Weekend Wrap-up July 26: My Novel (technically)

After a fun week of formatting, I finally finished a task I had set out to do: Put my novella trilogy into a single volume. Why did I do this? The main reason was that Amazon decided they weren’t making enough money off of indie authors so they dropped the royalty rate from 60% to 50% for books under $9.99.
I tried to keep my prices low because I don’t expect people to buy a novella for over $10, so each book is $6.99 which now nets me a royalty of $0.52.
For you math wizzes, I know you have just done the math and it doesn’t work out. 50% of $6.99 is $3.49 1/2. But don’t forget, Amazon doesn’t print it for free and I don’t expect them to. The printing cost is $2.97, which comes out of my royalty.
Now many authors have thought, “Shouldn’t the printing cost come out of the purchase price?”
But remember, Amazon doesn’t want to share the printing cost and would rather have $3.49 rather than $2.01:
(6.99 – 2.97) x .5 = 2.01
So if I sell all three book in my trilogy I get ~$1.56, but If I put the book into one volume…Hmmm.
I still wanted to decrease my printing costs so after reading over each novella (and finding a few minor errors…still. Grrr), I put them into one document, decreased the font size and line spacing to get a 350 page novel that I can price at $14.99, $6 less than having to buy the novellas separately.
With my printing cost now at $4.91, and being able to get the higher royalty, I now will get $4.08 and the reader gets a wonderful novel to read and enjoy.
I just have to wait to get the proof copy delivered to make sure it’s good to go.
-Leon

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Leon Stevens is a multi-genre author, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. He published his first book of poetry, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures in January 2020, followed by a book of original classical guitar compositions, Journeys, and a short story collection of science fiction/post-apocalyptic tales called The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories. His newest publications are the novella trilogy, The View from Here, which is a continuation of one of his short stories, a new collection of poetry titled, A Wonder of Words, and his latest sci-fi mystery, Euphrates Vanished.
My new book page: http://books.linesbyleon.com/

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