Tons of fans have contacted me in the last two weeks to ask when the hell book three of the 1000 Souls will launch. Since I was the one who said it would be ready and available in July, I can hardly blame them for being surprised that it isn’t out there yet.
Publishers are my enemies. Okay, not really, but the obvious finally did occur to me the other day: publishers are my competition. I’d never thought of it that way simply because those corporations are so big that they operate in a totally different league, one so stratospheric that I couldn’t imagine that little me and my eBooks were anywhere in the same ballpark.
But then agency pricing came along. Those rascally publishers are forcing the price of eBooks higher than paperbacks, gradually moving away from the $9.99 price point that Amazon set and pushing prices up to twelve dollars and more. What drove this home for me was seeing that Amanda Hocking’s new eBook, Switched, published by St. Martins Griffin, will be nearly $12 while the paperback is around $10. Now my memory isn’t the best, but I’m pretty sure I missed a chance to buy Switched for 99¢ when Hocking first self-pubbed it. She’s very popular, so I was surprised to see the whole Trylle series off the market until next February when the paperbacks are ready. How many sales have been lost in the months since I first considered buying Switched?
That’s when it hit me. As long as Hocking is with St. Martins, her books will be far more expensive than mine. Thank you St. Martins. It’s like opening a coffee shop across the street from Starbucks and finding out that the corp back in Seattle has decided to charge $12 for a regular coffee compared to my $1 price point. You couldn’t ask for a more accommodating competitor. It’s like they want me to undercut them and sell.
Great! Thanks Big Six Publishers. You’re helping many writers like me along the road to indie-publishing success.