C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 109

E-book pricing

Getting ready to release the Old Races short stories has got me thinking hard about e-book pricing, so I’m going to talk about it a lot now. :)

First off, where I’m coming from: Amazon, B&N and possibly Smashwords don’t kick in their 70% royalty rate until $2.99, so from where I’m sitting except for an occasional Special Offer, anything below that price seems like wasting my time (because I can’t really imagine selling SO MANY copies of something at $.99 or $1.99 to make up for the loss, though who knows, maybe I’m totally wrong about that).

To my mind, at $2.99 a reader deserves at least a SFWA-standard “novelette”‘s worth of words–around 17.5K. That’s 5 or so 3-5K short stories, or one longer-but-not-novella-length story. We’re talking about, say, 30-50 pages of story.

Novellas, which range from 17.5-40K by SFWA standards–well, we priced “Easy Pickings” at $2.99, but in retrospect I think maybe something in that range ought to be $3.99, perhaps. That would be somewhere in the 50-150 pages of story length.

Novels, by SFWA standards, are 40K+ (150+ pages, more or less). This is where it starts to get hairy for me, because does one price a short novel, say, NO DOMINION, which is 60K, at the same rate one prices a 150K novel? My inclination is no. And this is difficult to determine because in the print world, 60K novels are scarce on the ground except in category romance, where they in fact cost around $5.

So okay. Say I price NO DOMINION at $4.99, which I think is a pretty fair price. Then let’s say I write THE REGENT’S FOOL, which would have been book 3 of the Inheritors’ Cycle. If it stayed in line with the other two Inheritors’ books, it would be 150-170K, which is more than twice the length of NO DOMINION. If you were to get a mass market paperback of that, it would cost either $7.99 or $8.99. So would I (theoretically) price that at $7.99, and a middle-length novel like a Walker Papers, which ranges from 100-115K, at $6.99?

Well, no, actually, I probably wouldn’t. I’d probably set them at $5.99 and $6.99, although in my opinion we’re getting into a hazy grey area here, because while I can hear you protesting that e-books cost less to produce, and that’s true because there’s no physical book to print, the flip side is that the book still requires the same *work* that the printed edition costs. And those are things like this:

- me to write the book

- someone to edit the book

- cover art

- book design

- marketing

With the exception of marketing (which I haven’t properly figured out yet), those same costs are much inherent in any e-book I’d put out, except it’s my own money paying for cover art, editing and possibly book design, rather than my publisher’s money. This is probably in itself reason enough to argue for a further markup of the price to match publishing house prices, but OTOH, the publishing house is also printing books, which costs (as far as I can tell from the invoices I’ve gotten on my own author copies of books over the years) about 20% of the cover price. So okay, for a 100K+ novel I set the price a dollar below what a mass market would cost, and that more or less covers the “bargain rate because there’s no print edition” percentage of the cost.

(Begin digression: books like mine, published by a New York publisher as e-books, do not cost $9.99 or indeed $14.99 to try to screw the reader out of their money: they cost that because they’re paying for all of the above. Furthermore, bookstores pays the publisher $7.50 for that $14.99 book, which means all of the above is coming out of the $7.50 a publishing house is getting paid for that book. Subtract 20% of that $7.50 for printing costs, and appreciate that publishing is *not* a get-rich industry.

And Amazon is buying those books at at least $7.50 and selling them at a loss in order to draw people in and encourage them to buy Kindles. This is not sustainable for Amazon in the long run and it’s certainly not sustainable for the publishing industry, which is why Tor’s decision to release books DRM-free (and Baen’s having always done that) is a big deal.

End digression.)

I suppose the point of all this is that figuring out the e-pricing is tricky, and that I’m actively interested in how writers are approaching it and what readers think is fair. So talk to me! :)

Hip hip hooray!

Tor Books has just announced it’s going DRM-free on all its e-books.

I am so filled with squee over this that I cannot *tell* you. DRM (digital rights management) is one of the things that permits Amazon to have a throttlehold on e-book sales: you can only buy a Kindle book for a Kindle reader, which means if you ever change e-readers you have to either re-buy everything or (realistically) go to the trouble of cracking/converting the DRM, or (even more realistically) pirating the books. But Tor is firing a shot across the bow with this, as far as I’m concerned, and I hope everybody sits up and pays attention. Yay!

And on the second hip hip hooray of the evening, DON’T READ THIS BOOK is available for pre-order! I’m very excited about this one, so quick! Go forth! Buy, and prepare yourself for creepy stories!

(Really. Pre-order the trade paperback & you get to download the e-version immediately. When I say prepare yourself, I mean RIGHT NOW!)

Manners & Magic

With apologies to Jane Austen, I present to you MAGIC & MANNERS, which is what happens when I get it into my head to wonder what PRIDE & PREJUDICE would be like if it was not a lack of wealth that beleaguered the Bennet sisters, but rather an excess of magic…

That each and every one of Mrs Dover’s five daughters was afflicted with an inconvenient magic inherited from their father was no barrier to their impending nuptials: on this, Mrs Dover was determined.

“It has not,” she said to that long-suffering man for perhaps the six hundredth time in their marriage, “been the most desireable situation, but one must make do.”

“One must,” he agreed most aimiably, and into that agreement a silence fell, for one had, in fact, made do, both in Mrs Dover’s case and in Mr Dover’s. She, unmarried at the ancient age of twenty-three, had been obliged to accept the suitor who offered, and he, veritably in the grave at thirty-eight, had been equally obliged to request her hand. There was no scandal attached, much to the dismay of the neighboring gossips: Mrs Dover did not do in seven months what took a cow or countess nine, but instead gave birth to the first of many girls a stately and sedate fourteen months after marriage to Mr Dover.

Mr Dover had been, by all intelligence, an entirely suitable match: he had one thousand pounds a year and a quick humor which his wife had never fully learned to appreciate. He was laconic in spirit and gentle with horses, and had a handsome leg and a fine nose. All in all, he ought to have been married long before Mrs Dover was obliged to accept him. It was the unspeakable question of magic that had forced–or permited–him to remain unwed for so long.

Mrs Dover’s mother, Mrs Hampshire, had willfully seen nor heard anything of such rumors: no one in good society would. Certainly if Mr Dover was of that sort he had kept it quiet enough, with little more than his long-standing bachelorhood to hint at a family taint. Magic was the kind of thing that happened to someone else, to lesser people or those who had fallen from a higher station; it certainly did not appear unexplained in a family of good standing. Mr Dover had no mysterious deaths attached to him; he had never been married to a woman who wasted away in a high tower, nor had his parents disappeared or died under inexplicable circumstances. Certainly, indeed, Mrs Dover the Elder was of exceedingly good breeding and indeed, still alive when Mrs Hampshire oversaw the engagement of two (relatively) young persons to one another, while Mr Dover the Elder had died most respectably, at sea. Nor had Mr Dover the Younger any unexplained wards to care for, no suggestion of impropriety hanging over him in such a way. He was an eminently suitable young man for Mrs Hampshire’s rapidly aging daughter, and the match was made.

That the church walkway was lined with freshly blooming spring flowers, and that the trees were budding new green leaves under a gloriously warm sun on their wedding day was certainly no more than auspicious, and no one dared comment too loudly that it was the third of January, or that two nights earlier snow had fallen deeply enough to swallow horses’s ankles as they trod down frozen winter roads.

Mrs Hampshire had never been certain whether the new Mrs Dover had fully understood the unlikelihood of the blooming weather that graced her wedding day. She was very pretty, with blushing apple cheeks and wide light eyes beneath lemon-yellow hair that was indeed washed with lemon juice as often as possible to retain that soft bright color. Mr Hampshire, her father, was a man of reasonable means, though much of his money had gone to buying the new Mrs Dover’s brother a Captaincy, and so it had been necessary for the youngest Hampshire girl to marry passably well. It ought to have been an easy task, but Miss Hampshire, Mrs-Dover-to-be, possessed what an aunt had charitably called a tongue tied in the middle, and loose at both ends. She meant no harm at all, but it proved very difficult for Mrs Hampshire to seclude any potential bridesgrooms from her daughter long enough for them to fall in love with her mein and fail to notice her chatter. Mr Dover had been a blessing, and if the weather was unseasonably lovely for their marriage, well, the new Mrs Dover had felt it only her due, and Mrs Hampshire had breathed a sigh of relief that her youngest and silliest daughter was safely married.

Nor had Mrs Dover any complaints in a home where the tea remained mysteriously hot even after standing unattended for hours, or where a warm breeze seemed to waft from the kitchen’s roaring fires into all the coldest places in the halls. The laundry dried remarkably quickly, and stains never set in tableclothes; these were the unrealized advantages to marrying a man rumored to have magic of his own. Mr Dover had more money than Mr Hampshire; perhaps it was the greater income which allowed grass to grow more greenly or the dogs to be particularly well-mannered and disinclined to shedding. It was a fantasy upon which Mrs Dover was permitted to dwell until her second daughter’s third birthday, when an explosive sneeze from the child lit the tablecloth on fire, and only the quick calm hands of the oldest daughter kept the entire house from burning down. Even that might have been dismissable–the sneeze might have knocked a candle aside, the tablecloth might have been saved by doubling it and patting the fire out–but for the servants who were in the room at the time, and who most clearly saw what Mrs Dover denied. Rosamund, the eldest, patted the flames out with her bare hands, and left ice drippings on the wood beneath, and Elsabeth, the birthday girl, sneezed a second time for fun and dripped fire as if she was a little dragon, and not a girl at all.

Two of the servants gave notice and a third left in screams. Those who remained did so with forebearance, but the damage was done. By suppertime the story had been put around; by breakfast the following day each of Mrs Dover’s appointments for the next week had returned her calling cards, and by the following Sunday she pled with Mr Dover to allow them to retire to his modest country estate, where they might be forgotten about for a while.

Seventeen years had passed, and they had yet to return to town. Mr Dover found this to be no difficulty at all, and Mrs Dover bore it with good humor, which was to say she spoke of the difficulties of country living with every breath, most particularly the difficulties of finding suitable husbands for five–five!–daughters whose dowrys were modest at best, though certainly they all had lovely faces to make up for such moderate means,

“but,” Mrs Dover burst out, as though they had not fallen into a brief and companionable silence, “but certainly there is no doubt that a single man of good fortune must be in want of a wife, and what can you imagine, Mr Dover, but that Newsbury Manor has been let at last!”

“I am sure I can hardly imagine such a thing,” Mr Dover replied with usual good nature. He had his paper and his tea; nothing much could disturb him from these, and he had long since learned to bend when the wind blew in, as it so often did in the form of Mrs Dover. She, for her part, had barely come through the door before making impetuous statements regarding the desirability or lack thereof of their daughters’ situation, and only now wrested her hat from its perch atop her head to a spot on the table, where later she would scold a servant for having left it.

“Are you not the slightest bit curious about who might have let it?”

“Indeed, I am not, as Newsbury Manor is much too large for my liking and I could never wish to visit it myself, so am of no mind to know who has the poor taste to admire it.”

“Oh! How cruel you are. But I will tell you, as I know that the welfare of your daughters is close to your heart despite your pretenses to the contrary. It is indeed a young man of good fortune, as I have just had it from Mrs Langfield, a young man with at least three thousand pounds a year!–”

& that’s as far as I got before Young Indiana woke up. :)

MOUNTAIN ECHOES

I have just submitted the 2nd to last Walker Papers to my editor. I feel faintly sick now. I’m on the last leg of a 12 year journey now, and…wow. Just wow. Holy beans

I realized a few minutes ago that there’s one mistake in SPIRIT DANCES: the last lines should be “to be continued in RAVEN CALLS”, rather than whatever it says (tune in next time, I think). RAVEN CALLS does say “to be continued”, and MOUNTAIN ECHOES’s last words are “to be concluded in the final book of the Walker Papers.”

Wow. I’m gonna go…yeah. Sit for a while, now, thanks, and just…breathe.

Old Races story collection answers

I should have been smart enough to answer these without having to be asked, but somehow I wasn’t. :)

There will be 3 Old Races collections coming out in epub this summer.

The first, OLD RACES: ORIGINS, will contain five of the Old Races Short Story Project stories, all set long before the Negotiator Trilogy:

» Salt Water Stains the Sand, a story of the djinn which is also available as a free read on my website;

» The Death of Him, a story of the selkies;

» Falling, a story of the gargoyles;

» St. George & the Dragons, a story of the dragons;

and

» Legacy, a story of the humans

and may or may not have a 6th brand new story depending on how much I get done before the cover art comes in.

The second, YEAR OF MIRACLES, is the novella that tells the story of Sarah Hopkins, the human woman that Janx and Daisani both fell in love with in the Year of Miracles–the year London burned.

The third, OLD RACES : AFTERMATH, will contain at least four stories all set after the Negotiator trilogy, and will include

» Awakening, a story of the vampires

» Perchance to Dream, a Janx story reprint (the original publication was in DRAGON’S LURE)

» Aftermath, a Margrit Knight story included in the ORSSP for those who bought in before June 1, 2011

and at least one other brand-new story to fill the collection out.

In theory these collections will be released in May, June and July, but that really depends on when I get the cover art.

If you haven’t read the Negotiator Trilogy already, I would humbly submit you read it first, ’cause these collections are backstory and history (and what happens next) for stuff you learn in those books, and of course as the author I think you’ll get the most impact from reading them in publication order. The Negotiator Trilogy, in order, is HEART OF STONE, HOUSE OF CARDS, and HANDS OF FLAME,

Print edition: Don’t hold your breath. It may eventually happen, but it’s not a near-term thing, and frankly, it probably depends on how well BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER does from Subterranean Press, so if you haven’t pre-ordered that yet…do!

ORSSP patrons: I will be getting epub/mobi/pdf files to you, complete with the shiny new cover art, by the end of April. Thank you for your patience. O.O

THE OLD RACES : AFTERMATH

Margrit Knight has broken the long-held covenants of the Old Races. Ancient rivals are scattered, friendships are broken, and the dragons, djinn, selkies, vampires and gargoyles are beginning to step out of the shadows and into the light.

But the new world may not be what they expect. Dragonlord Janx faces more than he bargained for when human magic interferes with his own. Half-vampire Ursula Hopkins is only starting to understand what she may have unleashed by awakening her brethren, and Margrit Knight herself still has debts to pay after the death of a djinn…

Watch the new world unfold in these four new stories of the Old Races…

Coming soon to an e-store near you!

Cover art by Tara O’Shea. IS IT NOT AWESOME?!?!?!?!

Collaboration Ahoy!

I have a collaborative project with my long-term writing partner, SL Gray/. Sarah and I have written (quite literally: I counted once) millions of words together, and this particular project has been in the works for, heavens forfend, well over a decade now. It was originally conceived as a TV show, back when we were both living in California (and before, even) and had dreams of breaking into that industry.

It took us something like a decade to think of presenting it in a different format. Time, tide and … trousers … (o.O) have kept us from really doing much with it. But a while ago we shook the dust off and decided to give it a go as a fiction project. Sarah’s just sent me the second chapter, and I am full of excited squeaks about the idea of getting this story some air time.

I’ll talk more about it as we get our feet more solidly under us, but I can just about guarantee that this will be a Kickstarter project. And I mean, holy crap, people, when we get it going? You’re going to be blown away. We’ve got a fifty page bible for this project which I’m sure will end up as part of the long term reward structure, we’ve got world development out the wazoo, we’ve just got ALL KINDS of good stuff, and I cannot wait to share it with you. Cannot. WAIT.

*squeak squeak squeak*

NO DOMINION

NO DOMINION has been delivered to the Kickstarter patrons. If you are one and haven’t gotten your copy, please email me (cemurphyauthor AT gmail DOT com) and let me know what format you need it in, Kindle, Sony/Nook/Epub, or PDF.

I tell you what, the NO DOMINION response is really making me want to do something else to share with you guys. This has been wonderful.

I mean, realistically, Not Right Now, because I’ve got the Dinocalypse book (you’ve bought in, right? 7 e-books for $10, how can you POSSIBLY go wrong with that?) coming up to write, and the Walker Papers to finish, and a bunch of other stuff, but still!

For me, it turns out there’s an energy to direct market writing that’s different from traditional publishing–the whole sense of us all being in it together, among other things. Also, of course, the instant feedback–I mean, I’ve also just finished MOUNTAIN ECHOES, but it’ll be another 9 months or so before readers get that, whereas NO DOMINION is in their hands already. There are no doubt other things as well, but those are two of the most obvious ones. It’s pretty cool.

That said, I really haven’t a clue when I’ll run another one, certainly not when I’ll run another solo project. I mean, right now I’m involved with Dinocalypse, there’s still ElectriCity pending, and there are at least two other potential collaborative projects on the plate. And those ideas excite me, because I think collaboration may be one of the real boons of Kickstarter–reaching different audiences by bringing in different people for different aspects of the project. Over time, it may be one of the ways to work past the problem of being unable to expand one’s own audience sufficiently.

As for running a solo project, well, it’s not that I lack the ideas or desire–or indeed, it seems, the audience–just the time. Where’s a TARDIS when you need one?

In other news (sort of), there’s a Walker Papers group over on Goodreads (and has a spoiler-ok area for discussing NO DOMINION, if you want to). Someone over there just asked if I was going to write the Irish Mage books. The funny thing is that just a few weeks ago Ted and I figured out what that story would be. It would only be a trilogy, but I know how it would end and everything. The last book would be FATEFUL HOUR, and those of you who recognize the title source and have read RAVEN CALLS can probably figure out what would happen in that book. :)

NO DOMINION revisions

Got through the first pass of NO DOMINION revisions yesterday, and caused myself to burst into tears near the end. I hope that's a sign of the book doing what it should rather than me desperately needing more sleep. :)

To answer the most-oft asked NO DOMINION question: yes, it will eventually be made available to a wider audience than just the Kickstarter patrons. But I don't know when or how yet, so I'll keep you posted when I do.

Today I have to rewrite a few scenes, add a few clarifications, and figure out where to put chapter breaks in the, er, second half of the manuscript, because they somehow…stopped appearing. And if I'm lucky that'll be the heavy lifting done and it'll all be spellchecks and copy edits from there on out. Because it's due SUNDAY. O.O

RECENT READS: A Catch-Up Post

I've actually been reading, which is wonderful and amazing. I haven't, however, been doing a very good job of blogging about it, so a quick rundown:

ULTIMATE COMICS THOR: Pretty good graphic novel more or less setting up the history of the Ultimates Thor to be in line with the history of the Marvel Movie Universe Thor. Worth reading, if you like that kind of thing.

CAST IN CHAOS: 8th, I think, in Michelle Sagara's Chronicles of Elantra. Hands down my favorite of the series so far, which is saying something, because I pretty much love the books. Wonderful wonderful stuff with a nameless faceless evil that isn't quite what it appears to be. Really good.

Kathy Reichs: DEATH DU JOUR and MONDAY MOURNING. These are the books the TV show "Bones" is ever, ever so loosely based on. The main character is much more appealing in the books, but the books are quite a lot grimmer than the show. I'd read more if I was stuck in an airport and needed something reliable from the shelves to tide me over, but not my very favorite books ever.

Dick Francis: SHATTERED and SMOKESCREEN. The man can do no wrong. Thank goodness he wrote 40 or so novels: I still have 30+ to read!