Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Month: May 2020

On Pricing

May 20, 2020 /

When I first published Angels Without Faces onto Amazon, Apple, and Kobo, I confess it was very much a click and close my eyes exercise. As I’ve learned more over the past few months, and built a backlog of stories to publish, I decided to have a look at the pricing I have in place.

Each of the major sites above takes the US dollar price and converts to local currency. For some locations, this is acceptable. For others, such as India, the converted price is substantially out of line with the norms in that market place.

So, I engaged in an exercise to adjust prices as necessary, and align across the Amazon, Apple, and Kobo platforms. Easy, right? As long as you keep a note by currency or territory it should be.

Except . . .

Amazon has a set of minimum prices by currency, and won’t allow you adjust below that. Apple and Kobo change the royalty as you change the price, and have different mininums. An hour into it, despite the note taking and multiple screens, I was totally confused and exited out of it all. Amazon defines the price by the Amazon store, Apple by country, and Kobo by currency.

Time for a rethink, and then jump in again. It would be nice if I could set a template for each price point – $2.99, $4.99 etc., and apply that to the book I’m publishing. If it’s there, I haven’t found it yet!

April Recap

May 1, 2020 /

Like almost everyone else, we’ve been under a stay-at-home order, although that’s being eased a little as we move into May.

As someone who normally works from home, I think my biggest challenge has been, that even though some restaurants are open for delivery and take-out, I have missed the ability to get out of the house to eat in a restaurant.

On a positive note, Iast weekend was story fifty-two. One full year of writing a short story a week. I’m several hundred words into a story for this week, although with no clear idea where it’s going. That isn’t unusual, and I’ve learned not to let it worry me. I know there will be an ending, I just haven’t found it yet.

While the longer fiction is coming along, it’s not making the same progress as the short stories. I’ve thought about the reasons for that, and have some ideas to address it during May. Some of those ideas come from the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. His comments about our technological age, and the ease with which we can become distracted, definitely struck a chord with me. I’m still working through the book, but it’s worth looking at.

I’ll report back at the end of May, because I’ve only got about 25,000 words to go. Maybe by the end of May, I’ll have a finished manuscript!

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