A friend of mine was recently taken to task by another author. Author A was told by Author B that she was “unprofessional” because she included an estimated word count in her book blurb. After stammering words to the effect of, “Wha-wha-whaaaat?” (I’m an old Warner Brothers cartoon geek), Author B persisted.
Author B’s point was to the effect of, “Stephen King doesn’t post word counts. John Grisham doesn’t post word counts. Professional writers don’t post word counts. If you’re posting a word count, you’re being unprofessional.”
Everyone’s entitled to their point of view. Here’s mine.
The main reasons Stephen King and John Grisham and Charlaine Harris and James Patterson don’t post word counts is simple, and have nothing to do with professionalism. It’s actually rather elementary.
1) King, Grisham, Harris and Patterson, as a rule, don’t publish really short works individually.
2) King, Grisham, Harris and Patterson, as a rule, don’t think about the eBook market first and foremost.
You see, most readers can understand price if it’s linked to length. It’s a value-to-dollar consideration. For example, let’s look at Stephen King’s excellent novel, Under the Dome.
The average thriller these days is priced at, roughly, a $27.99 cover price. For this price, one usually receives a 300-350-page thriller. I based this example on Cross Fire by James Patterson, his latest Alex Cross novel, which actually runs a bit longer than that, about 384 pages.
Sure, big-box bookstores and mass retailers like Wal-Mart and Target will automatically discount that price by an average of 30 percent. So that becomes $19.59 plus tax. As readers, we all know and understand this shell game on pricing. But if you like hardcovers and are a huge James Patterson fan, $20 for his latest isn’t too big a pill to swallow. And the retailer usually gets a $27.99 book in at a cost of about $14.00 to them, so they’re still doing OK if the book sells at a good volume.
Now we return to Stephen King. Under the Dome originally listed for a whopping $35.00 cover price in hardcover. But do many people raise a stink? Do they complain that King thinks he’s $7.00 per copy better than James Patterson?
No. Why? Because for $35.00, all the justification you need is… you pick up the book. Flip it open to the back. Mercy sakes alive, Under the Dome weighs in at 1,074 pages! What a bargain! That’s well over two and a half times – almost three times – as many pages of entertainment! For only 25 percent more than the average Patterson novel! Readers have no problem seeing the value in the extra money they’re shelling out.
Plus $35 isn’t the real price anyway. We all know that along comes the average 30 percent retailer discount, you’re only going to pay $24.50 plus tax at the register.
This is why traditionally published authors are rarely asked, other than by the merely curious, how long their novels are in word-count. Because in retail locations, you can pick the book up, weigh it in your hands, look at the number of pages, and say, “Yeah, $24.50 for a book that’ll take me a couple months to read? That’s value.”
Value, because it’s something you can touch, see, feel and assess in a concrete way. So even if you buy Under the Dome in eBook form, you’re still very much aware of the value that eBook represents, because the print counterpart is readily available. So $14.99, or it’s new discounted price of $9.99, is not subject to much sticker-shock because that’s even less than the hardcover would cost.
So, we can all agree that traditionally published authors are not asked about their word count because they’re traditionally published, or because they possess a greater degree of professionalism, or because their PR guys at the publishing house forgot to add the word-count in.
They don’t add word-count because, by and large, it’s not needed.
And as a Kindleboard friend pointed out recently, in a sense, traditional publishers are still figuring out the market demands and expectations of selling eBooks. They’re new to it. They don’t include a word count because, well, in the traditional print model, that wasn’t much of a consideration, because you had a page-count to go by.
So, getting back to our original incident, why would Author B tell Author A it was “unprofessional” to post a word count as part of the description? Because the big names don’t do it. That was the argument. But now that we know why they don’t do it, that’s not sufficient anymore.
I therefore offer the possibility that Author B has drawn a false conclusion. Not false for the big boys like King and Patterson and Big Six publishers. But false for this market; false for the eBook market in general, and false particularly for indies.
You see, we’re dealing with a lot of differences between indie authors and traditional authors that can come into play for professional conduct issues such as this. Let’s take a look at some of those differences.
First, traditional publishing rarely publishes short stories individually. Indie authors do. Frequently.
Second, traditional publishing almost always prices books based, at least in part, on the length of the book in question. Indie authors seldom do.
This second point deserves more exploration.
Why don’t indie authors price their works based on the length of the work published?
Well, that’s simple. We’re not a corporation. We’re thousands of individual writers each doing our own thing. We have complete creative freedom, no corporate structural overhead, no printing costs, and so we’re free to price works much lower than traditional publishers.
And, savvy as we are, we know that we may not be able to compete on name recognition for a while, but we can certainly compete on price. Joe Konrath has blogged about the “race to the bottom” on pricing; he’s even in favor of it. When asked why he prices his books at $0.99 and $2.99, his reply is simple and straightforward: “Because I can make a living at it.”
His lead inspires a lot of authors to follow the same model, with varying degrees of success.
The trouble is this: customers don’t know what they’re getting, necessarily, at any indie price point.
For $0.99, one can receive anything from a 2,500-word short story, to a 62,000-word novel or longer.
For $2.99, one can receive anything from … a 2,500-word short story, to a 62,000-word novel. Or longer.
From a consumer perspective, from the book buyer’s perspective specifically, this is the equivalent of, well… insanity. When the eBook market and the indie writer presence in it was new, readers wanted to know why the prices were so low. “Is it of inferior quality?” was a frequent question.
And sadly, too often, in the early days especially, it was.
But we independent authors are learning. We’re getting our ducks in a row. We solicit beta-readers to help us out, hire freelance editors and cover artists, and many of us now offer a fairly professional-looking product, both inside and out.
But we still price for reasons not based on length. Why?
Well, here’s the conventional wisdom around indie circles.
“I’m a nobody. I can’t complete with Stephen King and James Patterson because no one at all knows me. So I need to stand out by being less expensive. I’ll trade a lower price for more readers. Once more people know who I am, I’ll raise the price a bit.”
Which can work, in theory. If the author is patient and sticks to the gameplan of “offer a first novel, or the first novel of any series, at an attention-getting price of $0.99, and then offer subsequent novels, or later novels in a series, at a more reasonable $2.99.”
Of course, we authors are not the most patient lot in the world. Especially if we’re full-time writers and struggling to buy a can of Coke, much less pay rent. So after offering our first novel for $0.99, shepherding it along, promoting it, and nursing it to a decent level of sales and a little bit of money in our pockets, then we release our second novel at $2.99 and … when that novel doesn’t sell at the same level our long-nurtured $0.99 novel is selling at within the first month or two, we panic and lower the price … to $0.99. Again.
Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And readers then expect that all indie books should be priced at $0.99, because even if the author is brave enough to start out higher, if you hold off on your purchase long enough, you just KNOW they’re gonna drop it.
Complicating this picture is that authors of short stories and short novels also price all over the place. A 5,000-word short story should probably never be priced higher than $0.99. It’s just too short.
But if someone is working in a more arty, less popular form of literature, they might start pricing their short stories higher because they know they’re in a low-volume genre anyway. If they’re in a popular genre, they still might do this, just to test the waters. Especially if they have 20 other $0.99 short stories out there, see a consistent level of sales, and want to see if folks will keep buying their work at a higher price.
Where this all becomes a problem is at the most important level: the level of the confused reader who’s wondering what the heck they can expect to get if they One-Click something that looks promising in the Kindle Store.
If they One-Click a book, there’s no great way to know whether you’re about to get something the length of “The Monkey’s Paw,” or something the length of “Under the Dome.”
Because, as a group, we indies are crazy. We don’t price on length, or consistently. We price all over the place for reasons as varied as attracting readers, to an attempt to fix slow sales, to an attempt to earn more, to whatever. You just can’t predict us, as a group. Not based on price.
And let me be honest: I’ve had a couple times where I saw a nice cover, read the summery and was intrigued, One-Clicked and… got upset as all get-out that all I received for $2.99 was a 5,000-word short story.
So then readers start retaliating. They post one-star reviews saying things are too short for the price. Justifiable, but not necessarily a reflection of the quality of the story itself.
It can get tense pretty quickly, folks. I’ve seen at least one reviewer on Amazon accuse a 62,000-word novel (not mine) of being a “short story.” Mostly because they didn’t understand how locations relate to length, or even how word-count relates to length.
(Dirty secret, folks: While readers are starting to catch on to word length, most readers still think in page count. And no one, except maybe Jeff Bezos, thinks in locations. Writers understand word length, because we’ve dealt with it long before there was ePublishing of any sort. But readers? They think in page count. It’s like a group of newspaper editors who think in column inches, and forget most newspaper readers don’t think that way.)
Amazon posts a file-size, but this is relatively useless. If an author can’t afford a cover, a decent-length story could still have a very small file-size. If an author has a lot of artwork and illustrations in a book, the file size could be huge, but it could mask a very low word-count. So file-size doesn’t work, from a reader’s perspective.
And remember, as eAuthors, we don’t have print books available at every Target, Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble to give them what they’re used to, that tactile, book-in-hand experience by which to judge value-to-price.
To fix this, it has for a long time been customary in electronic publishing to post a word-count as part of the book’s description. Some sites, like Smashwords, do this automatically. Some sites, like Amazon, do not. If a site does not include a word count automatically, and an author does not include this detail in his or her description, the customer has no idea what they’re getting before they One-Click.
And that’s what gets under a person’s skin. The lack of a heads-up. The lack of what the law calls, “informed consent.”
Hey, if I have a favorite author and he or she wants to charge $2.99 for a 5,000-word short story… and they tell me before I buy that that’s what I’m paying for, then I have informed consent. I can either decide I don’t want to pay so much for so little, or I can decide I like that author’s work so much, I’ll go ahead and One-Click anyway.
But without that heads-up, generally speaking, if I pay $2.99 for an eBook and only get one 5,000-word short story, you can bet that I am … not pleased. Because I had no heads-up, no informed consent.
Still, some will argue that a lot of consumers still don’t understand word-count, so it’s as useless as file size. I say that readers can learn to interpret word-count.
It’s actually a simple formula. A single printed page, depending on several layout variables, averages 300 to 350 words. Let’s go with the more conservative number of 300 for illustration purposes.
My novel, Most Likely, runs around 63,000 words. With a couple minor layout alterations, I can make it run anywhere from a tightly-packed 178 pages, to a more comfortable-to-read length of 222 pages, when prepping the book for CreateSpace.
Personally, I hate books that are cramped onto the page, so Most Likely, when it hits CreateSpace, will run 222 pages, roughly. (I’m still finalizing the layout.)
How long should it run? Well, at 300 words a page, you have 30,000 words for every 100 pages. So Most Likely, at 63,000 words, should run about 210 pages. Add in a few pages for front matter and back matter, and it pretty much does.
And around 200-225 pages is the average length of most young adult novels, which is what Most Likely is. So I’m right where I should be. For comparison’s sake, using the same formula, James Patterson’s 384-page novel Cross Fire should run around 115,200 words. And Stephen King’s Under the Dome, at 1,074 pages, should run around 322,200 words. Roughly.
Give readers this kind of metric, and they’ll learn soon enough how to interpret word count.
“This story only runs 3,600 words? That’s a 15 page short story. And you want $2.99 for that? #()* you!”
Or maybe they’ll click anyway. They might just like your work enough to accept that.
But it’s always better to know exactly what you’re getting before you OneClick. You’ll have happier readers as a result.
So, yes… for indie authors in an eBook world, the professional thing to do is to absolutely include a word count. It’s the only half-decent tool to give a reader a heads-up on what exactly their money is buying them … before they OneClick.
