Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
[...] Plus I absolutely suck at marketing. My problem is I haven't found anyone who is really good at it. At least not yet.
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If you want someone to tell you what not-to-do, I'm your man.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
[...] Now, on a side note, completely skipping the whole billboard idea (apparently it's not gonna work until I get other things sorted out), if I do start charging for my books, what would you say is a fair price to charge? Like I said earlier, I don't want to go too high or low for what I'm offering.
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I think skipping the billboard is wise. Try and work out a bigger strategy and if the billboard fits that then think about it again then.
And speaking of strategies, I hope it will be okay if I add this link to VyderScope's
article about what worked for him. (He's not around to speak for himself these days so this, I hope, is no different to linking any other blog article. Our wise moderators will correct my post if I'm wrong.) It's interesting and, in terms of the amount of published material you have already, I think something like that might work for you if you're willing to put in that level of upfront effort to get multiple books ready to release in sequence like that. For myself, I don't have enough stuff already out, and I'm struggling to find the time to work on one book at the moment.
As to price. Back when I published my first book I decided on $3.99 (and it hasn't changed). This was mostly based on the idea that most other Indy stuff around then seemed to be priced around $2.99 for 100k words and mine was 140k words. This was pretty arbitrary, but slightly supported by the fact that I would get (in my hand) around the same price per book as my print-on-demand editions. Your work, I think, is mostly 70k..100k, so I'd recommend $2.99. It's very well presented and think you can easily justify (at least) that price level.
You might want to check out
this thread where I talk about the 2017 Smashwords survey - including a link to the slideshow. A lot of the survey looks at romance, which is less relevant, but it does also talk about first-book-free and boxsets that you may find relevant.
P.S. Also note that my posts sometimes sound more knowledgeable than my experience/success justifies. (Trying the power of positive thinking: if I sound like I know my stuff then maybe, eventually, it will come true.
) Please don't read too much into them, I'm only trying to be helpful. Ignore anything that doesn't make sense to you.