I spent my writing time this morning mapping out the next four chapters of Tyrmia. This will take me out of Part Two and into Part Three. I’m sitting at 32,000 words or so at the end of Part Two. That seems short to me. But I’m not going to worry about reaching 100,000 words or some other arbitrary count. It makes the book far cheaper if the end page count is less than 300.
Null_Pointer came in around 214 pages at 60,000 words and that allowed me to nail the suggested retail price of $12.96. Anything more than that is a hard sell in Trade Paperback. Or so I’m told by book store owners. Which is perhaps why Starstrikers is considered a hard sell, with a new author and a $14.95 cover price. When I relaunch Starstrikers later in the year, it will be minus the 30 page preview. Hopefully I can get that one down a dollar or two after that.
I also took a chance on Scribd this week and put the pdf of Starstrikers on sale for $5.00 in their new store. So far, wait, let me check again for today, yep, no sales since Wednesday. Curiously, my view counts for the documents I have on Scribd, dropped by half shortly after I put one document up for sale. What this tells me is that perhaps the people who read stuff on Scribd are not the same people who like to pay for things. That’s cool, maybe you have to be a name to sell something anywhere.
This is causing me to rethink selling anything on Scribd. I’ll leave Starstrikers up for sale for one month. After that, I’ll probably take it out of the Scribd store. You can already get that novel for free on my website, but far more people use Scribd than come to my book’s web site. So having it there for advertising purposes, still makes sense.
My next uploads for Scribd will be the Writer’s Editions of both Starstrikers and Null_Pointer later this summer.