How not to price an e-book.

[alexandraerin]

There is a series of books called The Destroyer.

They are not very good books in any sense of the word except that in years past I've enjoyed them enough to check used bookstores for them. If you've ever seen an 80s movie optimistically entitled Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, starring Fred Ward as a superspy martial artist and Joel Grey as his Korean trainer, and Wilfred Brimley as the defender of freedom and justice, then you pretty much know everything you need to know about this series of books as they inspired that movie.

If you haven't, then you still know everything you really need to know about this series. It's cheesy as hell. It's meant to be a send-up of the typical pulp action series like The Executioner, and martial arts movies, and everything, but it's kind of a textbook example of how easy it is to attempt to do something ~*ironically*~ and end up just sort of doing it,

Anyway, there have been nearly a hundred and fifty books in this series, at its heyday they came out about once a month. This is the pulpiest of pulp fiction. They've been on my mind lately because in some ways, that sort of modernish pulp is close to what I want to do with my LitSnacks books.

So, I decided to check out and see if I could find some of the older books on the Kindle store. I wasn't sure they'd be there, but I figured they'd be perfect e-book fodder. They're mostly pretty short, there are scores of them, and most of them were written decades ago. I figured they'd be in the electronic bargain bin.

The good news is that there are some Destroyer titles available.

The bad news is that there doesn't seem to be any sort of rhyme or reason as to which ones have been put on Kindle and which haven't. I suspect rights issues might be in play, as there's really no other way to explain it.

The really bad news is that someone thinks they worth about ten bucks a pop.

I'm not saying that The Destroyer particularly merits an e-book renaissance, but it could certainly be ripe for one. Just... not at that price.

The really good news is that this means I'm not going to be spending any of my e-book money (which at this point actually does come from e-books) to read the further adventures of a white guy who learns to be the living incarnation of a pulp fiction version of a Hindu deity from a caricature of a Korean martial arts master, which is probably a good thing on the balance when there's so much good fiction out there I could be reading.

This has inspired me to take a look at the bargains that are available on Kindle. I mean, $1-$5 is the price range I plan to be operating in. While I'm basically going to be creating/bringing my own market rather than dumping my works in the Amazon store and hoping they get noticed, it could be helpful for me to know what else is out there.

And of course, I can always use more to read.

Comments

[addiejd.livejournal.com]

I, for one, would love to get recommendation posts occasionally.