Ah, the first day of a new year. Smells like opportunities waiting to be seized!

Well it’s time to list the goals I’ve decided on for it, and yes, I know: everyone’s doing this sort of thing today.

It is traditional, is it not?

Some of my goals are carryovers from last year (which I decided on kind of late in the year anyway).

I’ve spent the past two days in a productive flurry, tidying up my sites in preparation. You may, or may not, have noticed my sidebars aren’t quite so crowded now, and that there’s a few new pages here. Or that my Shadow Connor titles are no longer available for purchase (though that may take a few days to become evident at some distribution sites).

They’ve been unpublished because I simply haven’t been able to write the fourth book in the series. I’ve made at least a half dozen attempts, but something just wasn’t right.

Feral Intensity was a test.

In 2007, around about June or so, is when my old desire to write original fiction struck. I hadn’t really attempted much since late 2000/early 2001, when I’d written Sienna’s Journal. Early 2007, overcome with drooling lust for a certain superhero, I’d begun writing *gasp* fan fiction.

I like fan fiction. It’s fun to write and it’s good practice for writing original works. I’d be totally embarrassed to admit just how high of a word count my fan fiction stories amount to. But please, you have heard of Wolverine, right? Whew, baby!

Anyway, my first original bit of fiction in six years hit the web in a limited way. The title was Focus, and I was surprised to discover people really enjoyed reading it. I made writer friends, and we’ve become a happy little group since then.

That was also the year I learned about NaNoWriMo and decided to try my hand at it. Having not written anything over a few thousand words in quite a while, I challenged myself to write a 10k story in seven days.

Read more »

I just know Dhympna loves giving me posting fodder. Don’t ya?

She made a comment on my last post:

To play devil’s advocate, I am sick and tired of epublishers charging 6 to 8 dollars for a 130 page novel. Some pubs do not list word counts and after I buy such a short book, I will admit that I feel cheated.

So would I, considering I can buy a physical paperback with over 400 pages to read for $8 or less!

The problem is that there’s not a standard page size used across the board when it comes to formatting ebooks. It’s all dependent on preference of the person formatting, or on whether or not they’re also formatting with a POD edition in mind.

The page sizes most typically used by yours truly here are 8.5 x 11 inches for Smashwords publishing (which is reformatted to other file formats) or 6 x 9 inches for print formatting through POD and for my imprint.

Your typical grocery store paperback impulse buy measures at 4.25 x 6.75 inches.

Font size seems to be recommended at around 10-11 points, from my looking/reading around.

Okay, let’s illustrate the fact that it’s word count that matters over page count when it comes to ebooks:

My free novella, Shades of Gray, has a word count of 20, 098.

• 8.5 x 11 equals 34 pages
• 6 x 9 equals 65 pages
• 4.25 x 6.75 equals 157 pages

My ‘category novel’, Tria’s Tale, has a 33, 876 word count.

• 8.5 x 11 equals 75 pages
• 6 x 9 equals 132 pages
• 4.25 x 6.75 equals 306 pages

And there’s variances between page counts depending on the final file format. For Tria’s Tale at Smashwords:

• Online HTML reading: 96 pages
• Download the PDF and it’s 76 pages at 100% view
• RTF? That’s 75 pages.

No clue what the page counts are for .mobi, .epub or the other ereader formats available.

And since readers can change font sizes to suit their comfort, the page counts are likely to change again.

So the number of pages for ebooks doesn’t matter, and shouldn’t be taken into consideration when pricing them.

You can format a 10k short story to be 35, 49 or even 95 pages long, but it’s still a short story and you shouldn’t be pricing it at ‘novel’ prices.

Ebooks should show word count on their listing pages (which I do for our titles at Katarr Kanticles Press, Smashwords gives an approximation of, but Amazon doesn’t; they just show the file size in bytes).

That way purchasers have an idea of what they’re getting and don’t feel cheated or disappointed when they discover they paid $7 for a 30k novella.

It all comes back to setting sensible pricing schedules for your ebooks in the end, people.

New to self-publishing? Here’s something to look forward to!

This is part of the process I go through when I have a title that’s got a hefty enough word count to justify offering it as a print version in addition to the ebook.

For my ebooks, I have a set pricing schedule based on word count, and I only count the words that actually tell the story itself, not chapter headings, copyright info, etc. stuff.

Arcane Solutions is my example here, since I know the final word count after finishing it and the editing process will fall within the 50-70k range. Knowing that, I know the ebook price will be $5.75.

The print version is a bit more difficult to determine a cover/retail price for until I have the final word count and actually format it. I’ll have to guesstimate the final number of pages because of that, so I’m going to work with a low to highest page number.

It’ll will be a 6 x 9 inch book, and my low estimate is 202 pages with an even 50k word count. My high is 282 pages with an even 70k word count. This does include the needed extra pages like title page, copyright info, author’s bio.

So my base production cost will be between $3.27 to $4.23, going through CreateSpace. I do pay the one off $39 fee to upgrade from Standard to Pro plan, and there is an annual $5 fee to keep each title at the Pro plan. There are two reasons I choose to pay that: 1) I can make a better profit and set a more reasonable retail/cover price for it and 2) I figure CreateSpace deserves something for the free ISBN number and storage of my files.

I will have to pay cost plus S&H for a proof before it’ll be available for sale. If I screw up the formatting, then I’ll have to order another proof. Wait, no I won’t. I get the first proof free because Arcane Solutions was my NaNoWriMo novel this year! Yay!

Moving on.

Not counting my efforts & time spent writing it, plus formatting it and designing the cover, I start off $39 in the red. Not bad.

Read more »

I did hit over the 50k mark around 5pm yesterday. So, goal reached!

Arcane Solutions isn’t finished, but there was some timeline problems going on that were preventing getting parts of it written, so I began working on edits last night. It’s actually okay up to Chapter 10.

Now that I’ve taken care of some organizational stuff, I’ll be spending the rest of the day editing, writing missing scenes and chapters for it. I’m thinking another 10-20k before it’s actually finished.

Feral Intensity is just 23 sales away from hitting the 100 copies sold goal. Yay!

Another 149 sales is needed to reach my 500 copies sold by Dec. 31st goal. Realistically, that goal’s probably not going to be met, because I’d have to see almost 4 sales daily for the next 41 to do so. Still, it’s much closer than I thought it would be, and will hopefully be even closer by the end of the year. I’ll set a much higher overall sales goal for 2010!

I did approve my Story Tamer’s edits for The Silent One Wednesday evening, so that’s off the list. I want her to have another look over it, see if there’s any final edits to make, then I’ll format it, design the cover and release it sometime in December.

Kate’s three titles have been lanquishing due to the home improvement projects and all of us doing NaNoWriMo. All three will be released during December.

I’ll be concentrating on finishing Arcane Solutions and Hunter’s Edge, as far as writing projects go, for the rest of  the year. I’d like both ready for editing or already edited by the end of the year, so that they can be released in January and February.

Tomorrow, I’ll probably be busy with the dreaded culling of my WIPs list. The new lists will show under the 2010 page, which will appear under the About page. I’m also going to add a new subpage under ‘My Goals’ for 2010.

Trying to be all organized and focused is hard work, people.

 Powered by Max Banner Ads 

The word count for Arcane Solutions has risen to 48, 090. It’ll reach the 50k goal today! Yay!

Hopefully, it’ll be finished before the end of the month. Bad news is that once that 50k goal is passed, I have to do some re-writes in order to finish it. So NaNo will end for me today, and I won’t be updating the word count on it on my profile there.

Plan is to have it as polished as I can get it and send it for editing. After that’s finished, I plan to format it, design the cover and publish it.

It’ll be my first NaNo novel to go through those steps! Woohoo!

The publishing part probably won’t happen until after the first of the year, so if you’ve been checking the excerpts out and like what you’ve seen, stay tuned for information about when, where and how much the cover price will be.