I couldn’t stop thinking about garage sales last night. In my life I have never attended one and I have only ever staged one myself. It was a horror show. I’ve never seen such a blatant disregard for market value in my life. Okay, that’s not true. We used to walk across the San Diego border to Tijuana several times a year. I have witnessed there, firsthand, a wonderful quilter being raked over the coals of negotiation by smug Americans as if the beauty of her labor was nothing more than a dried out box of McDonald’s french fries.
But the garage sale was a close second.
To cite one of the most egregious examples of market value tomfoolery, we had dozens upon dozens of unused baby and infant outfits. Yes, still “in style”. Very cool, very hip. (I have excellent taste). Each of these outfits went for at least $20 new. We’d “rummage sale” priced them at, I believe, two dollars apiece.
For the math-challenged, that’s a 900 percent markdown.
(Actually, I am feeling pretty math-challenged at the moment, and too lazy to get out the calculator, so I’m not sure that’s right—but it was a HUGE markdown.)
A man and his wife arrived early and gathered up armloads of the clothes (at least 7-8 outfits), plus a bushel of other knickknacks, most of which were probably priced at twenty-five cents. Being anti-math, I looked at everything he had, surmised it was easily over twenty-five dollars worthy of booty, and said, “how about fifteen dollars, we’ll call it even?”
You’d have thought I shot him through the throat. He gurgled. He stammered. I was afraid he was going to throw up on my shoes. Finally he regained a modicum of composure and squinted (the mark of a true barterer):
“Five bucks.”
I told him ten bucks or he could take a hike. I honestly thought he was going to cry, parting with that sweaty, crumpled ten dollar bill. He looked back over his shoulder at me as he walked away—looked at me as if I was a convicted war criminal.
He and his missus were walking away with a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff for the price of two Happy Meals.
Why was I thinking so much about my nightmarish garage sale? Hmm, could it be that my first novel—the one I sweated over for years—is priced the same as a crappy Flock of Seagulls song and still doesn’t move more than a few hundred units a month, if I am fortunate?
When did an artist’s toiling become a garage sale item?
Seriously. An entire novel for less than a buck? We sold moldy paperbacks at the rummage sale for a quarter apiece, and you’d be lucky to get through the first chapter without spilling your cookies. Literally.
The digital music revolution set the price of individual songs at the same price. Ninety-nine cents. People will download a billion songs, most of which they’ve heard a thousand times before, at ninety-nine cents apiece, but they frown at an author charging anything at all for a 300-page book?
I gave my book away for a bit on a free ebook site. A reviewer (who gave it a glowing thumbs up review) complained that there were parts of the book that rantogetherlikethis. <==he actually wrote this, followed by “Get it?”
The lousy formatting was due to the lousy converter on the FREE site where he got his FREE eBook (that he loved, I might add—other than the lousy formatting of the text or HTML version he downloaded at zero cost to him). Of course the book cost me nearly a thousand hours of writing, but hey, they really should get the free e-converter up to snuff.
Perhaps ninety-nine cents is fair for an indie author’s book. I try not to judge. Certainly there are books out there that are a ripoff at any price. I just can’t help thinking we are pricing decent artists out of their willingness to submit. Nah, that won’t ever happen. Writers will always write. And authors will always, first and foremost, want their work to find its way into a reader’s hands.
But please, if you are a reader—give an Indie a shot. It costs about a fifth of the morning Starbucks that will be cold before you finish the first chapter or two. Look at it for what it really is:
A book that might have cost you $15-20 a few years ago, now being sold to you from the virtual shelves of a literary dollar store. At these prices, you should be sampling every indie writer on the planet.
And if you are still looking for a bargain, you got this blog for free (and this writer managed to sneak in the word “tomfoolery” at no extra charge).
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The blank page is dead…long live the blank page.
Great post, you hit the nail on the head!
Thanks, Alan!
You hit on so many good points starting from the negotiations with a poor Tijuana quilter to the ridiculously low price of indie author’s books. I can add one more point, no sales tax! If you’re a reader, you are doing a disservice to yourself not to check out the indie authors. Just visiting your review page of Black Beast is testament to that (which I’m downloading for 99 cent this weekend btw). Great blog post, great writing.
Thanks, Trish! It sure can be a tough trek through the wilderness for indie writers…but at 99 cents or $9.99, we will prevail! 😀
There are a LOT of issues in this post I feel like commenting on.
First, I believe $0.99 is far too low a price for the work we as writers put in our work. It has taken me 6 months (2 hours a day) to edit my novel. It was about 3 months of the same to write it. That doesn’t count time spent talking to beta readers and going through feedback. $0.99 is devaluing the product. For comparison, a legal advice with this many hours in it would cost $150,000. Yes, that’s a 6 figure number. And that’s a cheap lawyer at a mid-tier firm. Do I think my book is worth 6 figures? Not per copy, obviously not. But $0.99 is far too far the other way.
Second, I don’t buy $0.99 books. Why? Because all too often you get what you pay for. Is this warped logic? Maybe, but it’s based on my experience. I regret the time I wasted reading the few $0.99 books I bought. Some of them I didn’t finish. I am not saying there are not bargains out there, but looking for them is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I’m a full-time working mother who writes in her free-time. Reading is a luxury. I’m not wasting that time on a bad book (or a book that is probably going to be bad). does this mean good authors with bad books miss out? Probably yes (assuming I could have found them in the first place) but that’s the fault of the writers out there putting out bad product. But I’ve ranted about this before on my blog, and I’ve probably ranted enough here. I just wish, for the sake of good indie writers, that all indie writers held themselves to higher standards. The people who can’t or won’t put the effort in (for whatever reason) are spoiling it for the ones who ARE.
Third – next time I’d skip the garage sale and go straight to ebay. 🙂 I recently sold an 8 year old vacuum cleaner for $250. A saddle I sold for more than I paid for it. Baby clothes you can usually sell for 50% of what they cost (more if they are new and unused) because 50% off is still 50% that new mother has saved. Sure, it’s more work. But you don’t feel like you were just asked to bend over….
A lot of food for thought in this post, really enjoyed it!
Thank you for the food for thought comment! It is a conundrum for certain—price at 99 cents and potentially brand your work “bargain basement” or, conversely, up your price to, say, $9.99 like the “big guns” and risk someone scoffing “indie boy’s hit his head trying to charge the same as Mike Connelly and Johnny Grisham!”.
Hmm.
You’ve now got me reconsidering my own price, hours post-blog. One thing is certain: your eBay advice is right on the money (no pun intended). Problem was, in 1994, eBay was barely a glint in Big Daddy Internet’s eye! 😉
Thank again for the incredibly insightful comment. Cheers!
Amazing how you captured my thoughts. I’ve been selling the “bloopers” from my published books for $2.50 as an ebook, and they’re picking over them like Garage Sale Mavens out to save a penny. Yet, the same folks will scorn when they see me sitting at a table in the local Barnes and Noble autographing the big sellers for $23.99.
No dice, ladies and gentlemen. I want to see my books read, but I’m not going to sell them at $.99 anywhere, the closest you’ll get are the bloopers at 12 – 20 page hits, removed from the book for various reasons and posted for sale as ebooks on my website.
I’m ego maniac enough to know that someday… my books will sell for BIG money because I’m a darned good writer! (Can’t spell worth a damn, but nobody said I had to spell.)
I can’t disagree with you—I have changed my price on Amazon several times over the months. The thing about 99 cents is, even if you sell 20,000 copies, it’s heartbreaking losing the margin like that (particularly since Amazon takes a 70% cut instead of the 30% cut for $2.99 and above, a fact of which most readers would be blissfully unawares). I’m with you. Thanks very much for the read and the comment!
I cringe at how cheap books are. The prices aren’t right–or fair–for the author. Sure, songs may cost 99 cents on iTunes, but the album costs $15. UGH. The whole novel pricing thing makes me sad. But these are strange times we live in….