Category Archives: E-books

What Everyone’s Waiting For

Everybody’s talking about it.  It’s all over the internet, crashing servers with the added traffic.  Social media sites are abuzz about it.  You can feel the pervasive air of excitement and anticipation.

RallyingCry72dpiCalm down, world.  It’s just my next book.  You’re going to have to wait until the release date of March 1 to buy it.

Actually, it’s two stories in one e-book release, a two-fer.  “Rallying Cry” and “Last Vessel of Atlantis” are paired together.  What are these stories about?  Thought you’d never ask.

In “Rallying Cry,” an aimless youth named Kane Jones meets two old geezers who spin bizarre war stories.  They tell about having served in a secret World War I outfit in France—the Jules Verne Regiment—with ship-sized helicopters and mechanized walking tanks.   Just as an inspiring shout can move soldiers to action, perhaps all Kane really needs to turn his life around is a rallying cry.

Ever since reading John Biggins’ novel A Sailor of Austria, I’d longed to write a story set in a nursing home with an older character (two, in my story) imparting the memories of a bygone time to a younger character.  I finally did.  “Rallying Cry” takes off in different directions than Biggins’ book, of course, and I recommend you read both.

In “Last Vessel of Atlantis, a ship captain and his crew of explorers return to find Atlantis gone.  While facing violent savages, braving fierce storms, and solving internal disputes, they must somehow ensure their advanced Atlantean civilization is not lost forever.  Fans with long memories will realize this is a slightly revised version of another story of mine published as “The Vessel.”  The new title is better, don’t you think?

I explained the origin of this story in a previous blog post.  It was fun for me to imagine the difficulties faced by a small crew of sailors who find themselves the sole survivors of their advanced civilization, with all other continents populated by primitive savages.

If you can just hang on a couple of weeks until March 1, the book will be available here.  Deep breaths might help you cope with the anxiety until then, along with taking time to think about other, less exciting, things.  Your patience will be rewarded, and that’s a promise from—

                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe

February 16, 2014Permalink

What Should Your E-Book Cost?

Most authors (including me) are not experts in economics.  Many of them might have a vague idea that if their book was priced high, they’d make more money.  But this ignores the relationship between price and quantity sold.  The author should be seeking to maximize income over all, not income per book sold.

Caveat:  I’m no economist, so this is my best guess at the economics of e-book pricing. The thousands of economists who read my blog should comment and correct any errors I make.

Supply-and-demandThe relationship between price and quantity, from the consumer’s (or reader’s) view, is what economists call the demand curve.  Price something high and few people will buy it, and vice versa.  In classic economic theory, the demand curve gets paired with a supply curve and the intersection of the curves yields the equilibrium price.  The theory behind the supply curve is that high prices compel suppliers to produce more, and vice versa.

How does this apply to your electronic book?  The demand curve indicates you’ll sell more books at a lower price and fewer at a higher price.

But you can throw the supply curve out the window when it comes to e-books.  Why?  The supply curve is based on some assumptions, which are true for most products:

1.  If you’ve produced x  items so far, there is some measureable effort expended and resources used to produce the x + 1 item.

2.  Since resources are needed to produce the x + 1 item, it is possible to have shortages or surpluses of the item.

3.  The market is competitive.

None of those assumptions is true for e-books.  After the first book is produced, there is zero effort and zero resources expended for all the books that follow.  Therefore there can be no shortages or surpluses.  Also, the market is not competitive; there is only one source for your book.  Whoever publishes it has exclusive rights, though they may license competitive distributors to get the book to readers.

So it’s impossible to draw a supply curve for an e-book.  Quantity is irrelevant, so no supply curve, and no equilibrium price.

If you’re an author wondering whether your e-book is priced right, the lack of a supply curve and equilibrium price doesn’t leave you any more lost than you would be otherwise, though.  That’s because those curves represent a reasonable theory of how most markets work.  In practice, things get difficult.

Here’s a thought experiment:  Say you want to plot the demand curve for your just-published e-book using real data.  You set the price at $10,000 and nobody buys it.  You gradually lower the price each week and plot the sales data.  Eventually your book is priced at $0.01, demand is very high, and you’ve got your complete curve drawn.

The problems are: (1) many decades have elapsed, and (2) you haven’t ended up with the real demand curve after all, but pieces of many curves.  That’s because the curve changes with time too.  Economists say demand curves shift right or left depending on consumer tastes and preferences, the prices of related goods, and other factors which change with time.  What you really wanted at the launch of your e-book was the complete curve at that time, but there’s no practical way to determine it.

Sadly, e-book pricing involves guesswork.  If you’re self-publishing, you can set the price near that of similar books, and alter that price as circumstances warrant.  If you engaged a publisher, you have to trust their guesswork.

They call economics the dismal science, and we’ve arrived at a dismal conclusion.  Don’t blame me.  I’m no economist; I’m—

                                                                  Poseidon’s Scribe

January 26, 2014Permalink