My latest short story "The Night the Lights Came On"

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

New eBook for Sale & eBook Pricing

My Christian suspense novelette "A Second Chance" is now available in all the eBook formats on Smashwords and in the Kindle format at Amazon. I have been trying to finish editing this story for over three weeks now, so I'm really excited to finally get it out as text. It took me four long sit downs to get the editing done - with each sit down ranging from one to three hours. I'm liking the system of writing a story, editing it, podcasting it, letting it sit, then coming back to it to edit it one more time for eBook publication. I've noticed how valuable it is to let a story sit for a while before going back to edit it. Even though I have already podcast all of my stories, I still read it aloud when editing to catch all the things my eyes will skip past.

This story comes in at almost 11K words. Most of my other stories are around 5K words, and it's easy to take an hour or two and knock out an editing pass on them before publishing them. Since this story is twice as long as my others, it took a lot more work and it will be the first one I will be selling for more than .99¢ I will be selling this story for a whopping $1.99. Doing this made me rethink how much I might sell my 80K word novel for when it comes out.

eBook Pricing

This brings up a topic that's been on my mind a lot lately. It's a hot topic: eBook pricing. I was going to sell my 80K word upcoming novel for $2.99, but now I'm thinking I might sell it for $3.99. Here's my new breakdown:
  • FREE - Around 2K words or less (loss leader for other stories) Flash Fiction/Short Story
  • $0.99 - 7.5K words or less Short Story
  • $1.99 - 7.5K to 20K words Novelette
  • $2.99 - 25K - 50K words Novella
  • $3.99 - 50K + words Novel
What do you think? Too much, not enough? Thanks for stopping by, I'd love to hear from you!

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for your comment, I'm so glad my blog has given you inspiration! This is a topic I'm constantly thinking about. I'm still wondering if I'll release my first 80K word novel at $2.99 or $3.99. There are a lot of people that are selling their novels for $0.99 but I just can't see how something I spent so much time working hard on should be worth less than a buck. Maybe once I have several novels up then I'll start to drop prices on earlier books in the series so people can get into it cheap. A lot to think about for sure! Let us know when you put it up so we can snag a copy!

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  2. I have since made all of my short stories free, and this novelette $0.99 I wasn't selling much so I figured why not make them free? I'm doing this because I'd much rather have my stories be read than make a little money off of them. That said when my novel comes out in a few months I'm still not sure if I want it to be $2.99, or $3.99, or $4.99. I've spent a lot of time writing it and revising it. I still can't see selling it for only $0.99, but I'm unsure what I'll price it at from there. I've been reading a lot lately too on how people don't read books they get for $0.99 because they just sit at the bottom of their reading list - they assign less value to the book becaus it was so cheap.

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