The Price is Write

Why I refuse to Pimp out my Pen for Pennies.

I AM Words
Aug 8, 2017 · 4 min read

I see a lot of ebooks, especially from unknown authors on sale for £0.99 or £1.99 and for a while was considering doing the same. After all, cheap prices sell, right?

Well, only to an extent. The problem is that in reality an experienced and well-known author is unlikely to get as much as £1 per copy of a paperback, which is why their ebooks are often still £4.99 or more, and why you often see major offers on the digital formats. Also, their paperbacks are often at least £7.99 or so, but they can afford to sell offers because they often have a number of titles that they are pulling an income from.

In my case I have just one novel out at £3.99 for the ebook and when the paperback comes out it will need to be £9.99 for me to barely scrape just over £1 in royalties after all the costs. Since the likeliness of me selling even one book a day is very low, it’s hardly a money-making venture.

Lower the price and people might just give it a shot
People will be giving my book a shot if they like the sound of it, like the blurb, or have heard about it — maybe read a good review. They won’t “give it a shot” just because it costs 99p. And by no means do I intend on giving it away for “free” — why should I?

This is why I shouldn’t

Because it is two years or more of my hard work, and in the end something like £1000 worth of investment in editors, ISBN, internet charges, and marketing costs. I have no idea how much time I have put into writing my debut novel, but if I told you it takes a good 6-8 hours to read it at a steady pace, and I have produced at least six edits, that’s pretty close to 100 hours in one go. I wrote the first draft at a rate of about 3,000 words a day, so at 90,000 words, that’s 30 days with at least 3 hours a day. That’s near enough another 100 hours. If you then factor in all the slower reading and rewriting you can at least triple that — so we’ve found ourselves at not far from 500 hours already.

Then add the cover design, the networking, the marketing, the formatting…all the other unseen parts of “writing” and I should think we could clock another few hundred hours. In all, if I’d timed it all on a stop-watch and looked at a dial that said 1000 hours, I wouldn’t be that shocked.

Let’s say I charge myself at a meagre £10 hour — you know, because being able to write a novel really is a skill worth more than the minimum wage. Factor in all the other real-world costs with that unpaid time and we’re floating somewhere around the £10,000 mark.

For one book.

Pimping my Pen is not for me
So, forgive me if you feel a bit stretched at £3.99 for one copy — one of the 10,000 I would need to sell to make up my approximate earnings. One of the 600 I need to sell just to fund the editor I paid.

Next time you think that £3.99 — which is…two coffees bought in a flashy cup with your name spelt incorrectly on the side — is a bit steep for a debut novel from an unknown author…

… and perhaps I should sell it for 99p just to get some “exposure” or give people a taste of my work…

…ask yourself this: Would you expect a prostitute to give you a “free” taster?

And that’s why I decided to give myself a little more self-respect of the hard work I have done. I can choose to do a special offer and drop the price from time to time, indeed — and I will. I will also give free copies to skilled, experienced reviewers who can write qualified reviews, as an exchange for service.

I don’t see that anyone is “entitled” to read my book for free — or close enough — any more than I would expect a painter to give away their prints, a musician to hand out free CDs or downloads, or so on. And I give you this advice, or perspective:

If you walk down a street past two restaurants on a Friday evening: one is full and busy; the other is empty. Which one would you think sells the better food?

It might seem arrogant, and it might seem naive, and I might only sell 10 copies of my book, but you can be sure I’ll be selling them at a price that I feel my time, effort and hard work is worth…because…

…it is my book which is for sale…

…not my self-respect.

I AM Words

Written by

Self Publishing brand of @colinwardwriter, author of fiction, poetry, theatre and professional content.

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