Not Much to Report For This Week’s News · 8:11pm May 2nd
Yeah, it’s been a slow week. Punching along on A Pirate Planet, editing for Blood Less Vile (I’ll get to The Phoenix as soon as Blood Less Vile is in Beta), and … wrist pain.
Yeah, I apparently tweaked my shoulder again, which has led to my right forearm and wrist being a bit off again. This seems to happen more than I’d like, and while I’ve got some exercises I do to mitigate and strengthen myself against it, it still strikes from time to time. Since I was well ahead of quota at the end of April (and stressed out) I took the last day of April off to give it a little time to heal. Hopefully by next week all is well.
But yeah, aside from that there’s not really a lot of news that’s noteworthy. Sales have slumped with the current economic instability and recession, which is unfortunate. Oh, and I heard from a bookstore that one reason they are unable to stock Axtara – Banking and Finance is because the cover price is too cheap. It means their cut becomes too small compared to the price it costs to get the book printed, so they’re not going to stock it.
Obviously, this raises some interesting questions. Currently, the first Axtara paperback is about $3-5 cheaper than its contemporaries. Which is a great deal for the read, but it’s starting to sound like a price I set several years ago is finally being caught up to by rising production costs plus, you know, the whole tariff and recession problem (that is entirely self-inflicted, I should be abundantly clear).
This clearly puts me in a conundrum: Raise the price? It’s even been suggested that the lower price (Banking and Finance is $11.99 in paperback) could be hurting it, as that puts it several dollars below its contemporaries, and this appears to make it “cheap” in the eyes of some.
Regardless, if a bookstore won’t stock it because the price is so low, this implies there should be some sort of change coming, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it over the last few days. It may indeed be time to raise some of the paperback prices I’ve set. If I do, I’ll let everyone know with a hard date, so that you can grab it at the lower price if you’re so inclined.
