Writing for pocket change.
Feb. 4th, 2011 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI'm getting a surprising amount of feedback on the price I'm proposing to sell my snacklit for ($1-2 a pop). There's some concern that I'm undervaluing my work and may actually be cheating myself out of sales by doing so. Just to clear a few things up:
I'm talking about books of about 50-70 pages in length, hence why I'm calling them "snacks". I wouldn't charge $5 for such a book. I wouldn't pay $5 for such a book, unless I could see where the money was going. I think a lot of people will see the page count and the price being offered and feel that it's fair.
I'm aware that I have a number of readers who would pay $5 for such a book since they would know where the money is going (i.e., to me) and they'd give $5 to support my work in general so why not do it for 50 pages of prose.
I appreciate that. A lot.
But my goal here is not to just return to the same well again and again, but to cast a wider net. The early feedback I've received on price has prompted me to come up with a sort of special edition deal for people who would really prefer to show more support, but as far as the price in general goes, I'm going to have to resurrect a refrain I thought I wore out in the early days of Tales of MU:
That... or words to its effect... are among the more polite things I said whenever somebody undertook to inform me what I was doing wrong, what I could change in order to sell my work, what I would need to do before it would be considered professional grade or a real story, etc. I wasn't completely ignorant of how novels are structured or how the publishing industry worked, but I also wasn't trying to write a novel and have it published in any conventional way, I was trying something new.
The purpose of the low price point isn't to try to undercut the novels on the bookstands. I'm not trying to convince a crowd of strangers that because my book is ninety-nine cents and Neil Gaiman's is 8.99 that my book is ten times as good a deal as his. I'm not competing for book money at all. If the experiment bears out and I end up making a bunch of these, several of them could end up in a book and then that's a different story, but for now I'm asking for pocket change, adn the reason I'm asking for pocket change is because I want pocket change.
See, "pocket change" is a pool of money. It's the small amount of money we spend on impulse buys and guilty pleasures and personal indulgences. When someone buys a candy bar or a bottle of soda from a vending machine, when somebody buys a single song or a single episode of a TV show from an online store or buys a few credits in a casual online game through microtransactions, they're paying with pocket change. Even people who mostly live paycheck to paycheck still will occasionally have a dollar or two burning a hole in their pocket that they will use for a treat (and more power to them, because even people living paycheck to paycheck are entitled to treats.)
The lit world doesn't really offer much in the way of impulse buys at the right level to take advantage of this pool of money/mentality. You can go to a used book store, of course, and get a book cheaply. You can sometimes find amazing bargains on a discount rack... some years ago a bunch of science fiction, fantasy, and horror books ended up at a local dollar store and I ended up discovering one of my own favorite authors (F. Paul Wilson) as a result of this.
But by and large, there are short stories, and there are books. Short stories you might get for free or you might get via a subscription that gives you many short stories. Books you buy, and you expect to pay book prices for them.
What's in between? Not much. What could be in between? I aim to find out.
Bear with me. I'm trying something here.
I'm talking about books of about 50-70 pages in length, hence why I'm calling them "snacks". I wouldn't charge $5 for such a book. I wouldn't pay $5 for such a book, unless I could see where the money was going. I think a lot of people will see the page count and the price being offered and feel that it's fair.
I'm aware that I have a number of readers who would pay $5 for such a book since they would know where the money is going (i.e., to me) and they'd give $5 to support my work in general so why not do it for 50 pages of prose.
I appreciate that. A lot.
But my goal here is not to just return to the same well again and again, but to cast a wider net. The early feedback I've received on price has prompted me to come up with a sort of special edition deal for people who would really prefer to show more support, but as far as the price in general goes, I'm going to have to resurrect a refrain I thought I wore out in the early days of Tales of MU:
Bear with me. I'm trying something here.
That... or words to its effect... are among the more polite things I said whenever somebody undertook to inform me what I was doing wrong, what I could change in order to sell my work, what I would need to do before it would be considered professional grade or a real story, etc. I wasn't completely ignorant of how novels are structured or how the publishing industry worked, but I also wasn't trying to write a novel and have it published in any conventional way, I was trying something new.
The purpose of the low price point isn't to try to undercut the novels on the bookstands. I'm not trying to convince a crowd of strangers that because my book is ninety-nine cents and Neil Gaiman's is 8.99 that my book is ten times as good a deal as his. I'm not competing for book money at all. If the experiment bears out and I end up making a bunch of these, several of them could end up in a book and then that's a different story, but for now I'm asking for pocket change, adn the reason I'm asking for pocket change is because I want pocket change.
See, "pocket change" is a pool of money. It's the small amount of money we spend on impulse buys and guilty pleasures and personal indulgences. When someone buys a candy bar or a bottle of soda from a vending machine, when somebody buys a single song or a single episode of a TV show from an online store or buys a few credits in a casual online game through microtransactions, they're paying with pocket change. Even people who mostly live paycheck to paycheck still will occasionally have a dollar or two burning a hole in their pocket that they will use for a treat (and more power to them, because even people living paycheck to paycheck are entitled to treats.)
The lit world doesn't really offer much in the way of impulse buys at the right level to take advantage of this pool of money/mentality. You can go to a used book store, of course, and get a book cheaply. You can sometimes find amazing bargains on a discount rack... some years ago a bunch of science fiction, fantasy, and horror books ended up at a local dollar store and I ended up discovering one of my own favorite authors (F. Paul Wilson) as a result of this.
But by and large, there are short stories, and there are books. Short stories you might get for free or you might get via a subscription that gives you many short stories. Books you buy, and you expect to pay book prices for them.
What's in between? Not much. What could be in between? I aim to find out.
Bear with me. I'm trying something here.
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no subject
on 2011-02-05 12:01 am (UTC)But why not fill the void with new stories? It's a wicked idea, and I think you may have really hit on something here.