Setting Your Own Price

How do you actually price a book, if not just picking a number that feels right? You don't have to guess out of thin air. There's a faster, more honest way to anchor it: comparable titles.

Comp pricing, step by step

Start by pulling up five to ten books in your genre, similar length, similar audience to yours. Then look at their ebook and print prices separately, not as one number split two ways, because ebooks and print books are priced by genuinely different rules and different cost structures. For print specifically, check what the actual printing cost is on your platform before you consider going any lower: that cost is your floor, not a suggestion you can talk yourself past.

Once you have that range in front of you, land inside it for your first book, and adjust later once you have real reader feedback, the same way I did with mine.

Why go through all that instead of just picking a number? Because that was exactly the mistake I made the first time around, picking a price that simply felt right in my head, with nothing real behind it. Comp pricing isn't about finding the one “correct” price, there isn't one. It's about starting from what similar books actually charge, and letting that be your anchor instead of a guess pulled out of thin air.