Lesson 28

Writing Class 101
 E-books and sales. Lesson 28
 Today starts a new week. I hope you had a good seven days. Today I want to touch on e-books and sales. If you have found, or gone through a publisher, remember, they don’t care about you. You have to care about you, and market everything yourself. I know this takes away a lot of time from writing your next book, and it frustrates you from your writing, but it’s all part of the game.

Don’t listen to their suggestions on pricing. I was told my book should be $12.99 for my ninety-eight page book. When holding it in my hands, it was so thin it seemed more like a pamphlet. I believed that the vanity pubs knew what they were doing. They said the e-book should sell for $9.99. Great potential income if they would have sold. Once they were on the market and after three months, no sales.
During this time I found other connections on LinkedIn and Facebook asking them for advice, and they all came back with comments that my prices were too high, and no one would ever buy them at those prices. So, still not knowing enough I called my publishers and lowered my e-books to $5.99 and $7.99, because I still wanted to make something. Yet, still no sales.
I turned to blogs and book people, reading everything I could. In order to get your author name noticed and your book into a lot of hands, they would place their books on the market for free. Many advised against this practice, as do I, but if you have a very short book with many more on the market, it could pay off to direct them to all your other books that you have.
My wife only has free books on her Kindle. She refuses to even pay for a ninety-nine cent book. People look for bargains, and the next is ninety-nine cent reads. Again, for a small book, okay. At least as an e-book at seventy percent, that’s sixty-nine cents per sale. Remember, how much did you spend to get this far with set up, copyright, ISBN, editing, and cover, not to mention how much if you went through a vanity publisher. How much have you put into advertising? Also, they say the average sale for an author’s book is 250 books the first year. I don’t see getting more in the years to follow, so will you even breakeven?
The more I listen and read, the sweet price for an e-book is $4.99. If your book is on Amazon Kindle for less than $2.99, they will not give you the seventy percent of the sale. It could drop down to thirty-six percent.
Print books will vary, based on word count, actually, the number of pages. Book cost from Print on Demand is around $3.40 plus postage, so Print on Demand charges sixty percent, Amazon charges a fee, and you get what remains. My books have been sold to family and friends. At the $12.99 price which was said to be too high, I received $3.46. So based on that formula, print on demand received $7.79, Amazon took $1.74, and I received the remaining $3.46. So if I lower my price for that same little book to $9.99 I might make .40 cents a copy. Rough business, isn’t it. Everybody else makes millions off of your work and thousands of other authors, because they do volume. If we all sold 1 million copies or more, we wouldn’t even care. I have also heard that books going over 80,000 words, which means more pages, a printed book will cost more to print, more to ship, and Amazon again will lower your percentage.
I was talking about price set, wasn’t I?
So, 20,000 words or less, a lot of my books, said to be too high at $12.99. That’s roughly 89 pages. I could lower the price to maybe $10.99. 40,000 words, 160 pages, $12.99, and 83,000 words, a novel, 260 pages, my book was set at $19.99, maybe down to $15.99, but who really buys books anymore? According to Amazon over 15.6 million people buy paperbacks per year, and 1.5 million e-books are sold every month, but is that at $.99, and do they consider free as a sale? We are our own worst enemy. So, keep your price reasonable. Not too high, or way to low, and please, don’t give it away.
If you do happen to hit the big time, maybe you can charge more or hand them out for free. Funny thing is that I see James Patterson and Stephen King books for ninety-nine cents. Of course, they have made it, and they can afford it. This is what we are competing with. Maybe you will be the lucky one. Until then, enjoy your week and we’ll have another mind numbing conundrum next week. Until then,
 
Happy Writing from rickkurtisbooks.com