Mid-list e-publishing

Hi! I was hoping to get thoughts and advice on a side project I'm thinking of doing. After many years writing women's fiction and young adult fiction, I'm moving sideways into writing narrative non-fiction (a travel memoir and a few other mss planned). I used to have a motherhood column in our state's largest newspaper for a couple years and I still get readers asking now and then if I have a compilation. After someone asked again last week, I realised it might be a good way to gain more readers for my new work (my blog is gaining ground nicely, but more readers would be brilliant for platform when my travel memoir partial goes out on submission. Plus, I love my readers!).

My big concern, however, is pricing. I could choose to offer the compilation for free, in the hope of attracting more readers, which is what I initially wanted to do. However, a friend suggested that this can often be a problem in that people don't value things as much that are offered for free, I should value my own work more and also that I could #$%* a lot of writers off by offering work for free. She thought I should price the compilation (which will be around 20,000 words) at $2.99, which is, apparently, a magic price point. I'm not sure, though. The whole point is to gain more readers and the material is otherwise lying fallow... I'm not convinced.


If anyone has any light to shed, that would be brilliant. I've read heaps of the threads here, but I can't find any discussion on mid-list e-publishing (found a lot on why I might not be mid-list, but it's the closest thing to describe my situation in many ways, so will stick with it for now!).

Thanks so much!

Medievalist said:

Do you have print rights for those columns? Or does the paper?

Click to expand...

The editor from my newspaper stated the following, 'As a contributor, you retain copyright for future publication. Basically we purchase first rights and own an entitlement to archive your material. If you're going into a book venture using columns published in the paper, we just insist on attribution.' I'm going to check with her again regarding electronic rights, but I think it's fine.

Thanks for your thoughts. I can see how the $2.99 pricing makes much more sense when it comes to the money side of things, but I'm mainly interested in picking up new readers. Am going to try for the Kindle Single programme, which would give me a little more leeway with pricing...

I ended up getting rejected from the Kindle Single programme, but went ahead with the book anyway and launched it today. There are links on my blogs if you're interested... Thanks for the advice!