Quote:
Originally Posted by Marj
Personally, I'm beginning to resent this whole thing of readers expecting books for free or for the ludicrous price of just 99c. Some of you seem to think that $2.99 is dear! But you'd pay more for a cup of coffee.
My own books are adult (not porn or even erotica.) I will never make them free because people should consider before they buy them. My publisher set the first at $2.99, and probably the second will be the same. That is very cheap, cheaper than I would have chosen. For a year's work, a great book, $2.99 is an absolute pittance.
Maybe 99c for a Mills & Boon type romance, but for a serious book, try being willing to pay a bit more and you might find you get greater quality.
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I agree that a good book is worth more than 99 cents or even $2.99. The question is how do I find that good book or good author?
In the olden days of not so long ago, the premise was that if someone was published by a Random House they were a good author but if they were published by a vanity press or were self-published, they were not. In today's marketplace, that premise is no longer as valid as it once was.
The premise has begun to fail because increasingly authors are self-publishing and the number of "publishers" has grown exponentially. Now there are "publishers" who only publish a single author's books and "publishers" who publish fewer than 5 books a year. Last statistic I saw was that there are more than 50,000 "publishers" in the United States alone. Consequently, the gatekeeping that was behind the premise has disappeared.
Last year more than 750,000 books were self-published in the United States alone. How does a reader find the good author/book in that large a pile? The reality is that it is very difficult and various readers have various strategies.
For many of us, the strategy is to focus on the free or 99 cents ebook as the introducer to the unknown author. Does this work? I can only speak for myself but for me it definitely does. It was the free ebook
Sentence of Marriage that introduced me to Shayne Parkinson. That book was good that I immediately purchased all her other ebooks at the asking price (I think it was $2.99) without hesitation. And I then went on to write several blog recommendations and I notified all my friends and acquaintances that these are books to buy and read. Many of them did.
This repeated itself with many other authors -- Michael Hicks, Vicki Tyley, LJ Sellers, Tracy Falbe, to name a few. But I would never have read a book by any of these authors if the first one hadn't been free or 99 cents because there are literally thousands of books and authors vying for my attention so why spend more than I have to to get introduced.
You may think your book is worth much more than $2.99 and it may be, but it isn't worth anything if no one discovers it and getting discovered is the problem for which there is no single solution.