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Pricing Silliness and a Learning Lesson
Five Years is Forever in Indie Publishing… Well, I spent the last two nights going back and trying to update and then even fisk my own post from five years ago about pricing. What a fool’s errand. The post was so out of date, I just kept shaking my head in amazement and wondering who wrote it. I was looking at it through 2017 glasses and a ton of new knowledge. Stunning, just stunning how many changes in this business have happened. In the last five years we have done a master business class here on the coast every October, the next one in a few weeks. And every year…
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Think Like a Publisher: 2015… Projected Income
Chapter Three Projected Income To actually get a profit-and-loss calculation for a book project, you must now make some pricing decisions and projections of income. Yeah, I know. I know. This is all so new, how can anyone predict how much money they will make on any project? Well, you can’t. Not really. But you can try. And you want to know a dirty little secret. New York traditional publishing can’t predict how much they will make on any book either. But they try. And that’s the key. To really act like a publisher, you need to understand what you are trying to gain. You need to know how many…
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Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing: #9… You Must Sell Books Cheaply
Myths ignore facts. Myths are often beliefs built from fear or past actions. In this series, and in the previous series of Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing, I call the myths that control writers “Sacred Cows.” Writers hold onto myths like lifelines that are keeping them from drowning in a raging river of information. Sometimes sane people in the normal world will follow a publishing myth that makes no sense at all because it has something to do with the publishing business. And they follow the myth without thought. So this new series is an attempt to help the new world of indie publishing with the growing…
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The New World of Publishing: Some Real Perspective on Pricing
After all the comments on the last post about electronic pricing, it became very, very clear to me that indie fiction writers seem to think that pricing an electronic book is done in a vacuum. They just make up some number that feels right or is what they heard and then stick to that price without any thought of customers or history of publishing or what anyone else in publishing is doing. And most importantly, writers give almost no thought to the perception of the buyers. The decision is often made on pricing because it’s what the writer likes, or how the writer personally buys, or what the writer can…
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The New World of Publishing: Pricing Indie Books…Some 2012 Thoughts
Normally I hate talking about pricing of ebooks by indie publishers because there are no right answers and I always end up making people mad. But that said, things are changing so fast that my last post about pricing (besides pointing to other people’s posts) was way back. You can read it here. So leaving the thousands of details I could talk about behind, let me cut right to the chase and keep this short. With one reminder: I am not talking about writers here. I am talking about the average reader buying books. That said, my observations and studies of readers’ buying habits have lead me to believe that…
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Think Like A Publisher #8… Price, Discounts, and Sales
As some of you said in the comments, I sort of left this on a cliffhanger talking about how to get the other 79 book outlets to make at least 100 book outlets for sales. Please go read Think Like a Publisher #7 if you have not, or some of this will make no sense. This sales series is meant to work as one large unit. Alas, before I can go into how to get the other 79 plus sales outlets, I need to once again talk about pricing. I have done a number of major posts about this topic, so not going into it again here. Go argue price…
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Think Like A Publisher: #3….Projected Income
The first chapter in this new series was “The Early Decisions” which included picking a business name, setting up checking accounts, and so on. The second chapter was “Expected Costs.” To actually get a profit-and-loss calculation for a book project, you must now make some pricing decisions and projections of income. Yeah, I know. I know. This is all so new, how can anyone predict how much money they will make on any project? Well, you can’t. Not really. But you can try. And you want to know a dirty little secret. New York traditional publishing can’t predict how much they will make on any book either. But they try.…
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The New World of Publishing: Book Length
I’ve got lots of questions over the last few months from writers asking my opinion of book lengths in the future of publishing. So, let me haul out my old crystal ball, polish it up, and pretend like I honestly can see into the future. I honestly can’t, but I can give you opinions based on history and some facts. So let me try that and then we can discuss in the comments how right or wrong my swirling crystal ball is compared to yours. Some History of Book Lengths For the longest time, meaning almost one hundred years, there were generally two types of novels being published in Western…