Createspace is trying to kill me

The $7.54 you're seeing on The Last Mortal Bond is not the official price. It appears to be out of print, and that's the lowest price available from Amazon sellers who have it. But that's also for the mass market paperback. Createspace only deals in trade paperbacks, which are generally sold in the $15-18 range. As for the hardback price being so low, publishers have the money to buy in bulk, and printers are able to give them a discount, driving down the cost per unit. Createspace is POD, which means books are being printed on an individual basis and are more expensive to produce per unit.

Since Createspace's production cost is based on page count, I would suggest extending margins and playing with font size to see if you can get your page count down to the point where the customer cost would be in the $16-18 range. With a book that massive, I don't think it's likely to get it much lower without making the font so small that anyone could barely read it.

Would you mind sharing your approximate word count with us?  I'm guessing 160,000 to 180,000 words.

Oooook.  Panic is more or less over.

Without understanding what I was doing, I selected the Expanded Distribution CS has to offer.  That jacked the price waaay up.

I lose a lot in royalties, but I would rather sell 1000 books (print copy) at $2 royalty than 50 (or zero) at $7. 

Word count is 151,217. 

dagnee, that is my smaller book.  I split the book into two parts. 

Book two comes in at 110,161

That font size is going to be HUGE on the finished product. You could easily go down to around 10 without losing any readability. I've always used Palatino 9.5 for my books, which is about the equivalent of Garamond 11 in size. As an experiment, I copied and pasted some of the text to turn my 114,000 word book into 151,000. With my custom margin settings, it came out to 470 pages. And my trim size is 5.25x8, so there was less paper space to work with. So you should be able to significantly cut your page count if you decrease the font size.

The good news about ebooks, and why they're much friendlier to a self-publisher, is there is no production cost so you can sell it at whatever price point you want (or whatever is prudent). There are also no page numbers, font sizes or margins to worry about since everything is standardized. E-readers allow the reader to pick a font size and type of their choice, a godsend to older folks with bad eyes. If the file size is too large, there may be a negligible delivery fee attached to it per copy sold, but that's it.