The Price of a Book—One Perspective

When my co-author and I write a book, and especially when we get ready to click the Publish button on KDP, one thought above all occurs to me: If this were the only book out there, would anyone read it?

Because no one needs to buy our book. Our book—in common with all fiction—is a luxury. We are story-telling animals: we tell them around campfires, in bars, at parties, and share them with our hairdresser. We painted them on the walls of caves and in petroglyphs many millennia before this thing called “writing” occurred to us. No one needs to pay for a story.

This realization gives the lie to all the worry about “visibility”, all the wailing about “saturation” and “competition” in the book market. If people feel like ignoring our book, they are probably going to feel that way independent of all other books in existence.

So what, then, is the price of our book?

It’s not the $2.99 or $3.99 we charge for it. That cost is trivial to anyone who has the ability to buy it off Amazon—they’d spend as much or more on a latte without thinking about it. They’ll earn that much back in a matter of minutes at pretty any job in this country.

The real cost is time—hours spent reading they will never recover. That is what we are asking of them: to spend some hours on us instead of doing something else. The few bucks we get from the sale is just a tip that helps us write more so they can (hopefully) spend more time on us in the future.

Seen in this light, what they give us in exchange for our stories is arguably the most precious thing of all, the only thing the universe does not conserve.

We strive to be worthy of that. Nothing else really matters—does it?