HI I’m new here and I’m working on my first book. I’ll throw in my $.02 anyhow. The only way you could sell a large book would be to order them in a large quantity to cut down the cost. I’m not sure If I’ll even sell more than 4~10 copies of mine so I’m not so worried about it.

good luck.

Yet again I have to agree with Lee :-)

A few months back I did a comparison of publishers offerings and prices. I thought my Blurb book was going to be about 120 pages (just popped the last page in this afternoon, it’s actually 143).

I wanted to make sure I had chosen the right publisher as the last comparison I did was before Xmas.

So I looked at the largest  hard back books a number of publishers did, Blurb was the only one who did a 13" x 11" . Most of the publishers offered a price for a set number of pages (usually 20) then charged a set amount per additional page, so a little different to Blurb’s approach.

I did the pricing in £, I have just converted those to $ at the rate of £1 = $2

All prices are for a 120 page hard back book

AlbumFactory            12" x 12"         $198

Lulu                               9" x 7"            $96

MyPublisher              15" x 11"         $133

BobBooks                  10" x 8"          $140

Blurb                           13" x 11"       $76.95 (with its recent price hike)

I’d be very surprised if those other publishers had reduced their prices in recent months.

......Tony

ok Tony if you was to sell this book to someone, what price would you sell it to them.

I personally don’t think that there is a market with the general public for a book at $90 (assuming a $10 mark up). So I do not expect my book to sell beyond a small group of friends and family.

I am working on an edited version of the book to try and bring the price down to what I think is saleable, but I’m not yet sure I can do that.

At that price you are looking at a niche market and you would need to market it appropriately, just putting it in the Blurb bookstore, (or your local book store) would not generate many sales.

So, for instance, a really good photobook about a rock band could have a market at that price, but you’d need to find those fans to offer it to them. If there was a fan club for instance a mail shot to them might generate sales.

A book about school sports day could be marketed to the parents, people will pay a fair bit for books with their kids in.

I think if you are serious about selling your books (which I’m not) the starting point is identifying your market before you even start on the book. Understand the needs of that market, do a sit of research on what other books might be available on your particular topic, how much do they cost, what demographic are they in and disposable income might they have hence what could they afford, what is the one thing that would make them want to buy your book over any others? Why will it be different?  Then design your book to meet that market niche at a price you think they will pay. That will dictate how many pages should be in the book if you are using a print-on-demand service like Blurbs.

If you have a local independant book store a chat with the owner about pricing and mark-ups would pay off.

.........Tony