Wednesday, April 11, 2018

The Cost of Doing Business

I was going to share this meme on my Facebook page, but it reminded me of when I actually bought books for $4.99 or less.

In the late 60's I was around 13 and I remember getting a cash gift from my grandparents. It was an embarrassing amount, and I spent it on a pile of gothic novels in the bookstore! I was so excited. They sold for 79 cents each! I had at least $40.

I was a member of the Weekly Reader Book Club around the same time. Mama let me get new books every month. I can still name some of them!

In the 70's and 80's I was a member of the Doubleday Book Club and getting a real bargain every month on half dozen books. Over the years, I was a member of several book clubs but Doubleday was my favorite. You could buy a hardback book for less than $10. In hindsight, that's astounding. Now they're closer to $30, although book clubs might be lower.

Over the years, I've owned thousands of books. When we moved to Germany in 1977, I had to leave behind about 800 books. When I moved back to the states two years later, I left behind another 700 books. I used the base library, too. Over the years, I've collected many times that and with every move, my husband threatened to divorce me. One day I was going to have a room devoted to books.

When I started college at in 1988 at 31, I was in heaven. I had to buy lots of books. I read lots of books. I even researched lots of books and spent hours pouring over historical books in the library. I had books on Russian, European, Latin American, and American history. I had books on dinosaurs, psychology, anthropology, archeology, and communications. That was only for school and didn't include my pleasure reading.

By this time book clubs were almost a thing of the past so my book purchases were at the store price. I frequented second-hand shops and a couple of local used bookstores. I was still a sap for Book-a-Million, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, and Barne's and Nobel. You could always find good stuff on sale, too.

These days I dare you to find a book by an author you love for $4.99 outside a discount store or second-hand shop. I also dare you to find Waldenbooks or B. Dalton in a mall. You won't. In fact, you won't find a lot of bookstores anymore. The meme made me remember all the books I owned and how much I'd spent over 40 years on books. Despite all the books I bought over the years, if it wasn't for the library, I'd not read more than a few books year. I suspect this is a factor in why books sales have declined. Many people can't afford to buy many new books because of the price. Believe it or not, a lot of people don't own a Kindle.

I bought two series of 6 books each for my granddaughter this past Christmas. They're paperback books. Those two 6-book series (only the first two installments in a much, much longer series) cost me over $70. I bought three more books from the series that didn't come in a boxed set. These cost me around $40. That's a lot of money on books. She had already read the third boxed set at school and is in love with the series. Can you see where this is going? I could spend $1000 on this series for her. I won't. Her dad and stepmom bought three more of these books. I told you it is a huge series by author Erin Hunter. The total spent on 18 books is about $150. Hunter should love us.

Don't get me wrong, I understand how hard it is to write a book. I am a writer. But I also am a reader who is on a limited budget and books are not the priority. They are a much-loved luxury that I have to plan for. I do buy books but only when I can afford it. I use Kindle a whole lot but I prefer to buy paper books of those I want to collect. I just ordered a new release from my favorite author and it cost me $15... for a paperback. I wouldn't have done that for anyone I didn't know or who wasn't an author I was sure was excellent.

So, yeah, I wish I could buy books for $4.99. I've read 22 books since January 1. My kindle has about 600 books on it, in a wide variety of genre. I will tell you that most were giveaways. There are a lot of public domain books because I love classic literature. There are about two dozen reference books on it. Most of the time I have a couple of library books on it. I obtained a lot of novels from authors giving away sets of their older novels to generate interest.

I can't tell you how many of my Kindle books were free new author books. As a result of these, I discovered some great new authors to add to my collection. The vast majority of these (free) books are not worth $4.99. In fact, it would embarrass me to give away some of them if I were the author. I've deleted many free books from both my Kindle and my Amazon account after I'd read a few chapters. Yes, they were that bad.

It is important for writers to remember that readers want quality, and readers are willing to pay for it. Yet, I'm not willing to pay for mediocrity or plain rotten writing. The author is not always the best judge of quality and it shows in many of the novels turned out by indie authors. Some books are not worth a plug nickel. I'm sorry if that hurts, but it is true. Of course, a lot of authors think their writing is horrible but I can tell you, not enough of them think that.

Writers need to get used to people complaining about the price you ask for your book. It is a fact of life, whether the books are worth it or not, most especially if it is not. The best way to ensure that they buy more than the first one is to make sure it the very best work you can do. Edit, rewrite, edit, and revise as many times as it takes. Find a good editor, someone who will get tough with you. Ask people you don't know to read it and tell you the truth. Accept that truth with graciousness and view it as an education in writing.

If someone is editing for you, their suggestions are to help you make that story better. They're not an insult to your character. I love editing but telling a stubborn writer to fix their grammar, rewrite paragraphs, or change sentence structure is daunting. Don't be that writer. If you're not willing to make changes, you're not ready to publish it.

Once you've got a well-written book, you won't have trouble selling it. They'll still complain about the cost. That's called the cost of doing business. Incidentally, I don't by that $5 specialty coffee either. I make my own flavored coffee at home, and my coffee is good curled up with a good book.

1 comment:

  1. When we were paying $4.99 (or less) for books, how much was a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk or gasoline? Today there are still people who cannot afford to pay $4.99 for books. Perhaps they are school children in Oklahoma - where a girl in class this year was given a book to study that had been used by Blake Sheldon. I hope you can figure the number of years between - I've always been bad at math. One of our problem is that inflation has eaten up the difference between $0 for those who could not afford books at $4.99 and $0 for those who still cannot afford books and the $9.99 mass produced paperbacks. Even for dime novels over a hundred years ago, the $0 family could not afford them. In my opinion, those are the people who need them the most, and probably do not have libraries conveniently located (even today) for their use. Education in America is not as important as athletics or entertainment. I feel as though we are the masses watching games in Rome's Coliseum just to keep us entertained. Even our politics have become entertainment. Nope, I have little hope of getting books available at reasonable prices to those who need them. Depressing, isn't it?

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