novel « Robin Writes

Here you go, the handy dandy guide to writing that book you were always planning:

Have a story
Write it down
Check for plot consistency
Check for mechanical errors
Let someone read it.
Make any necessary changes

Simple, right?

Everyone has a story, their own story; some people come up with other stories—which are really just big what-ifs. What if this happened, or that, and how would it progress, and how would it end? Ideas can come from anywhere at all: dreams, real-life occurrences, and just plain daydreaming.

Now for the hard part—writing it down. You don’t have to write a certain number of words each day, and you don’t have to write every day, and you don’t have to write at the same time every day. However, if you skip more than a day or two, you run the risk of getting out of the habit of writing, and while that won’t necessarily preclude your finishing the book, it will extend the time it takes.

You might want to also make notes, or a timeline, as you go or even before you start.

After you’ve finished, and I don’t care what NaNoWriMo says, a novel is NOT 50K words, it’s almost twice that, at minimum, read it back over again to make sure you wound up all the loose ends and didn’t change someone’s name or description in the middle.

Make sure it’s believeable, as any good story is, and be sure you haven’t inadvertently used some colloquialism or slang term specific to your region, your family, or your business. Historical facts and actual places should, to a point, be accurate insofar as general readership is concerned.

Once you’ve made any changes, read it over again to check for mechanical errors: spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc. Fix them.

Now you can send it to someone to read—or several someones. Make notes of their feedback, and decide if you want to change anything.

There you go—you’re finished. You wrote a book. Congrats!

“How do I know what price to put on my book?”

As a former bookseller and a current publisher and author, I can tell you two things for sure:

If your book is priced over $15, it won’t sell.

If your book is priced below $8, you won’t make any money.

Now, I’m speaking of paperbacks, of course. E-books are bit different. First, you need to look at prices on the top sellers in your genre. Next, consider value for dollar.

Yes, it’s a book, yes, it’s a work of art. Readers still want value—that’s why, when your E-book is listed as “free,” so many people download it. At least half of them, maybe more, just want something for free.

With paperbacks, you shouldn’t price a 150-page book the same as a 300-page novel. You won’t get many sales. There are a lot of choices out there, a lot of reading material. Make it easier on your customer.

If your book is priced at $24.95 and someone else’s cost $14.95, that’s a huge difference and guess which one is more likely to be purchased?

If you sell directly, and your novel is priced at $14.95 with a printing and shipping cost of about $6.00, you’ll still earn about $9.00 per sale. If you want to sell directly to bookstores and other venues, you need to offer a discount of at least 40%, which means you earn about $3.00 per book. Still not bad, when you consider that authors’ royalties range from 10-18%.

Let’s look at the other end: an $8 book. Still the same cost to you of $6.00 and you earn $2.00. Selling direct. If you want to get into stores, you’ll have to discount those books to just under $5.00 and you make diddly. Now, if your book is only 150 pages, you might earn .80 per sale.

E-books are different, because there are such low costs associated with “producing” them. On KDP, you’ll garner 70% of the selling price; sometimes, yes, there downloading costs charged to you of a few cents.

A .99 book will earn .69. A $2.99 book will earn $2.09. Why would you offer your hard work for only .99, unless it’s for a promotion, for a short time?

On the other end, hardly any reader will pay $9.99 for an E-book unless the author is very, very well known. Some bestsellers can ask much, much more.

It’s value for dollar. Plain and simple.

RHP’s books run from $10.95 on up to $14.95 for paperback, $2.99 to $3.99 for Kindle. Authors make money, the house makes money, and readers are happy. And they buy books.

Short stories, usually just available as E-books, also seem to be popular. To me, downloading a story that runs a few pages, even for .99, seems more trouble than it’s worth; then again, I don’t read a lot of short stories. I prefer to dive deep into a novel and stay there for a while.

As an author, you can certainly whip up a short story and upload and sell it for .99—some authors make a killing that way. Particularly certain genres, such as erotica. I do not personally know of any professionals who do this, but I’m sure some do—perhaps under pen names.

And, since I have no experience with this, perhaps one of you would like to weigh in?

You could also combine your short stories into an anthology—same pricing guidelines as for novels.

If you keep your prices between that margin of $8 and $15, you should be able to sell books, if they’re well-written, formatted, and edited, with a good cover. Keep your E-book prices in the middle, too, and you should be able to sell your books and make money at the same time.

Of course, if you use one of those vanity presses that I constantly nag about, you’re going to have to raise prices in order to make even a couple bucks. So, yeah, another reason to avoid that!