Each business sement and separate product line has its lessons to teach about pricing. Pricing is crucial since it defines the value that your products are worth for your efforts and for your customers to buy them. A good starting place for pricing decisions comes from Cost-Based Pricing, Value-Based Pricing, and Competition-Based Pricing.

This article was prompted by some of the author’s recent experiences in the publishing business. There are obvious situations where considering the three guidelines of pricing, cost, value, and competition are the keys to finding the right price, and many influences lead to the decisions that need to be made.

Often, important decisions like pricing find that rather than the traditional guidelines for pricing decisions, loud voices from industry pundits promoting ideas supported by their personal opinions must be clarified, offering narrow and sometimes malicious advice and opinions. When I wrote this, I checked the definition of pundit and found it to be “an expert in a particular subject or field who is frequently called on to give opinions about it to the public.”

In the publishing business, authors make pricing decisions about the sales price of their books. This can be challenging enough in just trying to decide whether cost, value, or competition should be the influence on the decision, but an example of where a pundit has put a spin on the subject and just created confusion is worth looking at

Medium is an American online publishing platform, and in a recent article, a reader explained her hesitancy towards buying self-published books, which became a conversation about price points.

The reader explained that she hesitated to buy self-published books and said the reason was tied to seeking value and feeling that self-published books were generally priced too high. At the same time, she presented support for that claim by claiming that she had bought two recent books for $11.50 and compared that to a self-published book priced at $20.50. She added that the two books were from known authors and the expense, besides being self-published, was by an unknown author.

This is an example of how harmful generalizations happen. A simple consideration of cost, value, or competition does not require adding the factor of generalized assumptions about self-published or well-known authors.

The bigger problem is that using this generalization can lead to self-published and unknown authors concluding that they must be lower in price and ignoring their potential focus on content, value, and competition. Pricing for books and many products has a great deal to do with value, competition, and cost to produce. Customers will come back for products over and over that have valuable content but will disappear if disappointed, regardless of the method of publishing or the author’s name.

An important conclusion for any discussion about pricing is that there is a big difference between cost and value, and the price can be anywhere between the two.