therkalexander:
@sassymcgonagal1651yeah I’m so sorry about that. I wish I could do something about...
@sassymcgonagal1651
yeah I’m so sorry about that. I wish I could do something about it.
There is a way to adjust book prices internationally, but there’s no way for me to sell outside Europe and North America without selling books at a loss. And Amazon will literally not let me do it otherwise they wouldn’t be able to take their cut. India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Brazil, even fucking Canada and Mexico, etc. where I do sell plenty of books take a staggering amount of money off the top of each book. Oftentimes when I sell books abroad, I’ll only see a few cents worth of income per title.
That’s just for ebooks by the way. Which is composed of two things: intellectual property, and electrons. That’s it; nothing more. But capitalism sucks, and tariffs on electrons are bullshit, so there we are.
Paperbacks have an even worse problem. The price is fixed to the ISBN, so unless there is a sale set by a retailer (I have no control over that), selling Receiver of Many for less than $19.99 USD is impossible.
I set the paperbacks to the lowest rounded-up-to-the-nearest-divisible-five-minus-1¢ price that I can get away with. That means I make less money on paperbacks than I do on ebooks, tbh. Companies like Amazon, and more importantly Ingram Press (Ingram is what allows me to sell in bookstores large and small like Kinokunya and Coastside) take a large percentage of paperback sales to cover production and shipping costs.
The ebooks have the same issue. I self-publish, which means I can take home a much larger percentage in royalties than if I went through a traditional publishing house: it was the leading reason why I self published in the first place. And self publishing means that I didn’t have to give away too many pieces of the pie or worry about going out of print, or the effects that piracy has on runs by traditionally published authors. And I get to keep the cost of my books relatively low. But that comes with its own set of issues: the unaffordability of translation services, audiobook services, and the constant overhanging threat of piracy.
In fact piracy has cost me something in low seven figure neighborhood, and that’s just the illegal downloads that have been tracked. I know there are fans in the distribution shadow of Eastern Europe and Russia who have read my books and that illegal downloading is the only way they can get their hands on it, but even discounting those traceable downloads, and discounting downloads by people who shouldn’t be reading my books at their age anyway *ahem*, that’s still income in the high six figures that I never received.
I’ve even considered opening a Patreon for anyone who did formerly pirated my books, enjoyed them, but now want to make a donation in lieu of the money they didn’t spend at that particular time for whatever reason they had.
Piracy puts the hurt on my family. Like most authors, I’m not well off. It’s a rarified handful of authors that make big money off writing.
I rent. I drive a used car. Most of my electronics are refurbished or second hand. I get books and dvds at library sales and clothes through bargain online retailers. I worry about how I’m going to afford to send my baby to preschool next year. Book piracy affects me in a meaningful way.
And even given all those factors, I would still price my books lower on the international market if I were able to do it because I believe in spreading my vision more than I believe in money. If chasing money was the most implant thing, I could have picked a dozen other career paths.
So I am so sorry that the boundaries of current publishing put my book outside your reach. I assure you that if there was something to be done about it, I would do it.
