But the bad news is...

I just got a call from my customer service rep at NetPub (the company that does the printing and order fulfillment for Bandwagon). She wanted to know if I was aware that the deeply discounted price that Amazon pays for my book is lower than my cost to print it.

I said, "Yes, I was aware, though not to the penny. I don't want to lose money on this book, but I felt strongly that pricing it higher than $19.95 would greatly limit its sales."

She said, "A book of this size [576 pgs] is usually priced at $25 to $35."

I said, "Yeah, and I could price Bandwagon at $1 million and make a lot of money if I could just find one person to pay $1 million for it."

She laughed and told me that it's very difficult to change a book's retail price once it's in the market, so she's going to talk to her boss about reducing my printing cost. I thanked her for looking after me.

Thinking about it after we hung up, I wondered if I had made a bad decision when I listed the book with Amazon. I just felt that Bandwagon would get good exposure there... that the Amazon listing was a way to advertise it. But that advertising is not free!