Triskaidekaphilia & stuff
Fun facts:
1. They set a minimum on how much I can charge for the paperback. As in, I literally can’t say, “Screw it, make it $8! Or $5! Or a buck, let’s charge a buck!” because that’s way below the minimum. It’s some magical math that takes the cost to produce it into account and then adds dollars for who-knows-what (I could probably find out, but it’s liable to just make me mad — either way, that money doesn’t come to me).
2. So, as a new author, I’m basically starting out with a handicap, paperback-wise. The minimum amount is more than I’d like to charge, and frankly, it’s more than I’m generally willing to risk on an author I’ve never heard of. That’s why e-books are so awesome: you can check out new authors for less than the price of a latte. (There’s that coffee thing again! Why am I perpetuating this?)
3. If I charge the minimum, then I get nothing. If I jack the price way up, nobody buys it, because they have no idea who the hell I am, and who the heck wants to spend four lattes on a book written by someone they’ve never heard of? I had enough of that crap in college. (At this rate, I won’t get to retire, because I’ll be paying those ##!%!@ student loans off until I die. Then they’ll probably sell my corpse so they can squeeze a little more out of me.)
4. Research is depressing, but it taught me that as a new author, I’d be lucky to get 75¢ per book. Lucky. And I’d be wise to settle for less. All of which led to $12.99 being the obvious price point, because you have to be $something.99!
5. Hey, $12.99 is only one penny away from $13. Yes, I know, there’s all sorts of research about the psychological blah blah blah that is 99 cents, but it’s so much more fricking apropos to just round. the. hell. up. and make it 13. It’s a book! It has blood on the cover and “vampires” in the title! And it’s $13! (And the author is clearly a lunatic, so it might be worth checking it out just for the train-wreckiness of it all! Yes? No?)
6. After all that, it just dawned on me last week that the book is available in… 13 countries. Whoaaaaa.
In other news, my brain did it to me again. I was almost asleep the other night, when this happened:
Brain: DING DING DING INCOMING TRANSMISSION STAND BY TO RECEIVE!!!
Me: Rrrrrrrggggmmmmppppfffwhaaaaat?
Brain: Psst! The [stuff] is going to take place in a [thing] in book three!
Me: What? I… really? Wha… ok, actually, that could be kind of…
Brain: And the third book shall be called [TITLE]!!!
Me: No. It can’t be. It… no. No way. I mean, that’s… no. Absolutely n…
Brain: SO IT SHALL BE WRITTEN. SO IT SHALL BE DONE.
Me: But I can’t, I mean… waitaminute. What about the title for book two?!
Brain: GOODBYE! SLEEP WELL!
Me: *whimper*
My yule log. Well, the very last bit, anyway. 12-hour marathon stream, hours of vaguely Xmas-themed gaming audio (Velociraptors are Christmassy, right?) and some weirdness. Eat two bites, jump up to do something in front of the camera, eat two more bites, talk a little, jump up to do something else in front of the camera… I think I made a couple of people feel better about their lives.
Heather Masterson 