Forum: Author Hangout

Vincent's laying down a ton of wisdom here.

Hardly a ton, more like a pint-and-a-half of unexpected wisdom, which often changes how others view particular issues (one of my main skills is spotting unexpected patterns and drawing conclusions based on that.

Thanks. This is the answer to my thought process.

Sadly the bookapy thing is true.
People will pay $3 for a soft drink and $7 for a coffee, yet they won't pay $10 for a book that they can read for days and keep forever.

Hate to disappoint readers, but I have come to realize that in order to keep writing I need to make $$$ from my efforts. Otherwise I might as well spend the time doing extra shifts at work.

ALL of my future works will be posted in full on bookapy before I post on SOL.
And when I do post to SOL, it will not be done all at one time so that readers are "incentivized" to buy the whole text.

'Incentivizing' is relatively simple, as the longer a story takes to play out, the more impatient readers become (i.e. simply slow the posting rate). Yet again, SOL is unusual, as SOL readers have always preferred reading the story for Free first, then paying full retail for the work to encourage the author (i.e. those who can't successfully 'close' a story tend to suffer for it.

Thus, my eBook sales have always been better with a twice-a-week posting (i.e. keeping the story in front of readers so they're more likely to notice and read it). Many will purchase it out of sheer impatience, yet many more will ONLY purchase it once they KNOW how it ends. It's an unusual pattern, yet it's a long-standing one.

I don't have specific figures, yet I'd say the sales are roughly 20/80%, where the impatient readers account for about 20% of total sales, while those who only purchase after completing the story account for the vast majority of sales. Online, on any other site, is a completely different ballgame, which is why I typically posted to multiple sites, as (back in the day) they all had their own reader base and sales. Unfortunately, they've ALL been bought out by Amazon, and are now only a relict of their past glory.

Unfortunately, due to the sheer amount of dreck posted to Amazon KDP, it's extremely difficult earning much of anything on Amazon. Again, in the old days it was great for finding new readers, who'd then purchase your other books (associated sales), yet those days are long past now. :( In short, those with a monthly Amazon subscriptions absolutely REFUSE to pay for original content, regardless of quality.

I have had considerable sales for my latest work on Bookapy, yet those are from outsiders, not SOL readers, so the standard rules are reversed (in short, it's best treating the two as separate cases).

Yeah, I can think of several SOL authors who notoriously do that repeatedly!

However, be careful considering Amazon's results, as those are more traditional sales (i.e. not SOL related and the mainstream publishers have long penalized eBook readers by changing them significantly more (25 to 30%) than than the more expensive to produce print books. (I've been tracking publishing trends for a long, long time.)

It was standard procedure for a LONG time, yet the publishers finally realized how MUCH potential revue they were losing, and belatedly decided to 'cash in' on the ongoing trend.

And in most cases with a price difference that extreme, the 'hard copy' are the original printing, which is now considered a 'collectors' edition. I've seen that happen quite a few times over the years too, mainly because, preferring print versions, I'll often look at ALL the print releases and compare the prices, and many no longer offer ANY recent print offerings at all.

So, a self-published e-book at $10, I'm going to expect something that's at least 80,000 words.

Don't keep us on tenterhooks - how many words long is it?

AJ

A recent purchase from Amazon:
The Accidental Witch: The Accidentals
Author: Dakota Cassidy
Kindle Edition: $4.99
Paperback: $11.99
File size: 2996 KB
Print length: 207 pages

AJ

The Accidental Witch: The Accidentals

Does your e-book reader give wordcounts?

I asked google for the wordcount but it just pointed me at the Amazon Kindle listing :-(

AJ

The Kindle app for PC does not. It doesn't give me any properties for the book. I'll check the Kindle app for Android shortly.

No problem. I'm just curious how much per word e-books sell for nowadays.

AJ

Nope, the Kindle app for Android won't give me a word count either.

I found this:

How to find a book's word count: Go to that book's page and scroll down to "Inside This Book." Under that heading, click "Text Stats." (It'll be a blue link.) A new window will pop up. Under "Number of," you'll see "words." That's your number!

ETA: I just went to two of my novels on KDP and didn't find an "Inside This Book." :(

This was the first result, probably the article you are referencing: https://alexisgrant.com/2010/01/18/word-count-with-a-little-help-from-amazon/

Yean, that was the one I found.

Thank you.

The author of 'The Accidental Witch: The Accidentals', Dakota Cassidy, must spend a significant amount of time writing and must have reasonable success because it's volume 16 in the series. So I guess they're probably a reasonable benchmark.

AJ

Try howlongtoread dot com which estimates that book at 31k words and 224 pages (the word count seems low considerign the pages. In Word at 12pt I have around 300 pages per page, depending on the amount of white space. For 224 pages I'd estimate 60k-75k words.

Estimated Word count: 62,253
Page count not available.

How do they estimate the word count if they don't know the page count?

AJ

I wonder whether I'm missing something.

Does publishing a book's word count somehow disadvantage the author or the publisher or both?

AJ

It's mostly knowing where to find it, as it's often left off, yet still accessible. For example, on Amazon, they push that information WAY down, so you have to active search for it. Which for most books, a simple Wikipedia search will turn up a precise word count. (To find it, you often have to examine the book's publication history. Yet since I routinely do that anyway, it's essentially second-nature for me.)

Unfortunately, the file size can also depend on many things. For example, anytime I use Caliber to change the file type, the Caliber programs duplicates every single command I use—redefining it—and thus creating twice the overhead, unnecessarily. Yet, looking at the file size, you'd have no clue how efficiently the internal coding is.

Again, word size is the industry standard for a reason. Bloat is bloat, no matter what you call it. But I get your point, with all these about conversions based on page size really aren't much help, as they're 'best guestimates' only. Luckily, both SOL and Bookapy both report word counts, in addition to the file size (from back in the day when you had to worry how much your computer could handle before it overheated and shut down).

How do they estimate the word count if they don't know the page count?

That's why word count is a publishing industry standard, as the page count varies widely based on the physical dimensions of ANY book, even eBooks when read on a smartphone or a small tablet (aka: Amazon).

With word count, you know precisely you're getting, whereas, with page count, you often haven't a clue.

For me, I consider the word count as an indication of the content, as if the story is overly short, there's likely neither much content nor plot. There are some obvious exceptions, yet I've always been more geared to novel or saga length stories than quick, fast reads.

That's why word count is a publishing industry standard, as the page count varies widely based on the physical dimensions of ANY book, even eBooks when read on a smartphone or a small tablet (aka: Amazon).

Definitely. I do nearly all of my reading on a smartphone these days. I have no idea if my notion of a 'page' is similar to what used to pass for a 'page' in traditional dead-tree publishing. That used to be a fairly standard measure, and one could get a fairly good idea of how many words a book had by simply picking it up. Except for the occasional book with unusually thick paper, heavy covers, or the like, weight correlated well with length. Page count correlated even better.

Now? In theory, file size should correlate, but that can contain covers of variable size, compression of variable efficiency, etc. So we're back to word count, which I completely agree is the best measure. But Amazon probably has a vested interest in pushing for 'page count', both because most people aren't nearly as aware of what 'word count' means for length and because it fuzzes the difference between a book with short chapters (and thus more half-filled spaces on pages) and one with longer chapters.

Well, there's page size, font size, font type and weight, but then there's also the margins, the spine (for print books), etc., so there's a LOT of conflicting variables. Since I've always focused on 'literary' fiction and publishing, I've long focused on such issues. Yet Amazon, in particular, emphasizes 'pages' simply because they're assuming their online readers are too dumb to cope with it, yet Amazon has ALWAYS been a reseller first, and a publisher a distant second. So everything they publish/carry for others IS based entirely on word count, the industry norm and thus dictated by the publishers themselves.

Which is WHY you CAN look up the precise word counts on Wikipedia, because these are published by the publishers themselves and distributed to EVERYONE (i.e. freely available, so help easing the ordering, distribution and sales).

As an independent-publisher, it's my assumed responsibility to handle those issues too, though few authors would, or would ever be expected to, because it's simply not in their purview, instead it's the publisher's.

Again, Amazon's wearing two different hats, and the one hat doesn't seem aware of what the other hat covers, if that particular analogy fits or not. ;)

However, referring to rustyken's point, if you stick to novels (60K+words), then you pretty much know precisely what you're getting.

However, since I always purchase the print books, rather than the eBooks, which almost ALWAYS are nonstandard, that's where they reveal then actual word count, as the whole idea behind their eBooks is to jump the books they can't sell anywhere else (i.e the books they assume no one wants, and that the publisher definitely doesn't wish to promote, as it undermines the entire print industry).

Which is WHY you CAN look up the precise word counts on Wikipedia

or not. I've just looked up three famous novels. Yes they had wikipedia pages. No, they didn't give word counts.

AJ

Well, since I'm not documenting my every book reference anymore, they may have changed their entire way of doing business, yet back when I was verifying my every reference when posting my quote sources (since they are so frequently misattributed), the results were always highly accurate. So who knows that they do now.

Still, if you're comparing online Amazon offerings, rather than comparing the print versions, and their more detailed additional offerings, then you're comparing apple to jet engine parts.

Either way, I'm done arguing, as it's clear everyone's not hearing anything I say anyway, so … have fun arguing with yourselves without me, as I'm officially out! Some things in life just ain't worth it, no matter the outcome.

ALL of my future works will be posted in full on bookapy before I post on SOL.

There's an argument that posting on SOL with feedback enabled alerts you to errors that your editors and proofreaders have missed. The more mistakes that get fixed before the book is released on Bookapy, the stronger the justification for charging.

AJ

Definitely works for me.

Heck, it worked in a truly odd way the other day. Someone posted a comment about 'the last paragraphs' of a posting. While looking to remind myself of what those were, I spotted a typo that evaded me three times, my editors one to twice each, and all of the readers to that point (or at least the readers who inform me of typos, and there are usually several of those).

Hate to disappoint readers, but I have come to realize that in order to keep writing I need to make $$$ from my efforts. Otherwise I might as well spend the time doing extra shifts at work.

I have the luxury of being on the other end, right now. Up until November I had a salaried job that was very solid. Now, I'm going into early retirement - willingly, but given various things in my life it's also 'forced,' in that there's not much of a viable way to replace my old job with anything even vaguely comparable. We have enough to retire (combined with moving, which we were doing anyway), so book money is 'extra'.

That said, writing will be my 'retirement job' and I'll want to monetize it appropriately, so it's worth thinking about how to do that in advance.

I'm almost certainly going to keep serialized publication and post on Bookapy only after. For my purposes, there's a real cost to me of writing a book ahead: I lose any effective way of reacting to reader feedback, and I get some great ideas from reader feedback.

Cuts revenue, keeps the story at its best. I can live with that.

However, the odds go up that I won't just be publishing one long multivolume serialized story at that point. Other stories may well have other publishing models.

People may well buy 3 $3 books but not one $9 book, if they're of reasonable length.

Then the author issues a $6 box set on Bookapy :-)

AJ

Or prices them at $4 each, then issues a $9 box set :)