Why Writers Suck at Marketing

Writers and marketing. In this digital age, the two words are becoming synonymous, but to what end? Having been on both sides of the fence, this is a difficult post for me to write. This isn’t the sort of thing I care to admit or highlight to people, because writers are a unique breed. Immersed in words, we use them to the best of our advantage. We research. We’re intelligent. We should be able to learn anything we set our minds to.

But not all of us can.

Our Personality Matters


By nature, our work requires us to be introverts. We turn our focus to the voices inside our head to produce the words on the page. Marketing, on the other hand, forces us to be extroverts. The two fields don’t always jive with our personalities. No matter how hard we try to hide it, we all have our quirks and sensitivities. Is that wrong? No, not at all. Our personalities aren’t something to be picked apart and analyzed, but by their nature it’s difficult to pull off both at once.

Many authors read popular marketing books from the likes of Seth Godin, etc. or learn more from their organization. (Truthfully, I’ve learned more about marketing books from my romance writer’s group than I have in any other.) Can an author understand marketing from a pragmatic and theoretical level? Yes. Can an author turn around and apply that knowledge to reach new readers?

Well, that depends.

Books are Products, Unfortunately


Once the book is done, our vocabulary changes. Instead of authors, we’re small business owners. Instead of offering a book for our readers, we have a product to sell. That concept is uncomfortable for a lot of authors (and editors) because it cheapens our art, turning it into a money-making machine. While that concept doesn’t resonate with every author the same way, the idea of “going corporate” with a book is a direct attack on the romanticized view of an author.

For many, the idea of writing commercial fiction is painful. It’s no longer your story, it’s someone else’s. Indeed, there’s a stigma for authors who have bestsellers or write tie-in novelizations. They’re sell outs. They’re not real authors. They’re hacks. The question is: Why do those stigmas exist? Is it because the writing is any better or or worse than non-commercial fiction? No, most definitely not. Many authors have written both original works and tie-in novels including E.E. Knight, Tobias Buckell, Matt Forbeck, etc. So what gives?

Emotions Blind Us


Perhaps these impressions exist because it goes back to the same reason why authors suck at marketing. We are so emotionally attached to what we do, it’s challenging to deal with the reality of it. Once a book is published, we have to sell it. Not just when it first appears, but continually. Putting the discussion of sales aside, the reality is also that not everyone will like our book, including reviewers. Even if someone is interested in it, they may not want to recommend it or buy it, either. On the flip side, readers may love it and cherish it. But the negative side to that? Can we deal with scathing or uninformed reviews? Not so easy. We created the work. We’ve given birth to a story. In many ways, we view an attack on a book as a personal one on the author. Whether or not that’s the case, this is the reason why authors investing in a career have to have a thick skin.

Marketers are our Shields


Marketers act as a buffer between the creator of a product and potential customers, much like a public relations agent protects a celebrity or politician. A marketer deals with the good, the bad and the ugly from the PR side and determines how to leverage the positive points a book has in order to reach out to new readers. Marketers are cheerleaders, cops, therapists and investors. They may have a vested interest in selling your book, but they can see it from an outsider’s viewpoint because they didn’t write it. That perspective is invaluable to any author, because it often helps you express details about your book you can’t see.

The reality of selling any item, whether it be a book or a stuffed animal, is that you can’t make everyone happy. As authors, we really love what we do, so it’s hard not to take it personally when a reader doesn’t like the stories we’ve worked so hard to tell. Part of that, of course, is the fact that it takes a lot of time to do what we do. By the time the book is published, we’re already exhausted. We’ve nurtured the story for months, from first draft to final. No one else knows that, though.

Marketing isn’t Easy


The gut reaction when a book debuts is to take the path of least resistance. Writers flock to Facebook and Twitter or blog because it’s the easiest and most comfortable thing to do. We think by blogging once or twice or getting a couple of reviews that’s what marketing is all about. We’ve done our job, right? But it’s not. Marketing campaigns don’t last a single day, often they stretch out for months at a time. Bookstores, for example, specialize in merchandising books. Take a look around the next time you’re in one or visit their website; they don’t just carry new releases.

Yet, that’s what a lot of authors do. They focus on the “one” book and promote the living hell out of it. If that doesn’t work, they repeat ourselves over and over again. BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK. Granted, it’s infinitely harder to market one product as opposed to a line of them, which is why working with a publisher or like-minded authors whenever possible is so important. The nature of the web favors the biggest, not necessarily the best. The truth is: lone voices are just a drop in the bucket online, unless you put the work in to make your voice heard. That takes a long time to do if you don’t have any help.

Sure, people point out several examples of authors who do all right, but typically an author had something prior to their success, an asset they either leveraged or forgot they had. Maybe they wrote for a popular game line and developed a fan following. Maybe they were a contributor to a well-known blog. Maybe they had been previously published through a book chain.

Whatever the reason, remember that there was an identifiable and quantifiable justification for their success. It may look easy to us, but any successful person knows there’s something to be said for hard work.

What’s an Author to do?


The more websites pop up and the more books that are sold, the more challenging it will be for new authors to market their books online without professional help or the backing of a publisher. I have strong opinions about what that means and how much it’s worth; I feel that now instead of vanity press, we have vanity marketing. Some of the prices for such services are simply absurd. If you’re considering hiring someone to provide marketing for you, be sure to do your homework. Any professional marketer will have data and examples of what a typical campaign looks like. If a service cannot provide that to your satisfaction, do not hire them.

Whether it’s short stories or tie-in work, marketing for an author is most successful when you have a built-in audience of people willing to pay for your work. Mind you, that is not the same thing as a platform. The reason why popularity online is so attractive for people, is because it’s akin to brand awareness. The thinking is, the more people who know about you, the more likely they will convert into paying customers. Larger platform? Higher conversion. Though, even then that’s not a guarantee.

Does all of this include me? Who has a background in online marketing? Let’s just put it this way. For some of my new releases? Once the work is done, I hope to partner with my publishers, to figure out how I can best help bring awareness of my works in a way that’s comfortable for both of us.

February 7, 2011
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Your Business Model is not Your Neighbor’s

I’ve been in a lot of discussions recently with other authors and a few game designers about pricing. Over and over again, I hear comparisons to the iTunes model or whatever Amazon is doing. If “free” is not the golden calf, then ninety-nine cents is the deal of the decade.

From my perspective, pricing right now is being determined not based on the content that is being created, but by its ease of distribution and the potential market reach a website has. The iTunes model worked for music, and now it’s being applied to fiction and games, too. While I understand why this is happening, I’m disappointed that the pricing is based on availability rather than its intrinsic value. Impulse buy? Sure, but in my opinion, some things are worth paying more than ninety-nine cents for.

Just for the sake of argument, say that it takes a composer as much time to write a good song as it does an author to write a short story. Should they be priced the same? From a consumer standpoint, you listen to a song, regardless of what you’re doing. You can consume this song over and over again, and don’t have to drop your activities to listen to it.

Ninety-Nine Cent Pricing Should Work for All Publishers, Right?

Readers who purchase a story are making an investment because they are committing their time to the product, much like a movie. Games are another beast entirely, because they often require a larger time investment depending upon the type of game. Also, many games require multiple players and have a much higher production value in terms of formatting than a story does.

Just for a second, take a game and price it at ninety-nine cents. Is it text-based? Typically, no. There’s often art, tables, borders and even color. What happens to your sales when you strip out all of that formatting? I honestly don’t know. Phil Reed was recently speculating about that, too. Would you pay the same price for two products that are identical in every way, with the exception of the formatting?

Now, to be clear, I am not advocating that hobby games publishers shouldn’t experiment with their product offerings. However, I am suggesting that ninety-nine cents is too low for the standard price of a game. If I had a hobby game company and my production costs were low, I would experiment with structuring themed games for four to six players with a suggested running time and package/develop/market it like that. (Renting, on the other hand, is a different beast entirely and I don’t want to get into that here. And yes, some publishers, like WoTC, are already going with boxed sets. My idea is nothing new. I just like the idea of playing around with a streamlined digital version.)

Lastly, a publisher’s inventory also comes into play. Say I own a gaming company and I have a total of twenty products. Would it make sense for me to price them that low? What if I had two? Or five hundred? What then? Of those products, how long are they? Core books or supplements? What value do they provide to my players?

Now, one thing that fiction publishers are doing is offering short stories from an anthology as individual downloads and then bundling them together in an anthology. This is interesting to me, because now instead of having one product to sell, you have eleven or thirteen. In this way, the “singles” idea from music increases a publisher’s inventory. Even though singles have always been sold, traditionally we have purchased albums or CDs from musicians or, in other words, an anthology of an artist’s music. Here, there’s a loose correlation to fiction based on how a product is structured.

I have also heard some use “piracy” as a low-price argument. My two cents: Pricing your products at a lower price because you think they’re going to be stolen is not a business model. Why? Because you are defining your sales goals on either making more than nothing or generating revenue to cover losses you have not experienced. To quote Spock: This is not logical. By structuring your business around whether or not you think your product will be stolen, you’re predicting that your potential customers could all be thieves. Ugh. That’s a crappy way to treat your customers. (On the receiving end, too. Went to two, different businesses for returns this holiday season and I felt like a criminal.)

But Biff is Doing It, So Why Can’t I?

I have never talked to a creative professional that deeply and truly did not love to write, design, paint, program, photograph or draw, but I have talked to people who hate running and owning a business. When you write or edit and sell that work, even if it’s in your spare time, that’s pretty much what you’re doing. Many people, including myself, are thrilled that the internet gives them the chance to collaborate or see what the next guy is doing to keep up on the trends. However, what works for your neighbor may not work for you, which is why I strongly encourage you to think before you leap. Yes, you have to take risks and believe me I understand that now more than ever. This is where your business acumen comes into play. Run the numbers. Do the cost analysis. Ask yourself those important questions. What percentage do you need to increase sales by at a lower price to break even? Do you know what your production costs are? Can you look at historical trends? Is there a segment of your business you can safely experiment with? How long can you offer this promotion before it hurts your bottom line?

To be clear, I am not saying that some sort of industry standard for pricing is bad. What I am saying, is that I believe the standardization of a popular business model is not a healthy or reasonable expectation for any business. You can’t take a template and mold businesses that have been around for a year, five years or even ten years and expect them to change overnight just because something is working right now. Unfortunately, like offering things for free, the market (e.g. customers) may react that way even if the reality is very different. Take social media for example. It’s the hot thing that everyone’s talking about, but no one knows why. Does every business need to be on Facebook, Twitter, etc.? No, because like any other business venture there are pros and cons to doing it and social media doesn’t always equate to sales. Does it mean that that business is evil? Not at all. They’re doing what works for them. Same is true with ninety-nine cent pricing or offering free product, etc.

Can You Give Me An Example?

Recently, I brought up this topic with Jason Sizemore over at Apex Book Company. What I told him was, that even though Apex publishes science fiction, horror and fantasy books and may be the same size as other small press publishers, he has his own modus operandi, goals and future. It’s great to talk shop and be inspired by like-minded businesses, but no one should immediately run out and change their business structure because someone else is doing something that appears to be successful without thinking it through. I feel that Apex has a better chance of emerging as a leader because Jason is concerned with forging his own identity and he has good people to help him do that.

One big change that I recommended, was to stop offering the magazine for free and go to a subscription-based model. This was in place already, after a fashion, but I had suggested the semantics were confusing. Many creatives use the word “support” when talking about their artwork or music or whatever. You support a team or a cause. You buy from a business or you purchase something you want. In order for the magazine to be profitable, the donation suggestions needed to be removed and the subscribers rewarded. This was a great example of how free stuff works for some businesses, but too much free can distract a reader from converting into a buyer. In the end, Jason’s decisions aren’t solely based on his gut or my suggestions, they’re inspired by data, which gives him something to work from.

For extra credit, here’s some additional reading material and tools on the subject that pinpoint different issues through the past year:

Your comments are welcome. Please respect Biff.

January 7, 2011
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Providing a Service Versus Offering an Asset

For any creative professional who is providing a service, the difference between making money now and making money over the long-term can be pretty frightening. On the one hand, we all have the tendency to make decisions based on the power of a dollar. How many jobs have we taken that we were over-qualified for? How many assignments did we take because we needed to pay a bill?

Are You Providing a Service?

The idea that you, as a creative professional, are providing a service goes much deeper than making those quick decisions. Let me walk you through an example of what I’m talking about.

Let’s say I get hired to write a story set within the Hellboy universe. (Hah, I wish!) Because that setting is owned by Mike Mignola, I would not own the rights to what I’ve written. Since I already know the setting, I don’t need to spend a lot of time learning about Hellboy, so I wouldn’t lose a lot of time there. I would, however, need to research new stories within the setting because there’s already been a lot of myths covered. Then, there’s the time it would take to write the story and go through the editing process. Once the story was done, I can’t do anything else with it because now it belongs to someone else. Even though I wrote for a setting I love, I still produced an asset for someone other than myself. In short, I provided a service to develop something that someone already had a need for.

This example highlights how writing for a tie-in property typically works. The reality of being a creative professional is that we produce content for other people in order to make a living. I look at the process of developing an asset for someone else as our ability to provide a service rather than produce a deliverable. Other examples range from writing website copy for someone else’s business to graphic design to developing a game and pitching it to a publisher. The concept, though, is pretty simple to follow once you start tracking how the money is flowing to you. If you get paid up front for the work you’re doing, I feel that it’s helpful to look at your time as a service related to product development. You are, in effect, developing and providing an asset that someone else needs and will, in turn, sell.

Or Are You Creating an Asset?

When you design something for other people to purchase that you have more control over, then you’re creating an asset. An example of that is an illustrator creating a clip-art CD or offering prints for sale of artwork they own the rights to.

Now, there are advantages to both business models because, in many ways, an asset’s value increases depending upon how many people want that asset. I could design an interactive fairy tale for you, but if you didn’t want it, then it’s not worth anything and I’d lose money because I had just spent all that time creating something you don’t care about. The reality of developing your own assets, is that it isn’t enough “just” to create the asset. You need to figure out how you can get people to pay for it. For a writer, that means you have to develop a strong base of readers that will invest in your work.

A really good example of what I’m talking about here, are some of the arguments that self-published authors make. To those that don’t understand how publishing works, the publisher is greedy because they have too much control over the author’s asset (e.g. the book). What they don’t understand, is that the publisher is providing the author with a better chance of reaching readers which makes their asset more valuable. Even though there are many services out there that offer some of the same services as a publisher does, the majority of self-published authors don’t sell thousands of copies of their work for a variety of reasons. For starters, those services are not discriminate; they do not turn down an author based on the quality of the work. Publishers do, because they understand that books are assets that represent the author, but also their brand name, too. This is why authors who go through traditional models typically sell more books simply because of the way publishing works.

Then What?

Now, the examples I mentioned above may not apply to you specifically, but the idea is still the same. If you think about your time as your primary asset, then consider the following questions: Do I own what I create? If so, how am I getting paid for it? If I’m not getting paid what I’m worth, then how can I get paid more?

For myself, I don’t attach a “good” or “bad” value to providing a service versus offering an asset because I look at them in terms of different business models. Which is, realistically, what they are. I’d absolutely write a tie-in story for a property I’d love; on the flip side, I’d still want to write a fun story of my own, too.

Not sure about what you think about my post today, but I feel this idea is pretty important. That’s part of the reason why there’s so many changes going on here behind-the-scenes that I haven’t announced yet.

Deep thoughts today! Do these questions resonate with you? Why or why not?

July 27, 2010
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Guest Post: Three Reasons To Self Publish (And A Big One Not To!)

Today’s guest post about self-publishing is brought to you by author and game designer Jess Hartley. Jess is a professional writer who is experimenting with different options to expand her readership and engage existing fans.

Due to recent trends in technology and on-line marketing options, it is easier for a writer to self-publish today than ever before. Whether entirely on their own, or with the help of a plethora of book printers and retailers that specialize in small print runs, Print on Demand (PoD) technology or electronic publishing, almost anyone can set out to publish their Great American Novel and have physical copies in their hands in a matter of weeks, if not days. Some publishers brand self-publishing as the demon-child of the mainstream publishing industry, an evil to be avoided at all costs. Others (often those who are trying to encourage authors to print books through their services) rave about the mainstream publishing industry as archaic and tout their avenues as the easiest and fastest ways to get published.

So, who’s right?

The answer is found, as it often is, somewhere in the middle.

There are times and circumstances where producing your own material is the best choice. And situations where it may seem like the best choice, but really isn’t.

Self-published work may be right for you if:

You’re writing for a very niche market.

If you are interested in creating either fiction or non-fiction materials for a very specific community or small interest group to which you already have established ties, self-publishing might be a good choice for you. If, for example, my parents wanted to write a book about calling and cueing square dances, they probably won’t be able to sell it to a mainstream publisher. The niche market for their book would be just too small for most publishers to consider. However, since they’re already well-established in that niche, and have both the contacts and opportunity to market such a book to its most likely audience, it might be a good opportunity for them to do so as a self-published project.

Histories of a local area, or other projects specific to a certain town, landmark or attraction may be a great idea for that area, but not marketable anywhere else. A friend of mine recently published a book on ghost hunting in SE Arizona, which is selling like hotcakes through her ghost tours and local shops, but would be of little interest to someone from Michigan who’d never been to the area.

Your work is not in a form that is easily marketable.

Poetry, flash fiction, novellas and short stories suffer from similar challenges when it comes to publishing. While there are certainly some publishers who produce these types of works commercially, the competition for a space on their pages is fierce. Many anthology publishers are seeking increasingly more “big name” authors to include in their collections, in hopes of boosting sales, which has caused lesser-known authors to seek out different markets. Unfortunately, several poetry, flash fiction and short story markets pay at or below professional rates (if they pay at all.)

If you’re writing for one of these genres, it’s a good idea to do your research and find out what is and isn’t working in the current market to apply that to your own publications. If five, long-time poetry magazines have folded in the last year, creating a cookie-cutter publication of that sort may be a challenging business model for you. Before you self-publish, find out what’s working and what’s not, and learn from others’ mistakes and losses to avoid suffering from them yourself.

You already have an established readership or distribution model.

Even for those who write in the traditional publishing industry, the restrictions on commercially-produced projects keep us from being able to release what, when and how we would like to. The bigger a publisher is, the more concern they have to have with the profitability of any given project, and the more likely they are to have to “think big” in terms of print runs, marketing, and overhead.

Self-published materials can get into an established audience’s hands faster and with less restrictions than if an author were to go the traditional route. Additionally, when you self-publish you can customize your project to your reader’s desires with a lot more flexibility than if that same project was published through a large publisher. As a self-publisher, your “share” of the profit can (but is not always) be larger. However, this approach really works best if you’ve got a readership or distribution model already in place.

While some creators may thrive on marketing their wares book-by-book, it can be very challenging (and depressing) to learn that folks who have never heard of you and don’t know anything about your writing are rarely interested in paying money to read your work. If the writer has used a traditional printing paradigm (i.e. you pay the printer then hope to sell enough books to earn back your investment and make a profit) it can be a very expensive lesson to learn.

If, on the other hand, you have an established readership, self-published materials can be a great way to provide additional content to them, especially work that wouldn’t be feasible to produce through traditional means. My recent fiction effort, The Shattered Glass Project, is an experiment in this sort of model–providing established readers with the opportunity to directly support and be involved with the creation process.

A short story read only by those who are willing to invest as its being created? A series of poems written from the perspective of an established character? A game “ransomed” and released when a certain fund-raising level has been met? A novella that acts as a prologue for an upcoming novel? All of these can and have been done successfully by writers with established readers who are hungry for more material.

Self-Publishing is probably NOT the right choice for you if:

You believe that self-publishing is a way to avoid all the challenges of the traditional publishing industry.

There are a lot of challenges that writers face when seeking mainstream publication. Even after you’ve finished your novel, edited and revised it, buffed it to a high polish and written that dreaded query letter, you still have to find an agent or publisher who loves it enough to invest time and/or money in it. From agents blogs, the average offer rate seems to be somewhere under one percent – that is to say, out of every 100 queries or pitches received, 99% of them will receive some form of rejection. And once a writer has found representation, there’s still no guarantee that the agent/writer team will be able to place the book with a publisher.

It’s no wonder that many authors think that self-publishing is the answer to their prayers. Someone who receives 100 rejections on the novel they’ve spent years writing and which represents the pinnacle of their creative expertise, often finds it much easier to think that something’s wrong with the industry, than with their work. When self-publishing companies and printers say things like “we can have your book ready in a week, guaranteed,” it’s an intoxicating siren-song to those who have struggled for months or years to get someone in the mainstream industry to give them so much as an approving word.

But easy is not always best.

While agents and editors may seem like stumbling blocks to publication when you’re receiving rejections, they serve as a filter to catch and weed out the large portion of submitted materials which are simply not ready for commercial publication yet. Those who, rather than working to improve their creation to publishable levels, seek to do an “end run” around these obstacles, may get to see their words in print (usually at a hefty cost to their own pocket book.)

But their true goal – becoming a creator of publishable works, and a professional writer — is unlikely to be obtained in this fashion. Producing a product yourself–one which you either have to sell personally, or which is only available by special order through mainstream bookstores–is not a substitute for being published through a traditional publisher. And, it isn’t the “foot-in-the-door” to other publishing opportunities that many self-publishing companies market it as. Traditional industry professionals don’t usually see self-publishing as “published”. They see it as “couldn’t get anyone else to take my work, so I paid to have it printed myself.”

Learn what is right for you.

Your greatest chances for success with a self-publishing project come when you are realistic about the challenges and opportunities that self-producing your work brings with it. Don’t turn to self-publishing because you’re frustrated with mainstream publishing and think it will be faster/easier/more profitable to do your own project. Learn what does and doesn’t work as self-produced material, and use those to determine if self-publishing is right for you.

About Jess Hartley

For the last ten years, Jess Hartley has worked as a novelist and freelance writer, editor and game developer.

She has created game material and fiction for White Wolf Publishing, 12 to Midnight Games, Mind Storm Labs’ and Margaret Weis Productions on the Supernatural RPG line.

On an independent basis, Jess also writes “One Geek to Another,” a weekly etiquette and advice column for modern geeks, and authored “Conventions for the Aspiring Game Professional, an e-book designed to help those who are interested in working in the industry. She also guest-hosts “Out of Character,” a weekly gaming podcast that is part of the Pulp Gamer Network.

Her current independent efforts include The Shattered Glass Project, a fae fiction experiment based on a reader-sustained, patronage model.

Jess lives in Arizona, with her family and a menagerie of other interesting creatures, where she participates in a plethora of strange and curious pastimes which often make her neighbors and acquaintances scratch their heads in confusion.

To learn more about Jess, visit her website at www.jesshartley.com.

May 6, 2010
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Calculating the Cost of an E-Book

CalculatorI’ve had a lot of positive feedback from my previous post entitled Weighing in on E-Books, so I wanted to talk about ways to calculate the cost of an e-book.

First, let’s pull some arbitrary numbers. (And by arbitrary, I mean that these are not precise figures.) Let’s say that we paid our author $3,000 for their novel that was 100,000 words in length, which is the equivalent of about 3 cents per word. Then, let’s say we paid an editor a flat rate of $1,250 to edit the novel and an artist $500 for cover art. Add in production costs of $250 to create an e-book, and that gives us a grand total of $5,000 as the sum of the costs for our imaginary publisher.

In order to make up the costs of producing the e-book, we would need to sell a certain amount of copies at a specific price. Say that we priced the e-book at $10.00. If we kept one hundred percent of the revenue, we would need to sell 500 copies of that e-book to make up our costs before we made any money off of the book.

We decided that a retailer, like Amazon, is the best way to offer our e-book for sale. Currently, Amazon takes 65 percent of the cost of the book for all Kindle editions. Recently, they announced that they will lower that rate to thirty percent, but the new rate won’t kick in until June 30, 2010. (Read Amazon ups author royalty for Kindle, matching Apple per CNet.)

Let’s calculate our cost based on the 65% rate, because I think it’s important for you to see how that affects a publisher’s bottom line.

Now, we’d only make $3.50 for every book sold at a price of $10.00. At that rate, we need to sell approximately 1,429 or almost three times the amount of e-books if we took 100% of the revenue to make up our costs. Some retailers take less than 65 percent, but they still take a percentage to offer the book through their store. If you sign up with a One BookShelf site like DriveThruHorror e-books for example, they’ll only take 30 percent. Our profit would now be $7.00 for every e-book sold. So, we need to sell approximately 715 e-books to make up our costs at the $10.00 price rather than 1,429.

Even though we’ve estimated a price based on our costs, we need to think about something else — demand. Is this title only available as an electronic book? Or do we have a hardcover or paperback edition? Will pricing the e-book on sale at $5.99 sell enough copies to warrant the discounted price? How popular is this particular author? The volume of e-books that we need to sell might be different, depending upon any number of additional factors. One issue might come down to the original agreement that a publisher has signed with the author. Unfortunately, there are contracts that pre-date the release of electronic formats so it’s not uncommon to see authors providing a publisher with print rights but not digital or audio rights.

For me, I’m factoring in demand based on the reader’s awareness of my work as an author. Chances are, my soon-to-be-released small press product is not going to sell 1,000 copies at a price of $9.99 within a reasonable amount of time. Because I’m projecting lower sales, I’m lowering the costs of developing my digital product. Instead of paying an editor a thousand dollars, the publisher is offering a direct royalty payment that pays per product sold. We also are reviewing ways to make the product more valuable and attractive to readers by researching different types of graphics and layouts. Still, I needed to come up with two pricing structures; a retail price and a sale price. For me, my e-book price is lower than $9.99 because my costs and the demand for my work are both lower than a mainstream author. Those two things combined also mean that it may take me longer to recoup my costs.

Personally, I have a lot of trouble with people offering e-books at heavily discounted prices or for free, because this devalues the books considerably. What would you think of a print book that’s “on sale” for only ninety-nine cents? It’s original price is only $1.99? To me, this pricing structure seems pretty arbitrary. If your costs were $1,000 and you offered the book through OneBookShelf, you’d still need to sell approximately 720 books to make up that cost. (If your costs were $5,000, you’d need to sell 3,598 copies!!!)

Regardless of whether you self-publish or not, I feel that it’s a smart idea to calculate price based on your costs and your projected sales. By doing that, it can help you set reasonable expectations for your e-book pricing structure and prevent you from losing money over the long haul. Keep in mind, that the biggest mistake I see publishers making, is offering their e-book through a digital retailer like Amazon.com or OneBookShelf, and then “forgetting” about that book. If you want to make up your costs, be sure to include marketing your books — wherever they are being sold — into your plan. Sometimes, you need to make readers aware that you now offer your books in a different format, in order for them to buy those products.

If you’re curious about Amazon’s rates, be sure to visit Amazon.com’s Terms and Conditions or the Terms and Conditions for DriveThruRPG through OneBookShelf. (The Terms and Conditions for the DriveThruRPG site are very similar to the fiction and the comic book sites.)

January 25, 2010
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Monica Valentinelli > self-publishing

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