Ebooks vs. Snail Books

Now that I've got to reading tons of ebooks from Kindle and Smashwords, I have quite a different perspective on pricing!

An actual paper book, costs about $6, and I take about 3-4 days to read it.

An e-book, on the other hand, I sometimes finish two a day.  I think the authors are not focused on filling e-books with a lot of substance; they're more into hooking a reader into reading the first of a long series of books.  Some of the books I have read lately seem to be just an installment in a serial novel.  ('A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens was first published this way.)  So if one of my e-books were to be priced at $ 6, readers would (1) expect quite a substantial book, and (2) have to be committed to all of the odd variety of topics that the book contains: college life, young children, music, television, a young drama queen, a daughter of a British Earl (even if a minor one), and so on, in the case of Westfield.

None of my books---except Yraid, and Flower shop Girl, are quick reads, as it happens, but I'm glad I priced them at 99c, now having a feel for the issues.

Added later:

I have yet more insights into the authors of the books I have read; the books themselves, their style, and most of all, how different they are from my own stories.

Voice, jargon, slang
One thing I would have a hard time doing, is writing the sort of dialog that most authors of Lesfic for young adults churn out with such great facility.  Not only did they make me laugh out loud, but I could not not understand more than half of what the words meant.  (It's worse when I was reading British lesfic.  I can truthfully say that the Brits use far more slang than Americans do, which is a major change from days gone by, when rich Brits of the 20's and 30's would actually travel to America, just to pick up some of the jazzy slang that they loved.)  For better for worse, my idiom is that of the 1950's, because a lot of the fiction I had been reading before I started writing, was from that era.  Furthermore, even when not writing dialog, the text reads like some regional dialect, which means that the narrative is really hilarious.  A lot of the slang has incredibly funny humor built into it, especially when commentary about some situation is needed, so avoiding slang would make the commentary a lot less edgy.  An author about whom all this is particularly relevant is Natasha West, a particularly funny author (when she remembers to be.  You can just imagine her telling a story over a pitcher of beer, making the most mundane incident into a riot).  On the downside, though, if Natasha were to write a part of her narrative in almost the same voice as one of her funnier characters, it would get confusing, since a careless reader could easily lose track of whether this is coming from the storyteller, or that character.  (I can hardly point the finger, because it is quite possible that all my characters talk like I write.)

Another feature---and one that I have mentioned earlier---is that young folk, readers and writers alike, use a lot of abbreviations.  Lesfic, for instance, which stands for lesbian fiction, which means fiction about two women protagonists.  I might, or might not, be written by a lesbian author, but that alone wouldn't make a story lesfic.

Yet another feature of the relationship between writers of e-books and their readers has to do with price, and some other intangibles.  It strikes me that many authors of e-books that are written quickly for the "dimestore romance" modern equivalent, is that they're not likely to be motivated to fix errors pointed out by anyone (including me, obviously).  Only a few hundred readers, at most, will read the books, and an author will labor more at writing lots of different stories, rather than polishing a single work.  (For instance: some years ago, I wrote a Christmas story called Christine's ... Amazing Christmas, and Smashwords has let me know that the Table of Contents' links do not work.  I have not fixed this up, though it certainly should be fixed up ...