Monday News: Mark Coker of Smashwords suggests that $3.99 is the new black; Copyright reform for consumers introduced to Congress; Gender hypocrisy exists outside romance

JanePublishing Newsbook prices / book-covers / copyright / Fantasy Romance / gender bias / Smashwords3 Comments

Smashwords: New Smashwords Survey Helps Authors Sell More eBooks – Mark Coker shares some Smashwords data with the public. How much of this can be extrapolated to overall sales is unknown. Some interesting points include that the #1 bestselling book outsells the #500 by 37 times in total revenue; longer books sell better; and $2.99 is the most common price point and 99c is the most popular price point.

In terms of price, however, while a 99c price book may sell 3.9 times as many books as one price over $10.00, the 99c price book must sell 19.4 more copies to make the same amount in revenue for the author. Coker also noted that $3.99 books sold more units than any other price except for free which suggests to Coker that the pricing might be creeping upwards, slightly.

All interesting stuff. Smashwords

Here be Magic: Fantasy Week – Epic fantasy: Does it have to be so long? – Shawna Thomas writes that epic fantasy is meant to be long and that readers and authors should resist the urge to make them shorter, more easily consumable. Here Be Magic

Epic fantasy gives you vistas. Vistas need words. It gives you the history of kings back a hundred generations. It gives you mythologies. It gives ruins of civilizations that lived before the one your heroine is currently fighting for. It tells you not only the color of the king’s hair, but what’s on his banner and why. It gives you not only the names of the characters, but their fathers and grandfathers. Why. What. When. Where.

Good epic fantasy doesn’t just take you to a world; it builds a world from the ground up: Currency, politics, food, geography, history. Nothing is left to chance. Once you enter Martin’s seven kingdoms or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, you will have felt you could navigate the culture, sit at dinner with the commoners or even royalty and not miss a beat or wonder where the spoons are.

Do Readers Judge Female Characters More Harshly Than Male Characters? – In romance circles, we’ve talked about gender hypocrisy or the failure to accept traits in a woman that we’ll forgive in a man. It’s not only within romance, however, that these problems exist. In an interview between a female report at PW and Claire Messud, Messud was asked whether she’d want to be friends with her protagonist Nora. Messud shot back that this was a gendered question not asked of men. Maria Konnikova writes at the Atlantic. The Atlantic

“Gender perception can be a pernicious thing: Where a lack of warmth passes in a male, in a woman, it’s deadly. Messud is correct to point out that what is simply dangerous in a man is often seen as unacceptable in a woman. In fact, I would go a step further. Where anger can be seen as a relative positive in a man, it is hardly ever perceived as anything other than a negative in a woman. Consider: Assertiveness is repeatedly ranked as a positive, important central trait in males. In something known as the halo effect, we tend to evaluate secondary characteristics in light of the overarching primary ones that we look for. So, when we think of a male as assertive (good), we will likely reinterpret his anger as just a facet of that assertiveness. If we see a woman as lacking in warmth (bad), anger becomes a sign of her, to borrow McCleave’s words, unbearable grimness.”

My mentor, a pretty awesome guy, gave me the book “The Dance of Anger” which talked about how anger is considered so unseemingly for women but how we women should embrace it anyway.  As a corollary, Maureen Johnson had a number of people submit reimagined covers based on gender reversals.  The results were pretty interesting.

Members of Congress finally introduce serious DMCA reform – Ars Technica reports that there is a bipartisan bill called the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 which would modify the DMCA to allow for unlocking of devices so long as the unlocking is done for a non infringing purpose. It’d be great if something like this would extend to ebooks.

Most everyone who unlocks their ebooks does so in order to protect themselves and preserve their own access rather than for infringing purposes. It’ll be interesting to see who comes down where in terms of lobbying for and against this bill.Ars Technica

Jane

Jane Litte is the founder of Dear Author, a lawyer, and a lover of pencil skirts. She self publishes NA and contemporaries (and publishes with Berkley and Montlake) and spends her downtime reading romances and writing about them. Her TBR pile is much larger than the one shown in the picture and not as pretty. You can reach Jane by email at jane @ dearauthor dot com

→ Jane