Hello readers! First, apologies for the lateness of this post, first of all. I got my day started a bit later than I expected to. Second, thank you new readers for all the new reviews I’ve picked up in recent weeks! They’ve been wonderful to see popping up, and with impressive regularity as well! As always, thank you for sharing your thoughts on my work, as there exists a whole spectrum of people out there who find new works to read based on reviews and ratings. The more there are, the easier it is for those people to make their decision.
Granted, my reviews being massively positive certainly doesn’t hurt. Colony is absolutely spreading as a must-read Sci-Fi in a lot of circles, from the sound of it!
So, a big thank you to everyone leaving reviews and telling their friends about Colony and my other works. Their popularity continues to grow!
All right, back-slapping part of this post ever. Let’s talk writing. Or in today’s case, publishing. Because today we’re talking about the final topic on Topic List #14, and it’s a contentious one.
Yes, you read that properly: Book Pricing can be contentious, and no, I just don’t mean with readers (thought that’s certainly true). It’s a dicey topic among authors as well. Just this last LTUE I ended up participating in a somewhat heated debate over book pricing and what would or “would not” work. It never moved past the stage of debate, but heated it was, with one author declaring to another that they had effectively destroyed their own career over their prices … even though the numbers didn’t support that.
What I’m getting at here is that no matter what I write, even trying to show the various
“styles” of publication pricing that are out there right now, someone is likely going to show up, read it, and think “Well that’s all wrong!” And perhaps even comment with their own opinions and thoughts on the matter about why one is right or wrong.
Why? Because publishing is basically a straight-up stormy sea right now, with everyone clinging to their own raft or boat to ride out the waves as the entire industry undergoes a lot of change. Sands, Simon and Schuster is up for sale, and could cease to exist, being the first of the big publishers to collapse (they’re up for sale as their parent company, Viacom, doesn’t see print as an area they wish to be involved in, and S&S has been delivering steady losses now for three decades).
So yes, there are a lot of conflicting opinions out there about book pricing and availability because the market right now has never been in such upheaval. So today, we’re going to talk about a couple of the different approaches there are to pricing your book and figuring out a cost.
Now, two words of caution before we begin: This is something you should could be considering even before your book is done. Why? Because some of these options will affect how your book is written. So you should at least have in the back of your mind a basic idea of “That’s what I’d like to go for” because deciding after the book is written, edited, etc, may make for a lot of changes. Changes to the level of “complete rewrite” in order to have a functioning product.
Second, this will not cover everything or every approach. Publishing right now is in such a flux that it’d be impossible for me to cover every approach, so don’t take what’s offered here as a the “only ways” to price and publish a book. For all I know there’s a young author out there who’s about to release a book in an entirely new way that’ll hit this list like a broadside wave out of the storm. But I can give you the methods of pricing and publication that I’m familiar with.
So, with that all in mind, let’s look at some various approaches to pricing and publishing your book.
Unusual Things 