How to price a book: real numbers, real math, no guesswork

Pricing is the decision authors freeze on. You've spent a year — maybe ten — writing the book, and now a single number has to carry two opposite fears at once: price it too high and nobody buys it; price it too low and it looks like it wasn't worth writing. Most advice online resolves this with vibes. This guide resolves it with arithmetic. We've priced books with more than 1,200 authors since 2017, and the good news is that book pricing is one of the few parts of publishing where the math is public, published, and completely learnable in ten minutes.

The three numbers that decide your price

Every book price is squeezed between three forces, and once you can name them, the "right" price stops being mysterious:

• Your floor — what the book costs to produce and deliver. For ebooks this is nearly zero; for print it's the per-copy printing cost, and no list price below it makes sense.
• The platform's royalty rules — Amazon and the other stores pay different percentages at different price points, and the cliffs between tiers are sharp enough to double or halve your income at the same-looking price.
• Your genre's ceiling — readers arrive with a price expectation formed by every other book on your shelf. Thrillers, memoirs, business books, and picture books each have their own "normal," and a price far outside it costs you sales in both directions.

Let's put real numbers on each, format by format.

Pricing an ebook: the $2.99–$9.99 window is the whole game

Amazon KDP — where most self-published ebooks sell — publishes its royalty rules openly, and they create one dominant fact: ebooks listed between $2.99 and $9.99 earn a 70% royalty (minus a small delivery fee of $0.15 per megabyte in the US store), while ebooks priced below $2.99 or above $9.99 earn only 35%.

Watch what that cliff does to identical-looking prices. At $2.98, you earn about $1.04 per copy. One penny higher, at $2.99, you earn about $2.09 — double the money for the same book. At the other end: a $9.99 ebook pays about $6.99, while raising it to $12.99 drops you to the 35% tier and pays about $4.55. You charged readers three dollars more and made two dollars less.

Inside the window, where you land is a genre question. The pricing guides published by author-services companies and print platforms converge on the same ranges we see with our own authors: $3.99–$6.99 is the sweet spot for fiction, where readers buy in volume and compare prices hard, while practical non-fiction — business, self-help, how-to — supports $6.99–$9.99 because readers are buying the outcome, not the word count. A typical text-only novel's delivery fee is a few cents, so a $4.99 novel pays you roughly $3.40–$3.49 per copy.

Pricing a paperback: know your printing cost first

Print pricing starts from a formula, not a feeling. On KDP, a US-printed black-ink paperback of 110–828 pages costs $0.85 plus $0.012 per page to print, per Amazon's published printing cost tables, and Amazon pays you 60% of your list price minus that printing cost on Amazon sales. Two consequences fall straight out of the formula:

1. Your minimum list price is the printing cost divided by 0.60 — below that, the royalty would be negative and Amazon won't accept the price.
2. Every dollar you add to the list price puts 60 cents in your pocket. The difference between $13.99 and $15.99 is $1.20 per copy, every copy, forever.

Here's the arithmetic for a 200-page paperback — the question we're asked most: printing is $0.85 + (200 × $0.012) = $3.25. Your minimum possible list price is $3.25 ÷ 0.60 = $5.42. Priced like a real book at $14.99, you keep ($14.99 × 0.60) − $3.25 = $5.74 per copy. A 300-page book prints for $4.45, has a floor of $7.42, and at $15.99 pays $5.14 per copy. Color printing — the standard for children's picture books — costs several times more per page, which is why professionally produced picture books rarely list below $12.99 and usually sit higher.

Where should you land inside the range? The same market guides — and our own shelf — agree: $12.99–$17.99 for self-published fiction, $14.99–$24.99 for non-fiction, and $24.99–$34.99 for hardcovers. A useful cross-check from the industry: keep your list price at least 2.5× your printing cost, and expect your paperback to sit roughly $7–$10 above your ebook price. Here's the picture in one table:

Check the shelf you'll actually sit on

Formulas set your floor; your genre sets your ceiling. Before you commit to a number, open Amazon and look up 15–20 current top sellers in your exact category — same genre, similar page count, covers of the quality yours will have. Note their ebook and paperback prices. That cluster is reader expectation, and your price should sit inside it. This is also where the counterintuitive rule lives: do not price meaningfully below the cluster. A $7.99 paperback on a shelf of $15.99 paperbacks doesn't read as a bargain; it reads as a book that couldn't charge $15.99. Underpricing costs you twice — less money per copy and a quality signal working against you.

Two practical touches finish the job. First, end your price in .99 — $4.99 and $15.99 match the pattern readers see everywhere, and round numbers like $16.00 look oddly homemade. Second, remember that no price is permanent: on KDP you can change your list price whenever you like and the update goes live within about three days, so a launch week at $0.99 or $2.99 to gather momentum and reviews, followed by a step up to your real price, is a strategy — not a contradiction.

Five pricing mistakes we see constantly

1. Pricing the ebook at $1.99. It's in the 35% tier — the worst of both worlds: cheap-looking and low-paying. If you want cheap, use 99¢ as a time-limited promotion; if you want income, start at $2.99.
2. Forgetting the printing floor. Authors announce a $9.99 paperback before learning their 350-page book prints at $5.05 — leaving under a dollar per copy. Run the formula first, then pick the price.
3. Copying traditional publishers' ebook prices. The big houses price ebooks at $13.99–$16.99 to protect hardcover sales. You have no hardcover to protect — and above $9.99 Amazon cuts your percentage nearly in half.
4. Pricing to "earn back" what production cost. Your editing and cover are investments in selling more copies, not a debt each copy must repay. The market prices your book; your costs don't.
5. Setting it once and never looking again. Prices are levers. If sales stall, test a different point for a month and watch what happens — the data is free and the change is reversible.

Questions authors ask us about pricing

Sources & further reading: royalty tiers, the $2.99–$9.99 window, delivery fees, and the paperback printing formula ($0.85 + $0.012/page, US black-ink; 60% print royalty) are from Amazon KDP's published pricing and printing-cost terms. Genre price ranges reflect the published pricing guides of major author-services and print platforms and USA Publishing House's own work with 1,200+ authors since 2017. For what the book costs to make before you price it, see our publishing cost breakdown and printing costs guide — and for what realistic sales look like, how many books the average author sells. Authors in Missouri and Tennessee can also see our state pages for the local publishing picture.