print – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Here’s my new pricing strategy

A few weeks ago, I had an impression that I needed to revisit my overall pricing strategy, not just for ebooks but for audiobooks too. So I sent out a few feelers, trying to see how other indie authors are pricing their books, and also ran a reader survey (thank you to everyone who participated in that, by the way!)

After all of that, I’ve put together a new pricing strategy that I will probably keep over the next few years, inflation notwithstanding. It’s not that much different from what I was doing before, but it is worth sharing with you, especially if you’re on a tight budget and you want to know the best way to pick up my books. So let’s go through each format, and I’ll share my plans.

Paperbacks

Until now, I’ve basically just been pricing all my paperbacks at a flat $14.99 USD, with equivalent price points in each of the major currencies. For shorter books, this meant that I took a hefty profit. For longer books, a hefty loss.

Moving forward, as I move to distribute all of my titles through Ingram via Draft2Digital, I am going to price my paperback titles such that I take at least a $2 profit through wide distribution. For most titles, this means they will fall somewhere in the $12.99 to $15.99 range. Some of the larger books may go as high as $18.99. This does not include shipping costs.

As always, if you purchase a paperback on my store, I will sign and personalize them for free if that is what you want me to do. Not all of them are up yet, but I hope to get them all up there over the next few weeks.

Audiobooks

Until now, I’ve been pricing my audiobooks on the lower end of the price range that human-narrated audiobooks can command, which means that most of them were either $8.99 or $16.99. That was just the list price, though, and I frequently ran month-long sales where they were all discounted to $2.99. And of course, if the ebook was already free, I also made the audiobook free.

But this was before AI-narrated audiobooks began to come out on the major platforms in large numbers. Now, it looks like one of the biggest trends in the book world is the explosion of AI-narrated audiobooks. I forget which podcast I heard it on, but some industry experts are predicting that within 10 months, most of the audiobook market will consist of AI-narrated audiobooks.

Obviously, it costs much less to produce an AI-narrated audiobook vs. a human narrated audiobook. In fact, without AI, none of my titles would be available in audiobook format, since they are all AI-narrated. And after asking around some of the author communities I follow, it appears that most authors are pricing their AI-narrated audiobooks closer to their ebooks, rather than their human-narrated audiobooks.

What was more surprising to me was to learn that of the readers who took my reader survey, those who listen to audiobooks felt fairly strongly that an AI-narrated audiobook shouldn’t cost more than the ebook. So it’s not just the authors who are driving this trend, but the readers as well.

With that in mind, and the data I gathered on ebook pricing points, I have decided to make the list price of all of my digital books, whether ebooks or AI-narrated audiobooks, priced at $4.99 moving forward. That’s just the list price, though: occasionally, I will run a $2.99 sale, where either all my audiobooks or all of my ebooks are discounted to the $2.99 price. And for certain titles, like my Sons of the Starfarers books, I plan to keep them on a $2.99 sale permanently, since it’s a nine book series and that’s what they were priced at before. Also, if the ebook is free, so is the audiobook.

And as always, if you buy an audiobook from my online store, you automatically get the ebook free as well.

Ebooks

Before, I used to price my ebooks at either $2.99, $3.99, or $4.99, depending on the book. In general, first-in-series books were permanently at $2.99, while the later books were all at $4.99.

Moving forward, however, I plan to keep all of my ebooks (except for the Sons of the Starfarers books) priced at $4.99, regardless of where they fall in the series, though I will occasionally run $2.99 sales across the board.

(The exception to all of this is box sets, which I plan to keep at $9.99. At this time, I only do box sets for the ebooks, and I don’t want to price those so low that they undercut my regular titles. I may discount them during a $2.99 sale, but I haven’t yet decided on how much.)

My goal with this is to make it so that price isn’t a factor in deciding which book to buy next. If they’re all the same price, then it shouldn’t make much of a difference—and if $4.99 is too much for your budget, then you can just wait until I run the next $2.99 sale, which should happen approximately every third month or so.

As always, you can get $1 off of the ebook with the coupon code “buy direct” when you purchase it from my store. This only applies to $4.99 books, however—if the book is currently on sale for $2.99, the coupon does not apply.

$2.99 sale November-December 2024

With all of that said, I am currently running a $2.99 sale on all of my ebooks and audiobooks, from now to the end of 2024. If you’ve wanted to read my books in ebook or audiobook format, but have ever balked at the price, now is a great time to pick them up! I have somewhere north of 20 novels out right now, and in the coming months, I plan to publish a lot more (which is another reason to run $2.99 sales, so that my readers don’t have to spend upwards of $100 to read all of my books).

Genesis Earth now available in paperback

For the last couple of months, all of my paperbacks have been unavailable due to some quality control problems with KDP Paperback. The quality of their product is substantially inferior to CreateSpace, unfortunately. But for now, it still remains the best option for getting my books out in paperback, so that’s what I’m doing until I can put them up through Ingram Spark.

To mitigate the quality problems, I’ve made a new cover design which I hope to replicate across all of my paperback books. The biggest problem was that the cover was misaligned beyond the margin of error in the cover template, meaning that the front cover would bleed into the spine, or vice versa. As you can see, the new design has a solid background that wraps around the whole cover, with the text and art well outside of the margin of error. If Amazon screws this up, you’d be justified in asking customer service for another copy, or a refund.

In any case, I’m going to roll out the new paperbacks gradually over the next few months, as I manage to get to them. The inside content is changing slightly, in that I’m including the author’s notes at the end. I’m also adding chapter names to my earlier books, where previously they were simply “Chapter One” or “Chapter Two.” Other than that, everything is mostly the same.

I like the way the design for this one turned out. The paperback cover itself is slightly darker than the image shown, but all I’ve got right now is the proof, so I’ll post images after I’ve ordered a few author copies to sell. Hopefully by the end of this year, all of my books novella length and longer will be up in print as well as ebook!

Buy Genesis Earth on Amazon

Why my books are no longer available in paperback

All of my books are available as ebooks, but only a few of them were available in print. Until now. If you’ve looked to buy one of my paperbacks, you may have noticed that none my books are available in print. Why?

TL;DR: KDP Paperback sucks monkey balls, and I’m not going to sell a book if I can’t assure my readers that the product will meet an acceptable level of quality.

I originally published my paperbacks through CreateSpace, before they were acquired by Amazon. The books they printed were great, and I never had a problem with any of them. On the contrary, whenever I had a question about the publishing process, their customer service team far exceeded my expectations and helped to shepherd many of my books to final publication.

I learned a lot of things the hard way, and made a lot of mistakes along the way. But that was all on me. When I finally figured out the right way to do what I wanted, I could alway count on CreateSpace to produce a quality product.

Fast forward to 2018. Amazon shuttered CreateSpace and began the migration of all of their books to KDP Paperback. I loved CreateSpace, but I also saw the writing on the wall, and migrated my books early. I also published several new paperbacks through KDP Paperback, using their cover creator program.

The publishing process went about as smoothly as it had through CreateSpace. The customer service wasn’t nearly as good, but I had a pretty good idea what I was doing, and with a little experimentation, I was able to produce a quality product.

Or so I thought.

I always order proofs when putting together a paperback, and scrutinize that proof carefully before approving it. For Heart of the Nebula and The Sword Keeper, I had to go through a couple of proofs before I was satisfied that I’d gotten it right. The most common problem was that the front cover would bleed onto the spine. After a couple of failed adjustments on the KDP Paperback cover creator, I decided to just upload the jpg and not futz with it, letting the program adjust it instead. And for a time, that seemed to work.

For the Star Wanderers books, I did the same thing, letting the KDP Paperback cover creator do its thing without futzing with the placement of the front cover image. A couple of the proof copies had the bleeding problem, but after following a couple of online discussions, it seemed that the consensus was that the proof copies were of lesser quality than the actual customer copies.

That should have been a red flag right there, but I went ahead and approved them anyway, since the bleed was only about a millimeter or so, and I couldn’t justify the expense of another eight proof copies.

Big mistake.

A couple of months later, I ordered about $100 worth of author copies to sell at conventions. This was the result:

Every damn book had the cover bleed problem. Every. Damn. Book. And it wasn’t a small print error, either. The bleed was as much as 3 millimeters on some copies.

Keep in mind that except for Genesis Earth, all of these covers were designed through KDP Paperback cover creator. Also keep in mind that aside from a couple of the Star Wanderers books, this printing error was not present in any of the proofs that I approved.

Genesis Earth was particularly troubling, because that was a book that I migrated from CreateSpace. None of the author copies that I’d ordered from CreateSpace ever demonstrated this printing error. In fact, I’d gone through several proofs to ensure that the front cover image was completely outside of the red zone, to ensure that such a bleed problem would never be an issue.

KDP’s customer service promises that they respond to every issue within 24 hours. That is a lie. My first inquiry received no reply—not even the standard copy-paste boilerplate response that they usually send first.

I waited three days and sent a second inquiry, threatening to email Jeff Bezos and pull all of my books if I did not receive a response within 24 hours. As you can probably surmise, I did not get a response within 24 hours.

I did eventually get a response, and ultimately I did get a partial refund for my books. But by then, I’d had enough.

KDP Paperback produces an unacceptably inferior product. Furthermore, their customer service is terrible. Because I cannot asure my readers that they will receive an acceptable quality book, I have decided to pull all of my paperbacks from KDP Paperback and go through someone else.

It may take a few months to figure this out, in which time, my books unfortunately will not be available in print. However, I think that this will be the best solution in the long run. I’ve heard good things about Ingram Spark, so I’ll check them out, but it may take a while to do things properly.

And this time, I’m not going to take any half measures.

SW-VII: REPROACH is now out!

If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to lately, I’ve been busy publishing a new book! Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII) is now out on Amazon, Smashwords, and Kobo as a $2.99 ebook, and should be up on Barnes & Noble and iTunes in a couple of weeks.

This now brings the total number of books I’ve published to 17. Part VIII: Deliverance should be out in early- to mid-November, and if things go well, I should be able to put out at least one more ebook before the end of the year.

My main publishing goal, though, is to get print versions out of every Star Wanderers story before Christmas. I got the first proof of Outworlder a few days ago, and fixed the issues with it over the weekend. Just have to order another proof and make sure it looks good, then it’s just a matter of clicking a couple buttons and it should be up on Amazon. Because it’s a small book, it should sell for between $4 to $6–I know there are a lot of books in this series, so I’ll do what I can to keep the prices low!

Speaking of print editions, the trade paperback of Stars of Blood and Glory is now out on Amazon and the CreateSpace store! If you prefer to read in paper or just want a copy for your bookshelf, you can pick it up now. I’ve gotten some requests for signed copies, so I’m going to order a few from CreateSpace and try to get those sent out in the next few weeks. If you’re interested, shoot me an email at joseph [dot] vasicek [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll see what I can do.

That’s just about it. So much publishing–when am I going to get a chance to just write? It’s been a lot of fun though, and I’m happy to get these books out to you guys. Next week, I’ll turn my focus back to Sons of the Starfarers and hopefully make some good progress on the first book of that series.

Thanks for reading!

Back in Georgia

Hey, just a quick post to let you guys know how I’m doing.

I made it out to the village yesterday, met my new host family and got more or less settled. Due to some mixups, I ended up in Sairme (WAY up in the mountains) before making it down to Baghdati, but everything worked out well and I got to see some beautiful Georgian scenery at the same time.

My new host family is great! It’s a 35 year old guy and his mom, living on a farm in a village with all their uncles and cousins and stuff pretty close by. The guy, Dato, is way cool–he does IT at the school, farms his mom’s place, and otherwise just hangs out in the village. We played nardi last night–I actually beat him on the first go, then he slaughtered me twice. Then his aunt played him and things got really entertaining.

The house is WAY different from the apartment where I was living before. Much more spacious. It’s a couple hundred years old, though, so the wires are attached on the outsides of the walls and stuff. We’ve also got chickens all over the place. I’ll be sure to post some pictures, probably in a week or two.

I think I’ve hit it off pretty well with the family. They’re impressed that I already know a bit of Kartuli, especially the aunt. Things got a little tense when I turned down the wine and told them I can’t drink because my religion forbids it, but I don’t think it will be too much of a problem (though this being Georgia, you never know).

The mom is an awesome cook. This morning, she made one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had in my life. The house is old but comfortable, I’ve got all the space and privacy I need, there’s a lot more nature out here in the village–I think I’m really going to like it here. What’s more, Kutaisi is only a short half-hour marshrutka ride away.

After I’m through here, I’ll walk up to my old host family’s place and drop off some gifts: specifically, some RAM for their broken down computer. Then I’ll head over to my old school, say hi to my old coteachers, run downtown to pick some stuff up, then head back out to the village. Tomorrow, I’ll meet up with a friend of mine to get some stuff for camping, then head out the next day to go backpacking in Borjomi or Tusheti. That’s the plan at least.

Oh, and about the trip to Ani: I tried to get down to Kars, but couldn’t find a bus. I ended up in Akhaltsikhe, the Georgian border town, but the only way out was to catch a taxi to the crossing ($$$), catch a taxi on the other side to the Turkish town on the other side, and from there to catch a bus down to Kars (about 140 km). I was traveling alone, didn’t know any Turkish, it was about mid-afternoon and I didn’t have a backup plan, so I ended up aborting and headed back to Tbilisi.

Oh well–it happens. I’ll try again, though, probably in a few weeks. This time, we’ll meet up in Georgia, where I actually know how to get around.

In other news, I bought three author copies each of Genesis Earth, Bringing Stella Home, and Desert Stars before I left the US. They’re signed and numbered, and if you want to buy one of them, just shoot me an email (joseph [dot] vasicek [at] gmail [dot] com). The #1 copies are already sold, but the #2 and #3 copies of each book are still available. You can buy them from me at the current Amazon paperback price, and I’ll have my parents ship them out to you.

That’s all for now. Take care, and I’ll see you guys around!

Alright, hit me up…

I’m just about ready to release Star Wanderers: Part II–the story’s been revised and proofread, the cover art is finished, the formatting is ready to go–all that’s left is figuring out the book blurb. Which is where I could use your help!

Here’s what I’ve got so far. What do you think?

IS FIDELITY WORTH THE PRICE OF FREEDOM? CAN LOVE TAKE ROOT BEYOND THE STARS?

Oriana Station: a bustling frontier settlement between the Outworlds and the Coreward Stars. A popular port-of-call for free traders and independent starfarers alike—and the latest target in the aggressively expansionist plans of the Gaian Empire.

Life was simple for Jeremiah and Noemi before they arrived. Though neither of them speak the same language, they’ve reached an understanding of each other that goes beyond words. But when the colonial authorities make them into second-class citizens of a fractured empire, even that might not be enough.

Their newfound friends in the immigrant community can only do so much. With Noemi and her people depending on him, Jeremiah must find a way back to the Outworlds—before they lose everything that they came for.

I’m going with the family on vacation at the end of the week, but if all goes well, I should have it released before then. Newsletter subscribers will be able to download it for free on Smashwords for the first two weeks, and I’ll make Part I available for free while pricing Part II at $2.99. When Part III comes out, I’ll drop the price to $.99.

In other news, I typeset and formatted Bringing Stella Home for CreateSpace this morning, and ordered the proof just a few hours ago. With luck, it should come in the mail by the end of the week. This is the third book I’m releasing in print, and the last one for the rest of this year. I’ll be sure to post pics and links for where to get it once it’s ready.

In still other news, the Mars landing was totally worth staying up for last night. A truly awesome moment for the whole human race. And yes, I’ve been using this excuse all day.

Hey, at least I got the blurb done! :p

New print proof and an update on Star Wanderers

So the proof for Desert Stars came in the mail today, and it looks great!

No matter how much I do this, it never gets old. 🙂

It’s available now from CreateSpace, if you want to pick up a copy. If you’d rather buy it on Amazon, it should go live there in a few days. And if you want to buy an autographed copy of this one or Genesis Earth, let me know ASAP: I can order author copies and ship them wherever you want me to, but I’m leaving again for Georgia at the end of August, so I can only do that for the next two or three weeks.

As for Star Wanderers: Part II, I finished the major revisions just yesterday, and plan to go through it again this next week before publishing, mostly to fix typos and get it ready for publication. There weren’t too many story issues, but my first readers helped me to see a couple of areas where things were unclear (especially Laura–thanks for the awesome feedback!).

After going through this latest draft, I’ve got to say I am way excited to finish Part III and Part IV. It’s going to take a little more work, and it’ll definitely need some feedback before publishing, but I think I can have the first round of revisions done before the end of August. A couple of scenes are missing, and there are some key elments I need to change, but I definitely know where this story is going and I’m excited to tell it!

That’s about it for now. I’ve gotten some initial feedback from my first readers on Stars of Blood and Glory, and so far it’s been surprisingly positive. I may post the prologue here for you guys, or release it as an extra through the newsletter. The unpublished prologue for Bringing Stella Home would also make good newsletter content too, come to think of it…

Electronic publishing is like playing a really awesome video game. Once things get going and you really start getting into it, you just don’t want to stop!

The print edition of Genesis Earth is in!

The proof for the print edition of my first novel, Genesis Earth, just came in the mail–and it looks AWESOME! Check it out!

Holy crap, it is so cool to have a book in my hands THAT I ACTUALLY WROTE. So cool!

I approved the proof a couple of hours ago. It’s currently up for sale on CreateSpace (where I get a higher royalty), but it should also be up on Amazon in 5-7 business days. I haven’t opted for the extended distribution, which means that those are the only places where it’s going to be available for a while. I might opt in a little later, but I haven’t made a decision just yet.

Next step: put out print editions for Bringing Stella Home and Desert Stars. Those should be coming soon, probably by mid-August.

Man, this is so much fun!

Rivers and orphans and rivers, oh my!

So one of my goals this summer is to release POD (print-on-demand) editions for the three novels I currently have up as ebooks (Genesis Earth, Bringing Stella Home, and Desert Stars). I started with Genesis Earth a couple of days ago, and wow! I had no idea that getting a book ready for print could be so much fun!

I just finished formatting and typesetting the interior today, and it looks pretty awesome! Drop caps, chapter headings, page numbers, a pleasingly arranged text–there’s something immensely satisfying about paper, an experience that ebooks (as awesome as they are) just don’t quite capture. If I weren’t a writer, I’d be a typesetter–but because I’m an indie, I can be both!

As with ebooks, the learning curve for print formatting is pretty steep, but I think I’ve got the hang of it. The guys over at Kindle Boards gave me a lot of helpful advice, and sent me a really awesome POD guide that’s been a lifesaver. My editor (who’s also trained in typesetting) gave it a once over too, so I think we’re in good shape.

Barring any unforeseen complications, the print version of Genesis Earth should be up in a couple of weeks. The cover art is more or less done–I just need to revise the blurb, send the PDFs out to CreateSpace, and wait for the proof to come in the mail.

One thing I’m wondering is whether to go with the free ISBN (which will list CreateSpace as the publisher) or to spend $10 and go with my own imprint. My gut tells me to go with the free option–not because it’s cheap so much as because it’s less complicated–but I wonder if there might be some advantages down the road to taking the other.

ISBNs, imprints, and distribution channels, oh my…I’ll have to save that for another post a little later. 🙂