes, that's the impression I had when the book gets over 100K and my first one is well over that. I heard £12 quoted more recently and the royalty was miniscule. Will bear your advice in mind when I come to do mine, which won't be for quite a while as I'm still in the editing stage.

I also heard from several sources that if you choose cream paper instead of white, it makes the book thicker and you have to allow for that on spine sizing, and I suppose the postage might increase too, though the cream paper looks nice, at least on a friend's shorter book that I saw.

 

[pambaddeley]

So SP POD is really for people that REALLY want it on paper, not eBook and not really casual sales?

That's my understanding because it comes out as quite a few more £ than a standard paperback. I know people who can price their self published paperbacks at £8.99 but they are doing it through the older method of getting a large print company to print them and having them registered with Gardeners etc. for distribution. (In practice, they sell most of them through workshops, craft fairs, school fairs and the like though they also have them on Amazon. People could order them through bookshops because they are in Gardeners, but in practice I don't think they get sales that way.) Because they are doing it as a co-operative and one of them has a storage facility, they can start with a bulk print run which keeps down the unit cost, then have smaller reprints to restock.

 

[pambaddeley]

For info, a link to CreateSpace explaining how they calculate the royalty - CreateSpace: Self Publishing and Free Distribution for Books, CD, DVD
You have to know your trim size as well as the number of pages before commencing, then try it with a particular book price.

I think the biggest losses to authors come if they go with expanded distribution where CreateSpace make it available through more than just Amazon. I think this also allows it to appear in IngramSpark, so it could be ordered via bookshops or libraries at least in theory; more so in the US: Global Print Distribution Partners | Sell My Book | IngramSpark

Someone posted on Goodreads that they received 0.01c on a $12 book but that sounds a bit extreme. Possibly they had put it on expanded distribution where I believe the royalties can be very low.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I heard £12 quoted more recently and the royalty was miniscule.

POD royalties can be very small indeed. I think I've seen someone before suggest you just treat it as a small bonus on top of your ebook marketing/sales. However, if you treat POD as a serious business model in its own right, it may be worth considering splitting a novel up into different parts - 2,3, even 4 - and perhaps reflect this also in ebooks. But getting the pricing right for both could be a challenge.

Even if Createspace sounds expensive, at least delivery is already accounted for - I've learned for myself with an online shop just how much postage can really eat into your margins. At the moment, sending a book-sized small parcel by Royal Mail second class would cost around £2.85 within the UK.

 

[pambaddeley]

Yes Royal Mail is expensive especially since the sizing became part of the equation, not just weight. Small light weight paperbacks that fit through a standard letterbox and would have been economical to post in the old days are hit now because they obviously don't go through the tiny slot in the card used at the PO to separate 1st or 2nd class post from Large Letter.

I think the general view on POD is treat it as a bonus as you say - if you do sell a few that way, they are sales contributing to your ratings, it is being read etc. If passed on it might lead to further interest/readership.

The general opinion on Goodreads about splitting up novels - which some people have done - is that this tends to hack off readers so I wouldn't personally go that route.

 

[ratsy]

I'll shed my new experience on the POD matter.

In the US, I just lowered the selling price to correspond with and ebook sale on Lake Manor that starts tomorrow. I have moved the sell price down to 11.99 US from 13.99. The royalty I see off each sale is 3.92US. In the UK, at a sale price of 7.99 the royalty is 2.07 pounds. These are not bad margins if you keep in mind that I have no cost to prebuy, or inventory any of the books.

I have also just landed some shelf space at a local bookstore. At a $15 canadian list price, I will be making 2.64 per copy sold. The margin shrinks because I had to get those books to my house.

The way I look at it, the more avenues the better. Do keep in mind that Lake Manor is 200 pages long, so that should be taken into account.

Anyone can go to createspace and price out a book and see what royalties they would be making depending on size and page count.

 

[Cathbad]

Someone posted on Goodreads that they received 0.01c on a $12 book but that sounds a bit extreme. Possibly they had put it on expanded distribution where I believe the royalties can be very low.

I make from a nickel to a quarter on books in expanded distribution. I sell 40 to 60 books a month, and maybe 1 or 2 of those are from expanded distribution. So... I'm not worried about it at this point.

 

[Montero]

SP book I've actually purchased - Stella Riley's The Black Madonna. Kindle £4.23, Paperback £12.99, pages 624 - so quite a thick book. (Recommended by the way, if you like historical romances - her history is well researched.)

What I noticed about the print edition was that it was:

1. Not a standard paperback size - more one of the big "hardback" sized paperback. (I forget the correct name for that format. It is the sort of size released by trad publishers after the hardback and before what I'd call a paperback.)
2. Printed on very white paper - it was really a decent quality of laser printer paper, as compared to the much more "porous looking" and yellowish paper you get for a big run of paperbacks from a trad publisher
3. I think the font size was larger than in a trad paperback. (But haven't checked exactly.)

So are there any CreateSpace print settings that get the book "down" to the dimensions of a normal "trad" paperback and can you reduce font size and paper quality? Or are you limited by the use of laser printers, rather than printing presses?

 

[Brian G Turner]

Oh, btw, for what it's worth - in traditional publishing the author's royalties for paperbacks are in the region of 7%-8% of the list price. That means for a £5.99-£6.99 paperback, the author would get around 50p for each sold, minus the agent royalty of 15%-20%. Something, perhaps, to bear in mind with regards to POD pricing.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

more one of the big "hardback" sized paperback. (I forget the correct name for that format

maybe Trade paperback. Larger page size is cheaper because then there are less pages.
The smaller ones called "mass market"?

So are there any CreateSpace print settings that get the book "down" to the dimensions of a normal "trad" paperback

You can have any size of page and any font and the standard offering is two kinds of paper, but I think other papers may be possible.

It's all on their site.

Maybe all these posts about POD need to be in a different thread as they are nothing to do with series strategy.

 

[Kieran Song]

Man publishing a novel every 3-5 months...you're a better than I am if you can do it. I'm write now building up my backlist for the series in writing first and then launching every 3

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I'm write now building up my backlist for the series

I'd about 12 novels written in various stages of completeness before I started SP on 18th April 2016.