Unusual Events Review! · 6:18pm Feb 10th, 2016
"Wait," you might be asking yourself. "Didn't I just see this post yesterday?"
Not quite, readers, not quite. Yesterday was a discussion thread for those who had already read Unusual Events: A "Short" Story Collection. Today? This one's for those of you who haven't read it yet, but have maybe been wondering if it's really worth your time and money. Because Unusual Events' first big review is here, from none other than "Papa Pat" Patterson (yes, that's a big deal).
The summary? He loved it. Papa Pat gave Unusual Events a five star rating, and summarized his review with "Support Great (!!!) Short Fiction, and BUY THIS BOOK!!!" You can't get much better than that.
Well, maybe you can. Take a look at some of the glowing words he offered over the course of his review:
"Flash Point" describes the transition that high school student Mark experiences when he discovers that he can set things on fire with his mind. Mark is already an outcast at his high school, because he is new, a member of a small religious denomination, and because he won't give in. Read this, then read "Tuesdays with Molakesh the Destroyer", and then you'll have a pretty good idea of the perspectives that Stephen King missed when he wrote "Carrie".
Holy smokes, did Flash Point just get put in a similar category as Tuesdays with Molakesh the Destroyer? Because I think it just did. Cloud nine, here I come!
"Vacation" and "Workday" took me immediately back to La Vaughn Vanderburg-Kemnow's "Alaska Bush Mother," which I reviewed about a month ago. "Workday" also reminded me of Dave Freer's coming of age stories.
I've loved some of Dave Freer's books (especially Dragon's Ring), so this one gives me about as much glee as the comparison to Tuesdays did above!
I just flat loved "Supermodel," because it seems to be the very best explanation of superhero stories and superhero fan stories. Did you ever wonder why Superman didn't just go smash the enemies of America? This story explains all that.
" Ripper" is a nasty little story about a nasty little person guaranteed to give you the creeps.
Yeah, I'm grinning like mad over here. Being compared to Dave Freer or Megan Grey's Tuesdays? That's some awesome praise. And he loved Supermodel (which, since it was kind of an experimental story, is good to hear). This day just stays awesome.
You can read the rest of Papa Pat's review, as well as check out Unusual Events" A "Short" Story Collection yourself right here.
Okay, fine, you've convinced me. I can't promise that I'll actually have the time to read this anytime soon, but I believe that it's at least worth the price. So go ahead and take some of my money.
I am speaking with the utmost sincerity when I say this: Neat!
I looked, but my honest reaction is that $8 is too much to pay for a self-published e-book. And it may be too much for you, too. Most studies say e-books priced at $8 bring in less money than e-books priced at $4 or $5. See here (authorearnings.com data), here (Smashwords data), here (Luzme data, contradicts the others). The local peak at $10 on that last one is weird, and I suspect it's a dataset problem, with some publisher that sets a standard price and has decent marketing.
At 515 pages, you could've split it into 2 books and charged $2.99 for one and $4.99 for the other, and probably made more money. The nice thing about splitting it into two books is that you want to subtly shift the Amazon browser from asking herself "Do I want to buy this book?" to "Which of these books do I want to buy?" Pricing one choice significantly higher is an old sales trick.
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The problem is that right now there are some serious issues with ebook pricing and payments, and a lot of people are looking at price and not quality or quantity. Case in point, if Unusual Events actually followed standard ebook pricing conventions, the whole thing would actually be closer to $14 or $15, because the majority of the stories within it would be sold for $3 each in the current market.
Sure, ebooks at $3 might bring in more money, but a lot of those are short segments of larger works which in the end cost the reader more money.$8 is a far better deal than the current "standard" for ebook pricing. I'd rather give people a fair price than stoop to marketing people out of their money with deceptively "cheap" deals.
Ebooks are still hugely in flux, but a lot of that data you're looking at is skewed by the heaviest performers in the ebook industry: $2.99-4.99 10-40 page erotica stories, which amount for a massive total of sales. Many authors are also engaged in the "race to the bottom" where everyone feels that their prices have to be super low in order to compete, in turn flattening the market and creating a situation where those who write large, high-quality works are outrun by those writing cheap but overpriced dime a dozen works.
Basically, there are a lot of reasons why simply "chopping a book in two" like you're suggesting isn't a very good idea, for either the market or the reader. The ebook market is a melee of insanity right now, and equilibrium has not even close to being reached.
3751513 I see what you're saying about book length, but I think it would be better for reader and writer to chop a book into as many pieces as possible. Ideally, I'd like to be charged by the word as I read, stop paying if I stop reading, and only pay for the stories I read.
I don't think the notion of a "fair price" for ebooks is useful. What good is it if $10 is "fair", if $5 leads to both more people reading it, and the author getting more money for it? The profit margin on e-books can be up to 90%, while the author's share on a hardcover is closer to 10%; does it make sense to say a fair price for the same book is $20 in hardcover and $2.20 as an e-book? If so, no one operates that way.
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It sounds like what you'd rather do is use Kindle Unlimited to read books, where something similar (but not quite identical as that would be silly) is utilized.
The problem is that you're describing a system that you believe sounds great to you as a consumer, but would absolutely hate if it was applied to you as an employee working to gain a wage. Which is why there exist no system like what you're describing today (it's been tried, but it falls apart completely very fast). It's simply not feasible. Imagine if a similar system was applied to, oh, say fast food for a quick and dirty analogy. Imagine only getting paid for the portion of the meal that the consumer eats: Such a process would be (and is) an unsustainable business model the way food products are handled (indeed, this is why the closest places get is charging customers for the weight of their meal ... but what they purchase, not what they eat). You would not be paid for the assembly of the meal, nor your time spent behind the counter, only for each bite that the consumer made. And whatever they didn't eat, you wouldn't earn ... despite you having already spent the time and money to create the product.
What you're arguing is a system where the consumer has no responsibility and the creator takes all accountability for said consumer. In other words, a business model that does not work, and historically does not function. It is the responsibility of the consumer to determine whether or not they would like to purchase the product and if it suits their needs, not the creators. What you've presented is a system that makes the content creator responsible for the consumer's whims, without any tangible method of changing the consumer's whims.
This is an unsustainable business model. A consumer is responsible for their own choices and purchases, not the content creator.
This post actually would have been a helpful example at LTUE had it come a day or two earlier, as I was part of a discussion about how one of the biggest problems facing ebooks is that consumers are not informed or knowledgeable about the industry and yet are making all sorts of wide purchasing assertions and declarations without said knowledge. Because unfortunately, this post is kind of a shining example of the thing we were talking about, and would have been perfect to bring up.
There are multiple problems with what you present, but one of the most striking is your choice of quotes around "fair" when discussing ebook pricing. Let's make something very clear here: Fair is a price at which the content creators are able to see a reasonable return in exchange for their efforts, the kind of reasonable exchange that allows them to keep creating and producing while bettering their living conditions (or at the very least, not labor in constant sweatshop conditions).
That's not what you refer to when you use the term "fair". From your posts above, you seem to have equated "fairness" with "gets the consumer as much content as possible with as little financial cost or risk as they can" without entering the creator's own needs into it. You don't care about the content creator, only about the consumer. Hence, your comments indicate that you're not interested in the content creator, only in getting what you can for as little as possible.
And again, you make a number of assumptions about the way the ebook market functions that simply don't hold up. Again, the most successful and wide-selling ebooks by large are erotic romance "novels" (usually short stories or novelletes) that set the low price point and skew the numbers. Many ebook sales reports do not distinguish between the low-but-overpriced erotica (in fact, this very point also was brought up at the writer's conference I was just at) and regular, not erotica ebooks.
Regular books cannot compete with erotica. To say nothing of the scam authors who chop a $7 paperback up into five sections that sell at the "low" price of several dollars apiece, tricking readers into paying $12 for a $7 book (while touting the low price of each piece).
Worse, I must point out in you use of arguing the 10% cost that your understanding of ebooks—and indeed, publishing costs in general—is completely flawed. An ebook's production cost is not 10% of the normal. Once again, this came up at LTUE, this point that many consumers have begun to believe that the product they're purchasing is as simple to create as it is for them to consume and acquire.
This is not true. and your argument makes the same logical failing. Ebooks give the author a higher cut as ebook publishers are attempting to push back against the increasingly low payouts from regular publishers, but that does not make the costs of developing a book disappear. Covers must still be purchased. Editing must be done. Formatting must be accounted for. The only cost a digital book saves over that of a physical book is that of the paper and the binding—a cost that is less than you think when looking at the big publishers. You're not paying for the physical components, you're paying for the words and all the work that went into them.
None of that vanishes with a digital copy. In fact, it can grow, as many digital publishers require in exchange for the author's larger cut that they pay for the majority of the costs such as covers and editing out of pocket. And that can run into a very, very high sum.
Again, the problem is that the stance you've presented boils down to "I want something for as little personal cost as possible, and I want to assume no risks for the consumption of such, but place all those risks on the creator." You want an unbalanced equation. Now, you're welcome to try and find a market that caters to that demand, but you're going to have to look long and hard to find one that hasn't already fallen apart, because there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Ultimately, I feel like I must parrot what a few other authors have put quite bluntly: If X-amount of dollars is too much for one very vocal person, then they're not really a consumer, but a freeloader looking to try and get a product they're not really interested in at your own expense. Focus on selling to the people that actually buy your product and making them happy, not the one who's constantly trying to take you for a ride.
Might I suggest a library?
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I don't think you can say it historically doesn't function. You'd need to give examples. It should work fine. The reader is willing to pay more per word when she need pay only for the words she reads. The change in prices will certainly be less than the changes brought about by e-books.
But if you can get more money than at the fair price, and simultaneously your readers will pay less than they would at the "fair" price, why use the fair price?
In any case, that's a Marxist analysis that has nothing to do with real markets or "sustainable business models". The distribution of return per hour working among content creators has a long tail. So "fair price" is irrelevant. JK Rowling doesn't get a "fair price" on her work; neither do 95% or however many of people who'd like to be authors. A tiny slice of authors would happen by chance to be those at the point in the curve where they get your "fair price".
Bullshit. I wrote a comment describing how the content creator can get more money. You're misrepresenting me badly.