Friday, January 17th
Jan. 17th, 2014 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinThe Daily Report
Well, Omnibus III will be available next week, probably more likely the end of next week. I'm going to be putting it up in all formats at once rather than the piecemeal approach I've been doing. I think after that I'm going to be putting more of my stuff in the Nook store, and possibly some other places... my reason for not bothering to look beyond Amazon very often is that most of my sales come from Amazon, but obviously I can't get more sales in other places by ignoring them.
I'm considering putting up what I'll call a "Warts And All" edition that's an epub of the entire first volume, scraped from the website. I know multiple people who have independently done this and then offered me the script and/or the end result. While I don't mind people doing this... I think everyone has a right to re-format media for their more convenient consumption... I've never done this myself and I don't regard it as a shortcut in the e-book compilation process because the end results are... not what I'm going for. There's no way to just get the story and exclude the aside notes, announcements, and stray links that pepper the archive, as they're part of the post content. When I do it by hand, I can clean those things up at the same time.
The other problem is, what would I charge for it? Now, I think some of the fear of cheap e-books undervaluing authors' works is overblown, at least insofar as they focus on the gross price rather than the net to the author. If you're getting xty cents a book, that's either enough or it's not, regardless of what the list price is, and if a cheaper list price means more sales and more people reading, I don't see how that's not a net win.
So many people think of Tales of MU as "a book" and the chapters as "pages"... well, there's just under 500 of them in volume 1, right?
In actuality, there's between a million and a half and two million words in the first volume, which means it's somewhere north of 6,000 pages, which means it's longer than A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. The prices of the Omnibuses reflect that: the first one is $6.99, and the following (probably) five will be $8.99.
So what would I charge for an epub of the entire first volume that would be worth it to me, but not sound ridiculously overpriced to the consumer? And then we add in the fact that it is, essentially, a deeply flawed product. It's great as a convenience: oh, read the MU website on the go! But as a product? No. I could never in good conscience sell this, but it wouldn't be good business to give it away for free.
What I'm thinking, then, is that rather than setting a price on it, I'll give it to my sponsors. If I decide to go through with this (and I'll keep you posted on that), I'll start by attaching it to a locked post in my Patreon feed. Eventually it will go into the newsletter archive, which I'm in the process of updating to include *everything*.
Having threshed this out here, I'm almost certain that's what I'm going to do with it.
The State of the Me
Reasonably early to bed, reasonably early to rise.
Plans For Today
I have to do some semi-emergency grocery shopping in the middle of the day, so it's just two blocks today. One of them is going to be writing Tales of MU. I'll decide the other one when I'm back from shopping.
Well, Omnibus III will be available next week, probably more likely the end of next week. I'm going to be putting it up in all formats at once rather than the piecemeal approach I've been doing. I think after that I'm going to be putting more of my stuff in the Nook store, and possibly some other places... my reason for not bothering to look beyond Amazon very often is that most of my sales come from Amazon, but obviously I can't get more sales in other places by ignoring them.
I'm considering putting up what I'll call a "Warts And All" edition that's an epub of the entire first volume, scraped from the website. I know multiple people who have independently done this and then offered me the script and/or the end result. While I don't mind people doing this... I think everyone has a right to re-format media for their more convenient consumption... I've never done this myself and I don't regard it as a shortcut in the e-book compilation process because the end results are... not what I'm going for. There's no way to just get the story and exclude the aside notes, announcements, and stray links that pepper the archive, as they're part of the post content. When I do it by hand, I can clean those things up at the same time.
The other problem is, what would I charge for it? Now, I think some of the fear of cheap e-books undervaluing authors' works is overblown, at least insofar as they focus on the gross price rather than the net to the author. If you're getting xty cents a book, that's either enough or it's not, regardless of what the list price is, and if a cheaper list price means more sales and more people reading, I don't see how that's not a net win.
So many people think of Tales of MU as "a book" and the chapters as "pages"... well, there's just under 500 of them in volume 1, right?
In actuality, there's between a million and a half and two million words in the first volume, which means it's somewhere north of 6,000 pages, which means it's longer than A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. The prices of the Omnibuses reflect that: the first one is $6.99, and the following (probably) five will be $8.99.
So what would I charge for an epub of the entire first volume that would be worth it to me, but not sound ridiculously overpriced to the consumer? And then we add in the fact that it is, essentially, a deeply flawed product. It's great as a convenience: oh, read the MU website on the go! But as a product? No. I could never in good conscience sell this, but it wouldn't be good business to give it away for free.
What I'm thinking, then, is that rather than setting a price on it, I'll give it to my sponsors. If I decide to go through with this (and I'll keep you posted on that), I'll start by attaching it to a locked post in my Patreon feed. Eventually it will go into the newsletter archive, which I'm in the process of updating to include *everything*.
Having threshed this out here, I'm almost certain that's what I'm going to do with it.
The State of the Me
Reasonably early to bed, reasonably early to rise.
Plans For Today
I have to do some semi-emergency grocery shopping in the middle of the day, so it's just two blocks today. One of them is going to be writing Tales of MU. I'll decide the other one when I'm back from shopping.
no subject
on 2014-01-17 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-01-17 05:08 pm (UTC)There's still a pricing problem... even with a fair "bulk buy" discount, it will be outside the range where the major e-tailers give equitable royalties. If I charged $30 for it (compared to $52 for the individual ones), I'm only getting about $10 from each major bookstore sale, where I'd net $36 from someone buying the series as individual Omnibuses.
So if I do it, I'll probably keep it in my own e-bookstore, where my royalty is an attractive 90+% no matter what the price is. People who stumble across it in the major bookstores aren't likely to shell out tens of dollars for the complete series all at once anyway.