{"id":1716,"date":"2018-06-11T06:05:30","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T12:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.corividae.com\/shiny\/?p=1716"},"modified":"2018-06-11T16:52:15","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T22:52:15","slug":"its-awkward-but-can-we-talk-about-pricing-for-just-a-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.corividae.com\/shiny\/its-awkward-but-can-we-talk-about-pricing-for-just-a-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s awkward, but can we talk about pricing for just a moment?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This will just take a moment and then we can go back to talking about things that aren’t nearly as awkward as money… which is a pretty funny thing to say, actually, when you consider that I usually write about love and sex which can be plenty freaking awkward, amirite?<\/p>\n

But money is like the most awkwardest thing. Except maaaaybe politics?<\/p>\n

So I’ll try to make this short and story-like so it’s not too boring.<\/p>\n

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See that image? It’s a photo I took of my daily planner for last week. It shows part of my to-do list for June 5th–the release date for The Longest Night<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I colour code my planner, so that is in different colours because I wrote each of those lines on two different days.<\/p>\n

The day I decided June 5th was going to be the release day I wrote it in my planner in green. Weeks later when I figured out how I was going to price the story I made a note to raise the price on release day from the $0.99 pre-order price to $2.99. Then, and here’s the important part, I added, “Yes. Do it.”<\/p>\n

Because Past Me knew Future Me was going to look at that note and go, “Uh-uh. Nope. No one will pay $2.99 for the story…”<\/p>\n

Which is exactly what happened. I opened up my planner June 4th, looked at the note and thought, “If I raise the price to $2.99 no one will buy it, and then all the work I put into it will be for nothing.”<\/p>\n

But then I looked at the extra note Past Me left me, “Yes. Do it.” and I thought “You’re right, Past Me. If I don’t value my work, no one else is going to do it for me.”<\/p>\n

What I do is a work of heart, as they say, but a girl’s gotta eat too.<\/p>\n

Readers have been conditioned to expect ebooks to be really inexpensive but the thing is, for every\u00a0book I sell for $0.99 on Amazon I earn $0.35.<\/p>\n

At $0.35 a book, it makes it very difficult to break even, let alone make a profit.<\/p>\n

For example, editing and the cover for The Longest Night<\/em> cost me a combined total of about $250 (which is pretty freaking cheap, all things considered).<\/p>\n

At $0.35 a book I’d need to sell over 700 copies to break even and\u00a0I don’t have a big enough audience to do that in anything resembling a timely manner.<\/p>\n

There are things I can do to grow my audience–advertising, promotions like BookBub and the like–but those usually require discounting the price of the book… which is tough to do when the book is already<\/em> $0.99.<\/p>\n

So from here on out I’m going to try listening to Past Me.<\/p>\n

Now and for the foreseeable future. I will discount my pre-orders as low as I can manage (usually $0.99) and then at release I’ll increase the price to maximize my margins and the opportunities I have to promote the book and increase sales.<\/p>\n

I think I’m going to base future prices largely on word count so the scale will look something like this:<\/p>\n