Okay, so here’s the deal.<\/p>\n
Back in May, I made what might possibly be the worst mistake of my entire publishing career: I severely underpriced\u00a0all of my\u00a0Star Wanderers<\/strong> books.\u00a0For the year and a half leading up to that decision, sales had been declining rather steadily, and I\u00a0was getting rather desperate for some way to reverse that. By lowering my prices from $2.99 to $.99 for that particular series, I thought I would bring in\u00a0some new readers who would go on to buy my other books, and that that would offset the loss in income.<\/p>\n At the time, I\u00a0kind of had an impression in the back of my head that it was a bad idea. And\u00a0for a while, I listened to that impression. But when you\u00a0feel desperate,\u00a0there’s a temptation to shift strategy and just do\u00a0something,<\/em> especially if it’s easy and produces immediate results.<\/p>\n So\u00a0from May to October,\u00a0I severely underpriced my books.\u00a0In October, I went through all the data I’d collected, and realized that I’d categorically failed to accomplish any of my goals. Sales had increased\u00a0by only two or three copies a week for the books I’d discounted, and sales for the non-discounted books hadn’t increased at all. Meanwhile, my writing\u00a0income had fallen precipitously, to the point where I could barely cover costs.<\/p>\n At the same time, my personal expenses started to become a problem. I’ve always been frugal, but\u00a0a couple of unexpected expenses combined with poor planning and lack of work meant that by the end of the summer, my emergency savings were drained and I had to make some hard choices. Long story short, I had to pull most of the money out of my business account in order to avoid going into debt.<\/p>\n I’m doing okay right now, so don’t worry about that. Work opportunities have picked up with the Christmas season, so I should be able to get by\u00a0for the next couple of months just fine. And as for the writing end of things,\u00a0business is still profitable, so if I just let it sit for a couple of months I should be able to replenish the money I had to take out. It’s not like I’ve eaten my seed corn.<\/p>\n At the same time, though, it kind of is like I’ve eaten my seed corn, because I don’t currently have the money to pay for editing and cover art. In a couple of months, I will, but not soon enough for a January release.<\/p>\n I had originally planned to release\u00a0Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V)<\/strong> in January. And on the writing end, I’m still doing pretty good: I’ve heard back from my first readers and should have the revisions done by the end of the month. But the actual production isn’t something I can do right now, so I have to put the project off until the money comes in.<\/p>\n So that’s what’s going on. It kind of sucks, but lesson learned.<\/p>\n As for\u00a0Captives in Obscurity,<\/strong>\u00a0barring any more problems, it should come out in March. And I do still plan to publish some short stories between now and then. The nice thing about short stories is that they’re small enough that you can do most of the editing\/art yourself. It’s kind of like the difference between\u00a0planting a backyard garden and planting several acres of farmland. In fact, if things go well I should be launching a pen name soon, potentially as soon as December.<\/p>\n And for the future, I will be careful not to underprice my books.\u00a0If I could, I would love to give away all of my books for free (in fact, I actually do: on Smashwords, my books are available on\u00a0a “reader sets the price” arrangement), but that just isn’t practical. Lesson learned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay, so here’s the deal. Back in May, I made what might possibly be the worst mistake of my entire publishing career: I severely underpriced\u00a0all of my\u00a0Star Wanderers books.\u00a0For the year and a half leading up to that decision, sales had been declining rather steadily, and I\u00a0was getting rather desperate for some way to reverse… Continue reading Why SSF-V: Captives in Obscurity won’t be coming out in January<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[964,855],"tags":[89,42,529,891],"class_list":["post-10202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ssf-v","category-ssf","tag-career-decisions","tag-frustrations","tag-indie-publishing","tag-publishing-schedule","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2Ey","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10203,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10202\/revisions\/10203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}