The Long Tail, Pricing

[jeriendhal]

Currently I'm in the process of re-editing The Dragon's Companion to ready it for publication on Smashwords. Aside from fixing the basic format and correcting some old spelling and grammar errors, I'm also tweaking the background slightly to bring it in line with Tez and Maria's universe. Since the only copy of Word I have available is at work (Open Office doesn't play nice with Smashwords) this is taking a bit of time. Which leaves me with either a quandry or an opportunity. Re-formatting is going to take a while, and The Dragon's Companion was originally three novellas stitched together, the first about 20k words and the remaining two sections around 17k each. So I can either release it as one complete unit, as the original book was on Lulu.com, or as the individual novellas. I intend to price according the word count, so assuming $1.00 for 10,000 words, a reader could have a single story for about $2.00 or $1.50, or three together for $5.50. The latter would be more complete, but relesing them individually would mean I could get the stories out now and perhaps start generating revenue a little earlier, given it hardly matters how you read them as e-publications.

If you've already bought a copy of the original book (hello to both of you), or have no intention of buying it, I'd appreciate you participating in the poll below anyway, just so I can get an idea of what my audience would like to see for future works.

[Poll #1664546]

Comments

[seawasp]

Note that if one assumes the average novel is 100k words, then Baen sells ebooks at about $6-$7 a pop, or about sixty to seventy cents per 10k words.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I was using Micah Hogarth's haikujaguar rule of thumb for her "Pelted" novellas she's selling on Smashwords as a basis of comparison. I might sell the DC novellas for that price, and give a discount for the omnibus.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

I think $2 for a novella would be OK, but I don't think $1 per 10,000 words would scale well to real long novels, like seawasp explains.

I think splitting it into novellas might be a good idea, based on the assumption that people'd be more willing to pay small sums to try out a new author.

I'm wondering if offering the three parts at $2 each and a collected volume at a reduced price would be an option... I'm sure it'd be nice if all went out at the same time, but a later cheaper collected volume might disgruntle "early supporters".

... I'd try bartering copy-editing services for a finished file, but I only have Open Office, not Word.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Well if you're willing to help edit, you can just write down the needed corrections on a seperate file and I can put them in the hard way.

Shoot, if you're willing to do that, I'll even upload the corrected file to Lulu and mail you a hard copy.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

Will do. Should I start on the file of Unexpected Diversions I got from Lulu?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

That would be great, since I'll be handling The Dragon's Companion myself.

[chaypeta.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of micro transactions. It's a good way to go on the web... look at the success that mmorp's have had with it etc. So I go with the novellas and perhaps releasing the whole thing together later at a discounted price... say $5 for all three.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I think that's the way I'm probably going to go.