Tempting though it is to go for Amazon's 70% royalty from sales, I have decided instead to accept the lower commission rate of 35%, allowing me to drop the price of my ebook Smugglers At Whistling Sands from £1.71 to just 86 pence. Yes it's a shame that I will only pick up a royalty of some 26p from that from any sales on Kindle, compared to £1 but right at this moment, making money from my book is a secondary consideration. What I really want is sales.
And so far, I have not sold a single book of my children's adventure novel set at Abersoch on the Llyn peninsula of North Wales. Is my price drop a sign that I don't think it's worth £1.71? No of coures not. If anything I believe it is worth far more than this, but unknown authors like me need to take a reality check.
Why should you, reading this, risk shelling out £1.71 on someone you've never heard of before? It seems more reasonable to ask you to part with 86p on the basis that, in the event that you hate my book, it is not a huge amount to lose. When you consider how John Locke and Amanda Hocking started out - they offered their books at very cheap prices. Now that they are well known and have got tens of thousands of sales, they can charge more because they have a following.
And the other thing to bear in mind, of course, is that writing novels has got to be about more than making, or trying to make, money. It has got to be about the love of books. If somebody reads my book free of charge, right to the end, they have paid me the huge compliment of investing their time into bothering with my efforts when there are so many other writers out there.
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