Smattering

It’s Tuesday but feels like Monday.  I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not.  I suppose it’s good since that means I have one less day to Friday, not that that was particularly comforting at 6:00 this morning.

Today I’m working on the blueprint for Edge of Shadow.  The blueprint is this crazy detailed worksheet about every aspect of character and plot that Pot and I have studied over the last few years.  It’s her creation, though I’ve rearranged a few things to suit my tastes.  It’s one of those things I don’t much ENJOY filling out, but I usually am glad that I did once I get into the writing of the story, which I hope to be starting next week.

I confess to feeling somewhat uninspired about what to talk about today.  Feeling pretty tired and brain dead.  Yesterday I bought The Biggest Loser for Wii, and I thought I’d just pop it in before dinner to try it out last night.  Holy God, it may kill me.  But I’ll look really good when I’m dead.  Why must Jillian be so flipping in love with jumping jacks?  It’s the same thing I hated about The 30 Day Shred.  I can do anything else but I hate, loathe, and despise jumping jacks!  This program at least has a lot more variation than the Shred, so I think it’s something I can stick with.  I definitely feel like I worked more with that workout.

So after Joe Konrath’s post over the weekend talking about ebook pricing and the difference between sales and fans, I’ve noticed several authors bumping their ebook prices up a tich, maybe from .99 to 1.99.  Some up to 2.99 to take advantage of the new 70% royalty rate.  I deliberately released Forsaken By Shadow at $1.  A very low price point to try and get people to try somebody they’ve never heard of for very little risk.  My gut is to leave it there, perhaps releasing Edge of Shadow later in the fall at $1 and then raising it up to $1.99 after the initial roll.  What do you think?  When you see these crazy cheap books at a buck or less, do you think they must suck because they’re so cheap?  Or do you think “hey, I’m willing to take a risk?”  Are you more inclined to take seriously a book that’s priced a little bit higher?  I’m curious what would happen if I bumped my price up to $1.99, but I don’t know that I’m QUITE curious enough to do it just yet.  Thoughts?

4 thoughts on “Smattering

  1. I’m going to be honest. Since I’m broke most of the time, I usually won’t pay more than $1.99 for an e-book. I actually look for .99 books on purpose. And I’ve found a lot of good ones that way. A lot of authors who are new and unknown have books out there for .99 and I think they deserve a chance. I think I said before that my 1.99 books weren’t selling very well, but when I changed the price to .99, sales went up. When Amazon discounted one of my 1.00 books to .79, sales went crazy. The most I’ve ever paid for an ebook is $9.99, and that was Stephen King’s “Under the Dome”, which was VERY long and was also my first Kindle book. If I had the money to spend, I would probably pay more. But I don’t think I would ever again pay more than $5.00 or so on an e-book. There’s no paper, ink, or physical cover cost, so e-books shouldn’t be priced as much or more than print books. IMHO.

  2. Personally, I think for novellas/short stories, $1.99 is about as high as they should ever be. Less story, less money. I plan to post Tempest at $2.99, but it will be a full-length (50k words) novel…if it were shorter, I’d absolutely post it for $1.99 or $.99, depending on length.

    I was going to price all of my self-pub titles at $1.99…before I started the long revision process, and hired a professional cover done. And while I don’t think ebooks should be as costly as print, there’s a lot of my work and time and effort going into making them as good as I possibly can, with as professional a look and formatting as I can do with them. I know you’ve done all that as well. I think even though we need to keep prices low, we also need to put *some* value on them…because they really are the result of a lot of hard work, even if it’s just pixels and binary.

    1. Part of my reasoning for just leaving it for a buck was the fact that it’s a novella rather than a full book, and I felt like a novella ought to be cheaper since there’s not as much story. The fact that it’s short is more obvious on some sites than others.

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