Got my taxes done last week.
The good news is I actually had royalties to report ($88! Yippee!), on 36 sales. Right now, I’ve got 4 novels, 15 short stories, and 3 short story collections available; all of which are published by Aja Publishing and currently available just about anywhere you buy books (Bookstores, Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, and Smashwords). I did sell 3 stories last year to pro markets, but they won’t be published until this year, so I won’t be paid for them until later this year.
I admit I am less than impressed with those results, even as I celebrate each and every sale. Last year was my most productive year ever, but seeing the fruits of my hard labors yield such small fruit make me wonder if my little garden is in need of tending. I know it takes time, but the publishing industry is moving at light-speed these days, so I took another look at the market.
The prices for print books are driven by the cost to produce them, but there is more flexibility in e-book pricing. For the last 18 months, my e-book pricing has been set at $2.99 for anything over 4K words, and $1.99 for shorter works, but everyone I know who is selling more than one or two copes of their short stories a month is telling me my prices are too high and they’ve got theirs priced much lower: $0.99 (or free). So I’m going to trim back my prices too. Now, all my e-book short stories are the same price, and all of them are priced at $0.99.
I’ve also taken a good look at the genres for my four novels, and have trimmed my prices there as well, reducing the prices from $5.99 to between $2.99 (for Destiny Blues and Aurum) and $3.99 (for Legacy Soul, Brothers of the Fang, and the short story collections). It’s a big savings for people who might have been on the fence about trying a book an unknown author.
It’s spring, after all. Time to tend the garden.
