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Five Days

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Catherine Ryan Howard of Catherine, Caffeinated fame put up a nice series last week titled Five Days to a Self-Published Book. The five days are metaphorical, but if you’re just now looking at the daunting task of creating your own content that’s probably a relief.

The full series can be found here.

Update: The series references CreateSpace, but I’m not recommending it on that basis. Rather, I think it’s an excellent work flow example to follow, and I believe it was intended as such. (On the subject of CreateSpace, Lulu and POD, see also this recent comment from Joel Friendlander.)

Later Update: Mick Rooney has an interesting post up about Lulu. I asked Mick a few follow-up questions in the comments, and I found his answers illuminating. Anyone considering Lulu.com for self-publishing should give his post a read.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Levi Montgomery

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What do I value most in a web site? Honesty.

When you go to a commercial site (Apple, say), you know going in that everything you see and read was massaged by corporate drones to fit a corporate theme aimed at corporate profits. Whether you buy into the theme or not, it’s all a lie. It might even be a fun lie, like Disneyland, but it’s still aimed at your wallet.

This tendency infects almost everything, particularly in the U.S., because we’re a business culture. Whether you’re a top-flight CEO or a sole-proprietor, who people think you are and how they respond to that image will probably determine whether you get to eat or not. (Okay, maybe not so much with the CEO.) It’s not objectively wrong to put your best foot, face, cheek or assets forward — although how you go about doing so may say more about who you are than you intended to reveal.

All of which is preamble to introducing you to Levi Montgomery. Over the past six months, in reading Levi’s blog posts, I haven’t had a single moment where I thought Levi was shading his opinion for later advantage. Granted, that’s easy enough to do if you’re just shooting your mouth off, and there’s no shortage of such people on the web.

But here’s the thing. Levi’s involved. He’s part of Self-Publishing Review, he recently pointed me to and recommended The Self-Publishing Review (which allowed me to find HPRW again), and he’s walking the walk himself as a writer.

I don’t always agree with his reactions and opinions, nor he I’m sure with mine, but the thing is, he meets a critical bar. He rationally explains his opinions, instead of blithely assuming that anybody who doesn’t ‘get it’ is a dweeb. Take his decision to remove his work from Smashwords, including his view that the PDF file-type should be the e-reader standard. I disagree, but then I also know that Levi is interested in retaining more control over the look and feel of his work than I am. (I’m crazy big into transparency as an aspect of craft.)

There just aren’t a lot of people who say what they think and explain what they mean. Levi Montgomery is one of those voices. Add to that the fact that he’s not sitting on the self-publishing sidelines, and you’ll understand why I consider him a must-read.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: How Publishing Really Works

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How Publishing Really Works (HPRW) is a [now-archived site] I’ve found and lost several times, as well as the gateway to several other interesting sites. I’m adding it to the blogroll because I’m tired of spending frustrated hours trying to find my way back.

Run by Jane Smith, HPWR aspires to make the complexities and absurdities of the publishing world a bit less obscure, particularly for people who have an interest in writing themselves. A sister site to HPWR — and here I will beg your keen attention for a moment — is The Self-Publishing Review (TSPR), which should not be, but easily could be, confused with Henry Baum’s Self-Publishing Review. On TSPR Jane reviews self-published works using what I think is very fair and useful criteria:

What’s the catch? I’m an editor, and expect published books to be polished. I’m going to count all the errors I find in spelling, punctuation and grammar and when I reach fifteen I’m going to stop reading. I’ll work my way through up to five pages of boring prose or bad writing before I give up. And I’ll list on this blog every single book I’m sent, including the books I’ve not completed, along with how far I got through each one.

TSPR, like SPR, engages the most important question hanging over (and being lorded over) the self-publishing movement: are self-published writers creating works worth reading? HPRW attempts to pull back the curtain (if not the wool) on the publishing industry, which also helps would-be authors decide how best to approach the self-publishing movement. As to how Jane Smith manages to keep multiple blogs going while also finding time to write, I have no idea — but I am taking notes.

Update: It’s with mixed emotions that I’ve killed my blogroll link to this site, on the heels of [a now defunct] this post by Jane. We can all agree to disagree, but honestly I can’t square Jane’s condescension on her HPRW site while also respecting the work she’s done reviewing self-published authors on her Self-Publishing Review site. If, as she says in a follow-up post —

…while “good enough” can be a little difficult to define, “not good enough” is very easy to spot: almost every single one of the self-published books I’ve been sent for my self publishing review blog has slotted into this category, some far more easily than others (and bear in mind that I’ve got a backlog of book reviews waiting to be scheduled for publication, and most of them didn’t make the grade).

— then I’m hard-pressed to understand why she’s wasting her time. If, as she argues, unpublished writers are unpublished because their writing stinks, why in god’s name is she defying her own logic and reviewing self-published books? Simply to prove her own logic? If that’s the case, what kind of legitimacy can her reviews really have?

Honestly, I liked Jane’s posts on both of her sites. But having this bit of ugliness spew forth feels like a revelation of the worst kind. It colors everything of hers that I’ve read, and make me wonder what other hostile sentiments have been left unsaid.

— Mark Barrett

$4.99 and the Pipeline Pricing Problem

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Concluding a series of posts on that subject, I’m setting a price for that content today, subject to further modifications, complications, frustrations and disturbances in the time-space pricing continuum, as prophesied below.

$4.99. That will be the price of my short story collection on Smashwords*, where I’ll be making the work available as an e-book. To the extent that I have now answered this vexing question, I am relieved. To the extent that I have unwittingly uncovered a new and nightmarish parallel problem, I wish I had been born with no curiosity and wealthy parents.

Why $4.99? Well, I can’t point to any single determining factor. Rather, I took everything I learned over the past few weeks (and months) and tried to find a price that met the evolving criteria without contravening my basic assumptions, which included:

Particularly helpful was data from Smashwords CEO Mark Coker, which pegged pricing sweet spots at the $5 and $9 price points. Following the maxim that a lower price is better when profit is the same, I chose the $5 price point over the $9 price point because I thought it would spur demand, and because I thought $9 for an e-book was simply too close to the low end of current print-book and print-on-demand (POD) pricing.  [ Read more ]

Price, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series of posts on that subject, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Months ago, when I began idly wondering what my short story collection should sell for, I repeatedly found myself thinking in relative terms. In hindsight that approach seems to make sense given the rampant uncertainty in the e-book market , but it was more coincidence than prescience. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know, and I certainly didn’t know how much the industry didn’t know.

The comparison that popped up the most was what I took to calling hamburger pricing. Invariably this analogy would present itself while I was driving, because it’s impossible to travel anywhere in the United States for more than fourteen minutes without passing a hamburger stand. (I made that statistic up, but please feel free to quote me. The world can always use more urban myths.)

What I kept thinking at the time was that whatever my short story collection was worth, it had to at least be worth the average cost of an average hamburger at an average drive-up window. Without doing any research I pegged that number around $4, and in a lot of ways I felt like the idea made sense.

Which of course it doesn’t.  [ Read more ]

Quality, Fairness and Promise as Price

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series from last week, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Coming up on the end of a second week of thinking about how to price an e-book, I feel as if I finally understand the problem. I don’t have a final number yet for my short story collection, but I genuinely feel as if I have the tools to make that decision. (I know this kind of analytical obsessing isn’t as fun to read as gossip or flippant analysis, but if you’ve been reading along I hope you’ve gained some insight into these issues as well.)

Today and tomorrow I’m going to run down two perspectives I haven’t yet talked about. After that I’ll wrestle with the fact that setting a price in one place has an inevitable domino-effect along the pricing pipeline, and why I think that’s an indicator of problems to come. After that, I’ll pick my number and get back to the (relative) sanity of regular posting.

Fairness
Despite everything I’ve learned about the haphazard nature of pricing in general, and of e-book pricing in particular, I still retain a belief that there is some sort of fair value that can be applied to digital content. I know rationally that the marketplace will eventually come to define fairness as any stabilized price, but absent that stability I still find myself asking: what’s fair?

In the hard-bitten world of business this is obviously a naive view. What’s fair to most people is whatever they can get away with. If selling people into a mortgage or cell phone plan means using legalese to obscure relevant costs and fees, you do not hesitate to screw your customer. (To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, nobody ever made a hundred million dollars being a nice person — and that includes the messianic Mr. Jobs.)

Complicating things further, fairness is always a relative concept. Trying to be fair means trying to balance all factors involved, yet there’s no way to control for or even anticipate all of the variables. If I say a price is fair, who am I being fair to? A kid in Haiti who just lost his whole family? The rich, degenerate housewives on Bravo that are laughing all the way to your bank? Being fair in an absolute sense in any transaction seems a theoretical impossibility. In practice we rely on orderly (and regulated) markets to quantify fairness as a floating point between supply and demand, and that’s probably the best we can hope to do.  [ Read more ]

Consumer Expectations and Price

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series from last week, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

We all have expectations. Sometimes, particularly when we’re young or old, our expectations can be out of step with reality. When we’re young we don’t have the cognitive ability to understand the world as it is, so we fantasize. When we’re old we may have trouble keeping up with the pace of change, and the world may move on without us.

Perhaps no other aspect of daily life in America defines our expectations more than the price of goods. We are a consumer society, and as such we gauge our worth and meaning by what we have and what we can afford. Goods that are priced out of reach make us feel poor. Goods that are within reach make us feel wealthy — or at least as if we have options.

Everyone has heard a child request a new car or new house in the same way that they ask for a piece of candy or scoop of ice cream. To a child price is no object because money has no meaning. And who hasn’t heard an elderly person comment that a candy bar used to be nickel or a gallon of milk a dime? To an elderly person prices may mark the zenith of their life experience, while also serving as a reminder of the threat posed by inflation and rising prices.

People in the prime of their working lives generally have more realistic expectations about prices, but they can still experience dissonance when the cost of goods change. Gas at $4.00 a gallon is an outrage. Gas falling back to $2.50 is a windfall. But note: these emotions and responses are usually relative, not based on an actual understanding of the costs of production. Because we live lives abstracted from our own survival needs, and because our economic lives are abstracted through bank accounts, direct-deposit paychecks and credit cards, there is often no contextual reality to the prices we pay. We pay what we pay because that’s what an item costs, not because we know that’s what an item is worth.  [ Read more ]

Louie DePalma Pricing

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series from last week, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Think about any subject long enough and you’re bound to end up in the weeds…

The title of this post refers to a deservedly famous Taxi episode in which Jim burns Louie’s apartment to a cinder, presenting Louie with the opportunity to quantify the practical limits of greed.

The problem with this approach in my case is that the DePalma price for an e-book is probably one dollar over the high end of the acceptable range — meaning something like eleven or twelve dollars. And I would only be able to get that price if the customer borrowed my car and wrapped it around a tree prior to making a purchase.

As much as I would like to embrace my inner greed, I just don’t see a useful lever. To my chagrin, market forces seem determined to have their way with me.

— Mark Barrett

Price, Profit and Market Size

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series from last week, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Assume for the moment you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that at least one person will buy your book no matter what the price is. What price would you set?

Obviously, $AllTheMoneyInTheWorld.

Unfortunately, history suggests a shifting relationship between price and demand (sales), meaning you may not always be able to employ this pricing strategy. As a fallback, it can help to imagine how the relationship between price and sales might play out for your product, given multiple variables. Unfortunately, doing so usually involves a great deal of market research, lots of wild guessing, and facility with a spreadsheet that I don’t have.

One thing I can say about the relationship between the price of my short story collection and sales of my short story collection is that my ability to maximize profit is not a pressing concern. To whatever extent I might be able to squeeze a few more dollars out of the market by endlessly worrying about price, I’m confident the variance between that maximum profit and the average profit is going to be fairly small, simply because the total number of people interested in the product will be small.

Thus liberated by my own limited appeal, it still seems valid to assume that setting a lower price will move more copies, while pricing the content at higher levels will decrease the number of people who buy the e-book. This is obviously why people advocate for the free/freemium pricing model: it promises that the price of your product will not negatively affect demand.  [ Read more ]

Paying a Psychological Price

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

When the stock market (meaning of course the industrial segment of the Dow Jones averages) passes through a big round number like 1,000 points, or 5,000 points, or, more recently (and repeatedly, in both directions) 10,000 points, everybody pays close attention. Why? Because people are stupid.

Okay…maybe that’s a little harsh. Better would be to say that people are conditioned to pay attention to such numbers. For example:

  • 4,294? That’s just a number.
  • 4,444? Wow!
  • 9,303? Nothing.
  • 9,000? Wow!
  • 10,605? ZZZZzzzzzzz…..
  • 10101? Spooky! Digital! Buy tech!!!

Numbers in and of themselves usually have no meaning. They quantify, but they do not evoke. Precisely because of the abstract relationship between our numbering system and the way we usually employ it (to count things) the door is left wide open for extraneous associations to creep in, even if we are guarded against them.

As you can see from the above examples, our psychological make-up affects how we view numbers in a variety of ways. Some of these misplaced associations may be obvious, some may be obscure, but it should be quite clear that none of them have anything to do with what the numbers actually mean.

The people who sell you products know all about these extraneous associations and routinely use them to advantage. Some of this is simple deception. When you buy gas at $2.82 per gallon, you do know from previous experience that there’s an itty-bitty, ninety-nine-hundredths-of-one-cent hiding at the end of that price, but because it’s such a pitifully small number it doesn’t seem important. Which is why the gas industry adds that almost-penny. The big sign says $2.82 per gallon, but the other signs at the pump remind you that the actual price is $2.8299, meaning the seller is making almost a full cent more than the stated price. Why do gas sellers do this? Because it works.

But it’s not just the fact that the amount is small that convinces you it isn’t important. It’s the number itself. Anything ending in ’99’ is considered a de facto savings, because ’99’ so immediately evokes ‘100’. Not only is that ‘100’ a big round number, but it include an entirely new digit. ’99’ is a miserly two-digit number, whereas ‘100’ is a budget-wrecking three-digit number. The actual difference between the two numbers for any unit is 1%, but the psychological difference is closer to 100%.

And you know this. It’s why the couch you just bought was selling for $999 instead of $1,002. It’s why the car you’re thinking of buying costs #29,860, instead of $30,081. It’s why the bottled water you grabbed is selling for $0.99 — even though it’s going over $1.00 with tax. As a consumer you see these numbers everywhere, you figured them out a long time ago, you know what the pricing elves are up to, and yet it still works.  [ Read more ]