Successful Indie Author Lindsay Buroker on E-book Pricing

questionLindsay has a great post on her blog where she gives her views on how indie author-publishers might want to price their books.

Her rationale for pricing a novel happens to be exactly the same as mine, though I’ve never quite managed to express it this succinctly:

“I personally think about $5 per full-length novel is a fair price all around. It gives you far higher per-book earnings than traditionally published authors are receiving (even those whose ebooks are selling for $10+), it gives the readers a deal when compared to most traditionally published ebooks, and it’s often considered a fair price by those who feel that digital books should cost less than the dead-tree variety since paper, ink, and shipping aren’t a part of the equation.

“Lastly, it separates you from the legions of indie authors charging $0.99, $1.99, and $2.99 for their novels (often on the belief that they won’t be able to sell at a higher price because they’re not established names — I started out at $2.99 for just that reason). A lot of readers still walk warily around self-published books, so it can only help if you’re not giving obvious clues that your book was never vetted by a gatekeeper.”

Yup.

Shooting Up The Charts!

This made me laugh. It doesn’t take much to climb the Bestseller Rankings for the Amazon.co.uk Kindle Store, it seems. Yesterday ASCENSION POINT was languishing at #251,110. But then…

SOMEONE BOUGHT A COPY.

Yup–it’s stormed up to #30,554 on the back of that single sale. You have to assume that it takes a few more sales than that to be ranked in the top, I don’t know, ten thousand. But it’s still nice to see the line going upwards 🙂

Early days, folks. Early days.

Scrivener Quirkery and Kindle Fire

(Warning: This post is techie. It’s also only relevant to you if you want to use Scrivener to create Kindle-ready MOBI files ready for upload to KDP. If you do not meet this description, here is a link to a page of amusing animal GIFs instead.)

Sharing this in case anyone else hits the same problem.

I’ve been periodically using Scrivener to compile ASCENSION POINT into MOBI format, to see how it looks on my Kindle. I’ve also been using the Kindle Previewer, which cleverly emulates different types of Kindle (DX, Fire, iPhone, etc), and happily my book always looked great.

That is, until lovely fiancée came back from D.C. with a brand new Kindle Fire for realsies. Read more…