William Amerman's Blog - Posts Tagged "pricing"
Thoughts on independent writers
On various writer's forums, topics vary from how to sell more books to how to deal with bad reviews and so on. One thing we tend to tip-toe around, though, is expressing opinions on the quality of each others work. We try to be supportive and encouraging because insulting a writer's work is a bit like insulting one of his children. But it's hard when some guy is whining about a bad review and this same guy has pumped out 4 novels in a couple years, an aggregate word count of about half a million words, and it all reads like a 10th grader's B- book report on Lord Jim.
You know he's locked himself away every day for a couple of hours, roused himself into a self-absorbed frenzy of caffeine-induced egotism to put thoughts to the screen, but the cold truth is it's all worthless. It's wasted time. And I have a hard time advising him to buck up, cheer up, ignore the bad review and just press on. Because I'd rather that he didn't.
As a writer, I empathize, though. Almost every writer thinks his/her book is a gem just waiting to be discovered. That if only people could find it, would buy it, would read it, that it would quickly become a bestseller. God knows I fall into that description as well!
As a reader, though, my experience has been that most independently published books are, to put it delicately, crap. In ye olden days, agents and publishing houses acted as quality control owners. Even if they did let through a lot of what I considered "crap" years ago, compared with the independently published books of today, there is an obvious difference. It used to take quite a lot of effort and luck to get an agent to take you on or a publishing house to publish you. I racked up quite a few rejection letters over the years.
Today, though, any author can publish any work at any time. All you have to do is pound out a few thousand words, whip up a cover, format in Word and upload to a site and slap a price on it.
How do readers sift through all that noise? How do I do it? I just bought my kindle last month. I downloaded a lot of free books at first, but quickly moved on to .99 books. After a couple weeks of suffering through the .99 books, I've decided I'm going to have to move up in price. I'm finding a rough correlation between price and quality, but am wondering if that will hold as I move up into $2.99 and $3.99 territory. At least the sample chapters seem better. I wonder how others do it.
You know he's locked himself away every day for a couple of hours, roused himself into a self-absorbed frenzy of caffeine-induced egotism to put thoughts to the screen, but the cold truth is it's all worthless. It's wasted time. And I have a hard time advising him to buck up, cheer up, ignore the bad review and just press on. Because I'd rather that he didn't.
As a writer, I empathize, though. Almost every writer thinks his/her book is a gem just waiting to be discovered. That if only people could find it, would buy it, would read it, that it would quickly become a bestseller. God knows I fall into that description as well!
As a reader, though, my experience has been that most independently published books are, to put it delicately, crap. In ye olden days, agents and publishing houses acted as quality control owners. Even if they did let through a lot of what I considered "crap" years ago, compared with the independently published books of today, there is an obvious difference. It used to take quite a lot of effort and luck to get an agent to take you on or a publishing house to publish you. I racked up quite a few rejection letters over the years.
Today, though, any author can publish any work at any time. All you have to do is pound out a few thousand words, whip up a cover, format in Word and upload to a site and slap a price on it.
How do readers sift through all that noise? How do I do it? I just bought my kindle last month. I downloaded a lot of free books at first, but quickly moved on to .99 books. After a couple weeks of suffering through the .99 books, I've decided I'm going to have to move up in price. I'm finding a rough correlation between price and quality, but am wondering if that will hold as I move up into $2.99 and $3.99 territory. At least the sample chapters seem better. I wonder how others do it.
