{"id":161,"date":"2011-04-21T09:51:49","date_gmt":"2011-04-21T15:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/?p=161"},"modified":"2011-04-21T11:03:36","modified_gmt":"2011-04-21T16:33:36","slug":"the-99%c2%a2-store-what%e2%80%99s-a-book-worth-these-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/the-99%c2%a2-store-what%e2%80%99s-a-book-worth-these-days\/","title":{"rendered":"The 99\u00a2 store: what\u2019s a book worth these days?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I put my out-of-print book Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice <\/em>on Kindle<\/a>, I had to decide how much to charge. Amazon limited me to charging $9.99 if I wanted the higher royalty, 70%. So I thought, I\u2019ll underprice it a bit to make it more attractive, and listed it for $8.99.<\/p>\n

Turns out that was way over<\/em>priced. Fierce pricing debates rage among indie authors on blogs and the Kindle online forums. Many charge 99\u00a2\u2014the lowest Amazon allows. One theory is that people will take a chance on anything for 99\u00a2, so you start there to build buzz and then raise your price\u2014all the way to $2.99. Another is simple: the less you charge, the more you sell.<\/p>\n

But I think this debate isn\u2019t just about how to sell more copies. It\u2019s about what a piece of writing is worth. One writer posted an e-publisher\u2019s price list<\/a> (scroll down to find it) for different length works\u2014ranging from a \u201cShort Story\u201d of 12,000 to 18,000 words ($2.50) to a \u201cPlus Novel\u201d over 100,000 words ($6.50).<\/p>\n

I was distressed to see prices for books and stories quoted by volume, as though they were pounds of potatoes or bars of soap.\u00a0 I pointed out that a lot goes into writing that can\u2019t be quantified that way. Research. Revision. Thinking. As magazine writers like to say, it\u2019s harder to write short than long because of the additional effort (and skill!) needed to compress information into a tighter space. One person responded that she just wouldn\u2019t fork over more than $1 for something that took less than an hour to read.<\/p>\n

These indie authors are almost uniformly writers of genre fiction: horror, romance, sci fi, etc. My book is nonfiction, dealing with a serious question in many women\u2019s lives, and based on a lot of research. Does that make a difference? Should I expect my readership to pay more than an audience looking for entertainment, a quick escapist read? Would they think that\u2019s fair?<\/p>\n

And a broader question: is my book\u2014anyone\u2019s book\u2014really the equivalent of those doodads they sell at the 99\u00a2 store\u2014a worthless impulse purchase, but so cheap it doesn\u2019t matter?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I put my out-of-print book Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice on Kindle, I had to decide how much to charge. Amazon limited me to charging $9.99 if I wanted the higher royalty, 70%. So I thought, I\u2019ll underprice it a bit to make it more attractive, and listed it for $8.99. Turns out that was way overpriced. Fierce pricing debates rage among indie authors on blogs and the Kindle online forums. Many charge 99\u00a2\u2014the lowest Amazon allows. One theory is that people will take a chance on anything for 99\u00a2, so you start there to[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[19,20,18,9],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ebook-publishing","category-writing","tag-amazon","tag-ebooks","tag-indie-publishing","tag-kindle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions\/169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}