Paperback pricing wisdom?

[TimothyEllis]

What's the wisdom on paperback pricing?

I'm not doing Extended Distribution.

By the time I finish the work, I'll have 47 books ready to hit go on.

But they vary in size from 52 pages to 458.

Most of my eBooks are priced $4.99 regardless of size, but a few shorter ones around the 50k mark are $3.99, and anything shorter is $2.99, not including my few 99c shorts, which I bundled into a prequel book which comes out at 148 pages.

Does one establish a single price for the 4.99 books? Or do you price by markup for each book singly, rounding up to the nearest .99?

Whats the wisdom?

[LilyBLily]

For the U.S. market, I do $13.99 and the occasional $12.99 for my $2.99, $3.99, and $4.99 ebooks and $17.99 for my $6.99 ebooks.

I aim for a $4+ net profit on paper, which even the $12.99 gives me because those are short 50k-65k books. For the 100k books, I've settled on $17.99 for the same reason since the print cost does go up when one doubles the page count. 

[Eric Thomson]

I aim for a price that will give me the same net profit as an ebook, i.e. around $3.40 USD, which means on average $15.99 USD per paperback (approx 400pp)

[Vijaya]

Since yours are adult books, anywhere upwards of 12.99 is good depending on the size of your book. I shoot for a profit of $2-4 depending on the type of book, so the EZs are priced much lower than my novel for teens and up.

[RPatton]

Three times the cost to print rounded to the nearest .95. (Trade paperbacks are usually priced at .95 pocket is what sees .99).

[PaulineMRoss]

Paperback pricing is a different strategy from ebooks. Because there's a cost to producing every single one, I price high enough to make a profit of $3 on each sale. To be honest, I don't care if I don't sell any paperbacks at all.