Ready for prime time?

Last night just after 10 I completed my final (?)walk through of the manuscript for Win or Go Home. That's a lie. I still feel compelled to check it for typos and misspellings once more. The point is that I am not going to make any more substantive changes until I get it back from my editor.

I've contracted with Erin Potter to perform the task and expect to send it her way sometime in May. After accepting or rejecting changes I will be ready to submit the book to three e publishing platforms: Smashwords,Kindle and Pub It. There's a bit of an overlap because Smashwords distributes to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but if the book is on the web sites of the big players I stand a better chance of getting readers to look at the books. The royalty schemes are slightly different between them. In another post I'll take a closer look at that.

I've done a lot of thinking about pricing and if I had to decide this moment I would list price for $0.99. Why so cheap, you ask? Nobody knows me. One look at the number of visitors to the blog is evidence of that. If I price the book at $2.99 or more, chances are slim that anyone is going to take a chance on an unknown. Of course I believe it's a good book, but there are a lot of unread good books out there.

JA Konrath, John Lock and Amanda Hocking have sold lots of books for $.99. I think market share is a lot more important than return on a single unit. The price of a gallon of gas today is $3.95 at the station across the road. If I sell my e books for a fraction of that, I think readers will take the chance and put their money down. My fixed costs for producing one novel amount to $900. If I never sell a single copy it won't break the bank. But if I can sell a few hundred copies in the next year, I'll recoup the investment. And there always is the chance that I'll sell more than that.