I have just heard from Amazon that print book base prices are to rise on June 20th. It was bound to happen, costs are going up everywhere, but hopefully it won’t be by much. This should not affect eBooks at all. I hope.The book prices for print books include the costs of materials (paper, ink etc), the cost of getting someone to print it and put it all together, and postage. Yeah, postage is only free to the buyer. It’s in the price of the book. Leg Iron Books makes pennies in royalties on each book sold, most of it goes to Amazon. At the moment, with sales low, all the royalties go to the authors. I get the pennies from the anthologies and my own books, I don’t take a cut at all from other authors’ royalties. Everything is priced as low as possible while still leaving a little profit.So… all the print books are priced very close to the minimum. This inflationary increase means that, to keep the authors actually getting something, I will have to increase the prices. I will do this once I know what the cost increases are going to be. Around June 20th, all the books on sale are going to have to increase in price to keep the author royalties the same.I don’t want to do it. Amazon don’t want to do it. But inflation is running so high that neither of us have any choice. It is possible that the increases might send some books, especially the very tight margins on the anthologies, into zero royalties and that is not a good business model. As I wrote above, this should not affect eBooks although those have a ‘delivery’ charge too. There has been no mention of an increase in that so far. Fortunately, all our books are 6″ by 9″ format or smaller. Books over that size seem to be getting hit harder – we don’t have any of those here. So, it is likely that the price increases will be small but there will be increases. This does not affect just Leg Iron Books. It’s going to apply across the board on independent small publishers and self-publishers. If you’ve been eyeing up a book on Amazon and thinking about buying it, make that decision before June 20th. Of course, if you prefer eBooks, you probably have nothing to worry about. Yet.