What Kind of Emperor’s Edge Goodies Would You Like to See for My KickStarter Campaign?

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Lindsay

If you happened to read my post last week on Using KickStarter to Fund Self-Publishing Projects, you might remember that I was toying with the idea of running a campaign myself, one to help fund the production of my Emperor’s Edge audiobooks.

I paid for professional narration and editing of the first two audiobooks out of pocket (you can download all of The Emperor’s Edge through Podiobooks.com or iTunes, and the opening chapters of Book 2 will be out soon), and I put them out there for free, because that’s how I like to roll, but I have four more books planned in the series, and it’ll be quite an investment to get them all out there. So, KickStarter.

For those who don’t want to read the other article (hey, it’s long, I understand), this is a site that allows artists, authors, musicians, etc. to post projects and ask for “crowd-funding” help, meaning people can donate money to get the project off the ground. In return, they get goodies related to the project.

Here are things I’m definitely going to give away to folks who pledge:

  • Completed audio files of the books (instead of listening to a chapter a week on iTunes, you’d be able to listen to the entire book at once, similarly to a story you download from Audible)
  • Signed paperbacks of The Emperor’s Edge, Dark Currents, and Deadly Games
  • A USB drive with all of the audiobooks, all of the ebooks, cut scenes from the stories, interviews I’ve done around the web, and basically anything else I can think of that might be fun to include.

Here are a few more things I’m thinking of giving away:

  • A chance to name a minor character in Book 4
  • Advertising (probably sponsored posts, but I’m open to other ideas) for fantasy authors or artists who’d like a little exposure on my blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, etc.

Are these good, or is there something else you’d like to see as a prize? Don’t worry — leaving a comment here under no way obligates you to pledge. I’d love to get your input though!

UPDATE: Here’s a preview link to what I’ve set up so far. Nothing is set in stone, so feel free to comment. I may add a partial manuscript or short story critique, since a couple of you have mentioned that, so if that’s something you’d be interested in, please give me an idea on a reasonable price point. Thanks!

Posted in News | Tagged , | 37 Comments

Writing Tips: It’s All in the Details with Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Lindsay

I’ve been buried in editing this week, finishing up the third Flash Gold novella (it’s off to the editor now, so almost done!), and I’ve been neglecting the blog. Fortunately, I have a couple of guest posts in the queue, so I can offer you something to read in the meantime. Today one of my Twitter buddies Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali (she’s the lady who interviewed me about my assassin, Sicarius, a couple of months ago) is here to talk to you about getting the details right when you’re writing.

It’s All In the Details

I’m that person who rolls her eyes in disgust when I watch a movie where the doctor checks for the patient’s pulse using his thumb.  I groan when a laboring woman gives birth to a baby with no umbilical cord who already looks mature enough to get up and walk away.  I hate when movie characters wake up with perfect make-up and hair.  I yell at the screen when a character doing CPR has his arms bent while giving chest compressions…way too slowly.  And for the life of me, and don’t get me wrong, I love the Walking Dead, but shouldn’t all those walking dead, emphasis on the word dead, have melted into puddles of rotten goop in the summer heat by now?

But that’s television.  In books, we get it right.  Right?  Not so much.

Who would ever notice?  Who cares?  I do.  While there are few things about which I can claim being an expert, believe me when I say that I am paying attention to everything.  If I’m paying attention then rest assured that there is some nitpicking picker who is scanning your prose with a magnifying glass.  If you don’t get the facts right, those little details, you’re likely to lose credibility.  Check out 5 Common Medical Errors in Movies.

When I wrote An Unproductive Woman almost fifteen years ago, I included a character named Khadijah who had recurrent breast cancer.  While I didn’t give hard details or facts about her disease or treatment, I did say enough to get it wrong.  After completing AUW, the manuscript spent the next ten or so years in a box in my garage.  Who would have thought that in the interim, as I raised my two eldest children, I would eventually go to nursing school and become a registered and certified breast oncology nurse?  Not me, that’s for sure.

When the opportunity to self-publish AUW presented itself, I grabbed it with both hands.  I immediately got to work re-reading and re-editing.  It is while doing the final edit that I realized how wrong I had been.  Chemotherapy typically lasts six months, not nine.  Radiation may burn the skin but does not cause the hair of the head to fall out, unless that is the area being radiated.  Not all chemotherapy causes nausea and weight loss.

Wikipedia is a terrific source of information for some things, but sometimes, it’s the small details that count.  Personally, I am impressed when I read about a character who’s received an intramuscular injection in the right hip as opposed to a shot in the butt.  I’m not talking info dumps here, nor am I looking for any House-like rare conditions with cures that are even more off the wall, but the basics should always be spot on if we are to earn our reader’s confidence.  Unless we’re writing fantasy, we can’t just make it up as we go along.  Actually, you can’t always make it up with fantasy either.

For an accurate and up to date medical reference, Medscape is a terrific online resource.  Look up any medical condition and you’ll get an explanation about disease presentation, diagnostic procedures, and possible treatments.  PubMed, while a tad scholarly, is a pretty good resource as well.  The regular old Centers for Disease Control also provides information that’s easy for the lay person to understand.  When in absolute doubt, just ask an expert.  If you’re the shy type, send an email.

Ah, so, it’s not medical information you need?  For more general knowledge try The Order of Things: Hierarchies, Structures, and Pecking Orders by Barbara Ann Kipfer.  This book is a fantastic organized reference book with dozens of lists about everything from religion, to philosophy, to economics and more.

The long and short of it is, it’s all in the details, and as a writer, you need to pay attention to them.  If you don’t, your reader will.

And for the record, if you want to take out a zombie, a gunshot to the frontal lobe isn’t likely to do the trick.  You’ve got to destroy or sever the brain stem.  Just saying.

*****

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali lives and works in Houston as a breast oncology nurse. She is married and the mother to three brilliant artistic children who far outstrip her in intelligence. She writes because she loves to and also because she has a story (or two, or three…) to tell.

You can catch her online at her website, Goodreads, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.

Her novel can be found on Amazon and Smashwords. (She’s offering a coupon code to grab the novel for free for the next couple of weeks at Smashwords: LC23T)

Posted in Guest Posts | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Newsletters 101: Email Marketing for Authors

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Lindsay

NewsletterI’ve had a couple of comments left in the bowels of the blog of late that lead me to think that I should say more about newsletters than, “You should have one.” Okay, my article on How to Start a Newsletter (and why every author should) covers a little more than that, but there are still questions afoot. So, let me see if I can answer a few questions and comments today. We’ll call this the email-marketing-for-authors FAQ.

My book just came out, and I want to email everyone I know, so that they’ll buy it. Should I?

My answer here is going to depend on who “everyone” you know is. Is it 20 or 30 friends and family members that you email on a regular basis? If so, sure, send them a note in case they’re interested in checking out your book, and you might even ask them to forward the message on to people they know who read in that genre.

If “everyone” you know is everyone you just happen to have an email address for, including the 500 people who work in your building, the 745 Facebook friends that you’ve never talked to, and basically everyone you’ve ever hit reply to in an email over the last five years, then my answer is no, leave these people alone. They don’t have a real relationship with you and probably don’t give a rat’s petootie about your new book. They might regard your random email as spam. Nobody likes to get spam. If you bug them more than once, they may mulishly decide they’ll never try your book (even if they might have been interested by it if they’d chanced upon it on Amazon).

If you want to engage in email marketing (and there are all sorts of benefits of maintaining a mailing list with your fans’ addresses, the main one being that you can send them a note and let them know when you have a new release out), then you need to start a newsletter.

What exactly do you mean by “newsletter”?

A lot of people seem to think I mean blog-rss-subscription-by-email when I say newsletter (i.e. people fill out a field on your blog and your posts are automatically delivered to their inbox). It’s fine to have this on your site, but this isn’t what I mean. There will be times when you want to email fans directly, and your messages might be for their eyes only (hey, they’ve signed up to be in your inner circle, so it makes sense to give them some special insider stuff).

For example, last month when I released my short story, The Assassin’s Curse, I put it up for 99 cents in the various stores, but I sent a Smashwords coupon to my newsletter subscribers, so they could get it for free if they were interested. A lot of people chose to buy it anyway, to support me as an author, but I’ve definitely had emails from people who mention that money is tight and that they appreciate how affordable my ebooks are, so it’s nice to be able to give away freebies or coupons now and then. Of course, I can’t give every book away free, but I figure it’s good karma to be generous when possible. After all, the folks who sign up for your newsletter are going to be some of your biggest fans, the types of people who tell other people that they have to try your books.

But, I digress… Back to the what-is-a-real-newsletter question.

When I talk of newsletters, I’m talking about a separate mailing list where your readers must “opt in” (choose to sign up of their own accord) in order to belong to it. They are agreeing to receive periodic newsletters from you, and they have the option to unsubscribe at any time. Every email you send should have an unsubscribe link at the bottom (if you join Aweber, Mailchimp, or another of the mailing-list services out there, this will automatically be included in your footers).

Anything else (like you signing people up just because they emailed you once or they commented on your blog) isn’t proper web etiquette and may even be illegal (I’m too lazy to go look up the details of the CAN-SPAM Act, but either way you don’t want to do anything that people could construe as harassment or an irritation).

When you make the leap from writer to published author, you also make the leap from artist to entrepreneur. If you’re trying to sell something, you’ll want to obey all of the rules and etiquette that good businesses follow. The last thing you want to do is alienate potential readers by coming across as a spamming pest.

What you can do is, when responding to reader emails, mention that you have a newsletter they might be interested in signing up for and include a link to that page on your site.

Where can I get a newsletter?

I use Aweber, but it’s mainly because I signed up with them years ago, when I ran several mailing lists for my various websites. I’ve been happy with them, but I don’t generally recommend that service to authors, because of the cost. They charge about $55 a quarter, and most authors won’t need all of the bells and whistles that come with the service (such as the ability to host multiple lists, run auto-responders, and a lot of fancy stats analysis such as click tracking). An exception would be if an author was very popular and saw themselves quickly racking up thousands of newsletter subscribers. (The free services I’m going to mention are only free to a point — after one- or two-thousand subscribers, for example, you have to start paying, and at that point they may become more expensive than Aweber).

Free-to-a-certain-point:

  • Mailchimp — up to 2,000 contacts
  • YMLP — up to 1,000 contacts

I haven’t tried either of these, but I’ve heard from authors who have, and they seem to be happy. The people I know have small lists and haven’t had to worry about going over the subscriber limit yet.

Why I’m sticking with Aweber

Even though Aweber is pricier when you’re starting out (they don’t have a free trial or free-to-a-point option), I expect to break into the thousands of newsletter subscribers before long (I have about 700 now, and I just started plugging the email list in August — I’m also planning a site re-design where the sign-up form will be more prominent). So, I’d end up paying sooner or later anyway.

Another option?

If you pay for your own web hosting, you might have a mailing list software already installed and accessible from your control panel. I’ve heard of WordPress plug-ins that you can use in conjunction with a list based on your own server. I’m not sure what kinds of features you might have with this option, as I’ve never checked into it for myself, but if you’re the techy type (or know someone who is) it may be worth looking into.

After my newsletter is set up, how do I get people to sign up for it?

The big thing is to let your readers know about it. I was slow to do this myself, but my subscriptions picked up when I started mentioning my newsletter at the ends of my ebooks. These days, in my afterword, I usually mention my website, Twitter, and Facebook links, and also that I have a newsletter that people can check out if they want to be notified when I have new releases, contests, giveaways, etc.

Some people want to jump-start their newsletter-subscriber numbers by hosting contests on their blogs, i.e. everyone who signs up for my newsletter will be entered for a chance to win an Amazon gift certificate! I, uh, possibly did that myself. 😛

The problem with that approach, though, is that you get people signing up who aren’t necessarily fans of your work. They’ll just unsubscribe later on.

The only people you really want to sign on are those who have read your stories and want more of your work. As I mentioned, the best way to get those people is by mentioning your newsletter at the end of the book. I know, I know, if you’re only selling a few books a week, this can feel like a tediously slow way to increase one’s fan-base.

My suggestion? Give some short stories away for free (if you have a series of novels out, you might even try giving the first book away for free — you’ve all seen that I’ve had my first Emperor’s Edge book available for free for a couple of months and it’s helped with newsletter sign-ups and sales of subsequent books in the series). You’ll get more people checking out your work that way, and, if they like it, they’ll come to your site and sign up for your list.

Sneaky internet marketers’ tactic to encourage signups:

When I spoke of free ebooks, I meant to get them out there in the Kindle, B&N, iTunes, etc. stores where lots of people will find them, but you can also use free as an incentive to get readers to sign up for your newsletter. If you stumble across some business’s website, you’ll probably be hit with a pop-up box that says something like, “Sign up for our newsletter and get our free ebook on 7 Ways to Melt Away Your Bellyfat Now!” Believe it or not, that stuff works. And you can use the tactic too (sans the annoying pop-up box, please).

Let’s say someone is a fan of your work, and isn’t that big on signing up for newsletters, but they do visit your blog now and then. You could try giving away an exclusive short story, cut scene, or character interview as a way to entice them to sign up. If your freebie isn’t available anywhere else, then they might be a little more tempted to sign up. (Again, this is going to work best with people who are already readers, so do your best to get your work out there in a lot of places where people can try it, maybe for free.) With a mailing list service, you can set up your first email message so that the free tidbit is included in the body of the email; that way people will get it right away and you don’t have to do anything manually.

I have to admit that I haven’t really used that tactic yet myself, but I did do a blog post last month, when I was showing off the cover art for that short story, and I mentioned that I’d be giving away free copies to people on my list. As you might guess, I had quite a few extra signups that week.

Okay, that’s enough for one post (more than enough!). I’ll continue this soon in “Advanced Newsletter Tactics for Authors” so stick around, and let me know if you have any questions you’d like to see covered.

Posted in Book Marketing | Tagged , , | 39 Comments

Book Promotion Basics — Useful Articles for New Authors

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Lindsay

I promised myself I’d spend most of my computer time editing today, so I’m doing a “best of” type post for authors who haven’t been hanging around my blog, reading every single word for long (it’s okay…you didn’t know any better…:D).

The following are some core articles on book promotion:

And a few bonus extras:

If you have any questions or topics you’d like to see covered in future posts, let me know in the comments. Thanks, and happy book promoting!

 

Posted in Book Marketing | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Peacemaker (Flash Gold 3) Cover Art, Teasers, and Story Updates

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Lindsay

I’ve been editing the third Flash Gold novella for the last couple of weeks and sent it off to a beta reader last night. I’ve reserved a spot with my editor for later in the month, too, so I should be able to get the story out in early March.

The novella, Peacemaker, came in at almost 40,000 words (the last two were 17,000 and 27,000 respectively), so I hope folks looking for a longer adventure will be pleased. I haven’t written up a blurb yet, but you can make some guesses as to what’s going on based on the cover art!

Here are a few dialogue teasers from the story:

“Moosehide, then,” Cedar said. “I don’t reckon I’d be able to talk to the Hän without you. Are you willing to go?”
“That depends. Are you willing to share your fancy blanket again?”
A smile softened his face. “Well, it did need a lot of attention from a seamstress after the last time you slept in it. Did no one ever educate you on proper things to do in bed? Setting off explosives isn’t one of them.”

“You’re not speechless, are you?” Cedar asked. “I’ve never seen that on you.”
“I…don’t know what to say,” Kali said.
“Thank you is a popular choice.”

For the Emperor’s Edge fans out there, I gave the story a break after finishing the rough draft at the end of January, but I opened the file up this morning, and I’m ready to dive in again. It starts out with a little sword play atop a moving train. There are actually quite a few train scenes in this one, and I even clambered under, over, and around trains in a museum in Chandler, Arizona, to get ideas for a big battle near the end.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have editing to do!

Posted in My Ebooks | 15 Comments

Using Kickstarter to Fund Self-Publishing Projects

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Lindsay

Thanks to the e-reader revolution, there are a lot of perks to self-publishing these days, but one of the downsides is that you’re on your own for funding some of the basic necessities, such as cover art, editing (this alone can be $1,000 and up for a novel-length manuscript), and formatting. Once you start making money, and have reserves from previous sales to draw upon, it gets easier, but lots of independent authors struggle to come up with the initial funds.

I’ve run into some authors who have used a site called KickStarter to help with start-up costs. I’m looking into it myself right now, not for books, but as a way to pay for my podiobook-creation costs.

As I’ve mentioned before, I pay the folks at Darkfire Productions to handle the narration and editing, because I they do a much more professional job than I could ever manage on my own. As you can guess, hiring voice talent to narrate a whole book isn’t inexpensive, and the podiobooks get published for free, so it’s a little different from paying $1,000-$1,500 for making an ebook that you’re going to sell. I’m fortunate to have enough awesome readers now that I generally make that back within a couple of weeks of releasing a new novel.

With the audiobooks, I paid for the first two out of pocket (the first chapters of Dark Currents will be online soon for those who are wondering!), but when I sat back and did the math, I realized I’d be in the $10,000 ballpark on expenses if I did the whole six-book series. That’s what I’d like to do, but I’ve been mulling over whether I get enough “return on my investment” with the podiobooks to justify the expense.

Because they get published on Podiobooks.com and iTunes for free, the only way I make money is if people end up enjoying the stories enough to buy the books. This has happened, as I wrote about in an article on “Can Publishing a Podiobook Help You Sell More Books?” but I’m certain I’m a long ways from breaking even overall on the audiobook-creation expenses. I have been thinking about selling the finished podiobook to folks who may be interested in having the complete audio (Audible-style) in one file without the story being broken up by chapter with repetitive intros and outros, but I’m also thinking of giving KickStarter a try to fund the costs of producing the third audiobook.

What is KickStarter?

KickStarter is a “crowd-sourcing” site, where you can post projects that need funding to get off the ground. Basically, you’re looking for donations from people, but you get to make it worth their while by offering gifts to those who pledge (i.e. copies of the finished project). You can have different levels of gifts for those who donate different amounts. People won’t be charged unless you meet your goal, so you better make your goodies appealing, so more folks will sign up.

What should you give away to entice people to pledge?

You can probably think of numerous ways you could reward these early investors, but here are some thoughts.

If you’re putting together your first novel, and you intend to offer ebook and paperback versions, you might have a goal of $1,500 or $2,000 to cover the costs of editing, cover art design, and formatting for ebooks and paperbacks. You might get this by offering a copy of the finished ebook to those who donated $5 or $10 and a signed paperback to those who pay $20 or more. (If you do physical products, you’ll need to figure the costs of ordering and shipping those into your funding goal.)

In my case, since I’m interested in creating the third audiobook in my series, I might offer the completed audio file for the third book at the lowest pledge level (people would get this before the chapters started going up on Podiobooks), files of all three audiobooks at the next level, and something like signed CDs with the first three ebooks and audiobooks on them at the highest level. I’d poll my readers/listeners to get an idea of what they were interested in before setting up a campaign, and I’d suggest you do the same. What people want and what you think they want aren’t always the same! Maybe I’d find out that some people would donate if they could get signed copies of the paperbacks instead.

Who does KickStarter work for?

Though I’m just now looking into this for myself, I’ve been aware of KickStarter for a year or more, and I’ve watched a lot of authors put together campaigns. Honestly, most of them have failed to reach their funding goals. If the goal isn’t reached, that means that none of the “pledgers” will be charged, so you don’t get any money at all for your project.

Why do people fail? They don’t have a big enough readership to support them beforehand. You can’t count on random people browsing the KickStarter site, thinking your project looks cool, and pledging money. In fact, I’d be shocked if that happened very often. You need to have a fan-base built up that wants to support you and wants to see your books in print (or, in my case, audio).

Do you need a huge fan base? Not necessarily. If you do have a huge fan base, you can be like this guy who has $22,000 pledged right now (his initial goal was $3,000 to cover the cost of turning some of his comics into ebooks!), but most of us aren’t going to get that kind of love. That’s okay, since most of us are just looking to cover our expenses, not get rich off of people’s pledges. And that can definitely happen, even for a new author.

Last year, I interviewed Miranda MeiLin, an indie fantasy author who successfully funded her first ebook and paperback using KickStarter. You can read the whole interview if you’re interested, but here’s a quote related to her KickStarter success:

Forty-eight people bought pre-sale packages to the tune of $2500. That paid for my editor, artist and typographer, and then the purchase and shipping of the paperback for those that bought the print package. The $50 presale bought them an autographed paperback, the finished formatted ebook and a thank-you in the acknowledgments, but the real attraction was that they got the raw manuscript as soon as my editor and I decided it was done (the $25 package was everything but the paperback). I finished on August 31st, 2010 at 9:30 pm; the raw manuscript was in their hands 24 hours later.

Kickstarter worked for Miranda because she was able to build up a readership beforehand. She did it by publishing her early stories as part of web serial that people could read for free. You can, see, too that she didn’t need a huge number of supporters (only 48) to make her goal.

I think I’ll be able to get some support, too, since I have quite a few readers who follow me via Twitter, Facebook, my blog, my newsletter, etc. I think that’s key with KickStarter — having an audience already established, people who are going to be excited by the items you’re giving away in return for their pledged money. I have more readers than I have listeners of the podiobooks, so I don’t know if it’ll work as well as a book-related campaign might, but we shall see.

So, what if you’re just starting out and don’t have a readership?

My advice would be to serialize some of your work on the web or give away free short stories in ebook form on Smashwords, Amazon, B&N, etc. to start building a readership before you launch a Kickstarter campaign. If you do ebooks, make sure to include an afterword, letting folks know where to find you online (and maybe even suggesting that they sign up for your newsletter!).

Posted in Tips and Tricks | 20 Comments

Ebook Pricing for Short Stories and Novellas?

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Lindsay

As we’ve talked about before (How Well Does Short Fiction Sell in Ebook Form? and Novellas and Short Stories — Ebooks Not Just for Novels), there are no rules when it comes to word count on ebooks. I enjoy writing novel-length fiction, but those 100,000-word beasts do take a while to pen. It’s nice to whip out a short story or a novella here and there, both because it makes you feel terribly productive by releasing ebooks more often and also because it gives you a break from your main projects.

I started my Flash Gold Chronicles, a series of steampunk novellas, for those reasons. One thing I’ve wondered about is pricing. With novels, there are a lot of them out there in any and every genre, so it’s easy to get an idea for a baseline price. We’re seeing more and more short stories, too, and those often go for 99 cents — the lowest price you can set an ebook at without making it free. With novellas (defined on Wikipedia as being between 17,500 and 40,000 words in length), there are fewer examples in the Kindle Store and elsewhere.

Long-time author, Dean Wesley Smith, suggests the following pricing scheme for ebooks:

Short stories. 99 cents. Author gets about 35 cents per sale.

Short novels and short collections (Anything from 15,000 words to 45,000 words) $2.99. Author gets around 65% or about $1.95 per sale.

Novels or long collections (45,000 words and up) $4.99-$5.99 range. Author gets around 65% or about $3.25-$4.50 per sale.

This seems like a good guideline to me, especially for short stories and novels, though the ebook-buyer in me wonders if $2.99 is a little high for something in the 15,000-20,000-word range. Most folks can zip through a story that length in about an hour. Also, if they can get a whole novel (my novels are all over 100,000 words) for $5, then isn’t $3 on the steep side for something 1/5th of that length?

Perhaps $1.99 would be a more fair price point, but herein lies the dilemma for e-publishers:

At price points of $2.98 and below, you only receive a 35% royalty from stores such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble (Smashwords offers a higher royalty for any price point, but their marketplace sees a fraction of the traffic of Amazon, and many authors have low to non-existent sales there). So, on a $1.99 ebook, you’d only get about 70 cents whereas charging a dollar more lets you get well over a dollar more on your cut.

Receiving 35 cents for a 6,000-word short story doesn’t seem too shabby because it probably didn’t take that long to write, but with a 20,000-word novella, you’re getting into different territory. There are more words to write, more words to pay an editor to proofread, and a more intricate story to work out overall.

I’ve been doing some mulling of late on the prices for my Flash Gold novellas, and I’m planning to test things a little when I release the third one in a few weeks.

Testing price points for novellas

Here’s what I’m doing right now with my Flash Gold Chronicles:

  • Flash Gold (18,000 words) — 99 cents
  • Hunted (27,000 words) — 1.49
  • Peacemaker (38-40,000 words) — to be determined

Because Flash Gold is on the short end for a novella, I don’t think 99 cents is too low. I really think of it as more of a short story (a long short story if you will). I based the price of Hunted on the 99-cent price of Flash Gold, figuring it had roughly 1/3rd more words, so I’d charge 1/3rd more. It makes sense, but at the same time 50 cents per sale seems kind of weak when a $2.99 price point would bring in $2. Would people pay that much more for a story of that length though? That’s the question, and I haven’t yet tested it out.

I think I’m going to play it safe and try the $2.99 price on Peacemaker, since it’s even longer than the other two, almost novel-length in its own right, at least according to Wikipedia. I plan on raising the price on Hunted to $1.99, mostly so it’ll make the jump to $2.99 seem less drastic to readers.

Proposed future price points:

  • Flash Gold — 99 cents
  • Hunted — 1.99
  • Peacemaker 2.99

I’ll make the price adjustments when I release Peacemaker (so, if you’ve been thinking of buying Hunted, now would be the time to do it! :D).

In the end, we just have to test things and see what the market will bear. For an established author, with a fan base built up, $2.99 may work just fine for a 20,000-word novella. For a new author, without any sort of fan base built up, getting $2.99 for an entire novel can be a challenge.

Earning more for short stories and novellas while keeping prices low

You and I may find that we simply can’t get people to buy short works at $2.99 a pop. Or, maybe we can sell some, but sales are so much lower that it’s not worth it overall to charge more. Here’s an option for us:

Bundling short stories and/or novellas to create an omnibus.

Soon after I release Peacemaker, I’m planning to publish the Flash Gold Chronicles I-III in a single ebook volume, probably for $3.95 or so. This would be a good deal for readers who want to simply grab all three at once (it’ll be cheaper for them to buy all of the stories in one ebook, and the combined word count will equal that of a full-length fantasy novel), and it’ll be a good deal for me because the higher royalty rate on a $4 ebook will mean I’m making about $2.70 per sale. Compare that to 35 cents on Book 1 plus 50 cents on Book 2 plus 50-70 cents on Book 3 (if I find I have to price that at $1.99 instead of $2.99 to make sales).

Ah, who knew writing involved so much math?

I’ll write another post later on with details on how the pricing experiment and the novella-omnibus goes. In the meantime, authors, what are your thoughts on pricing for short stories and novellas? Are you following Mr. Smith’s guidelines or doing something else? Readers, what are you willing to pay for ebooks of those lengths?

 

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Ebook Pricing: Why 99 Cents Might Be a Mistake for You

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Lindsay

A lot of new independent authors will e-publish their first novels and set the price to 99 cents, thinking that’s where they have to be because they’re unknown authors. Then they’ll go out and promote the heck out of their books (spending hours on blog tours, forum posts, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), all in an effort to sell copies of that single 99-cent title.

The problem?

If you’re selling your ebook for 99 cents, you’re only making 35 cents per sale. Nobody ever said being an author was the road to riches, but that’s an awfully poor return on a novel that probably took you six months to a year or more to write, edit, and publish. What’s worse is that, with only one ebook out, you can’t make more than 35 cents per customer (more on why that’s a problem below).

This is why, if you ask me, I won’t recommend the 99-cent price tag for authors with one book out (short stories or short novellas, being a possible exception).

Wait, you’re thinking, isn’t my first ebook currently free? Isn’t it a 105,000-word, full-length fantasy novel that’s less than 99 cents at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Itunes, and Smashwords? (Yes, I can work plugs for my stuff into any blog post! 😉 ) And didn’t take it take me a year to write that puppy? (Actually, it was more like seven years in the making, but that’s another story.)

The answer is yes, I have a free novel out there, and there was a time when I had that novel priced at 99 cents too. The difference is that I have books 2 and 3 (with 4 coming this spring) in the series out as well, and those are $4.95. I’ve tinkered with the price on Book 1, and I’m finding that, right now, I make more overall by giving that novel away for free, because more people try the series and go on to buy the following books.

But, if you only have one book out, then it might not make sense to sell it for 99 cents — or less. The problem with 99 cents is you have to sell six times as many copies as you do at $2.99 to make the same amount of money.

You’re welcome to test things (I encourage it, in fact), but if you’re not writing in a popular genre (i.e. thrillers and romance), then you may find it tough to sell enough books for it to be worth it (“worth it” is subjective, of course, but most of us want to at least break even on our editing and cover art costs in a timely manner). Even writing in a popular genre is no guarantee of success. Many people find that their sales increase at 99 cents, but not enough to be significant. They may sell 50 copies a month and think, “Hey, that’s not bad” only to realize that only earns them $17 or about $200 a year. It’s hard to stay excited about your writing and the promise of a writing career on such paltry earnings, and many new indies don’t even sell that well. (I didn’t my first month.)

Is marketing worth it if you only have one 99-cent ebook?

If you only have the one book out, there’s nowhere for a new reader to go after buying your first novel. You’re putting all this time into marketing and guest blogging and hand-selling books, and all you’re going to get out of it is a maximum of 35 cents per customer. Ouch. Not many businesses make it on returns like that.

If you wait to go hardcore on the marketing until you have more books out (perhaps even a series, eh?), you now have the potential to make $10 or $20 per “customer,” depending on how you price your books. It’s still not a lot (see my earlier note on how most authors don’t get rich), but the numbers start to look a little better. Maybe you’re averaging $10 or $20 per hour of promotion you do, as opposed to 35 cents.

At that point, putting hours into promotional efforts begins to make more sense, especially if you start a newsletter and encourage your readers to sign up. In the business world, people talk about the “lifetime value” of a customer, and it’s not so different with authors and readers. Say you’ve sold someone your series and made that $10 or $20, but you’re working on your next series. If you have that reader on your mailing list, then you can shoot him/her a note when you have a new book out. That person may buy the new one and continue to buy your books for many years down the road. Ultimately, this means that your hour of promotional efforts can end up being worth much more than $20, but only if you have multiple books out and only if you encourage readers to sign up for your newsletter (don’t assume that readers will just remember your work, because they have lots and lots of authors they follow!).

You may be thinking that you can do the newsletter thing and try to snag lifetime customers based on your one book, and that is true, but you’ll probably find that it takes more than one book for readers to decide they love your work. After one book, they may decide to look for others by you, but if there’s nothing else out there…well, it’s asking a lot at that point for them to come to your site, read all about you, and sign up for your newsletter (that said, it’s never to early to get started with that stuff).

In summary, I recommend pricing your first ebook at $2.99 or above and not worrying a whole lot about sales and marketing until you have more books out. Even if you only sell 10 ebooks a month at that price, you’re making more than if you’d sold 50 at 99 cents. Then, when you have more ebooks out, you can play around with “loss leaders” (AKA pricing your first book at free or 99 cents to get more people into your world).

A short cut to getting more ebooks out there

If you’ve just published your first novel, and it took six months to a year (to seven years) to finish it, you may be groaning at the idea of not making much money until you have another one out. Well, I started out in the same boat. I’m envious of these new indie authors who pop in with five or ten “trunk novels” they can drop into the marketplace. But what about the rest of us?

Write some short stories to bulk up your list of titles. You can absolutely turn short stories, novelettes, and novellas into ebooks, and they don’t take nearly as long as novels to write.

I’ve talked about this many times on here (so those of you who have heard it before can skip this paragraph), but when I published my first novel, I didn’t have any of the following books in the series written. I did have a short story that featured the heroes from the novel. I uploaded the story to Smashwords as a free ebook (I didn’t even think of charging since it was only 6,000 words), and I included an except to Book 1 at the end. The ebook was distributed to iTunes, Sony, and Barnes & Noble (at the time I didn’t know how to get a free ebook into Amazon, or I would have done that as well), and lots of folks found it, read it, and went on to buy my first book (at the time I had my first novel priced at $2.99). How many people? It’s impossible to say, but over the last year, I’d guess that 500 to 1,000 sales came my way because of that short story.

Do you have thoughts on free/99-cent ebooks? Let us know in the comments. Thanks!

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