Books I'm reading

In the midst of all of this writing I'm still reading. A lot. Often it's a new book (or an old one) I haven't heard about and i see them and hear about them on a forum I saw, a podcast, browsing through Amazon's site or from a blog that catches my eye and I've found a lot of great reads out there by doing this. There are some who think that all indie books are trash. This is a bald-faced lie. As far as I'm concerned, the reason why they find trash ( and that's if they are being honest) they don't know what they're doing.

I haven't found this lie to be the case at all and here are some of the books I've read or plan to read in the near future. Some of these are indie and some trad. They aren't all of the books I've read so far but these are my favorites. You might want to check them out; you might like them too if you haven't already read them:

The Pale Queen's Courtyard by Marcin Wrona (fantasy)

The Riders of the Sidhe (fantasy)

The Black God's War by Moses Siregar III (fantasy - there is both a novella and a full length novel with this title by the same author!)

The Worker Prince by Brian Thomas Schmidt (science fiction)

White Foxes, Full Moon by Niko Silvester (fantasy)

The Ugly Princess by Oksana Vasilenko (fairy tale, children's)

Changes by Jim Butcher

Agartha's Castaway (Science fiction, YA)

These are books I plan to read before the year's end:

Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien

Golden Feathers Falling by Marcin Wrona

Red by Melissa Yuan-Innes

Some ebooks simply cost too much!

One thing I've been thinking about for a long time in relation to ebooks is price.

Price, I think, matters a great deal when buying an ebook. The large publishers have really gotten out of control when it comes to prices. As a reader I've always felt a little irritated when having to buy mass market paperbacks for nearly $9.00 (yes they are nearly that much now) but when I first bought my Kindle this past summer and started buying George R.R. Martin's Songs of Ice and Fire series I received a shock to my system. They were all $9.99!

Ebooks for $9.99 seem to be the norm from the bigger publishers. I didn't much like that at all, as I see it as quite expensive for a book that isn't a purely physical product requiring wood, ink, printing presses and many people to create said product. But being that Martin is such a great storyteller in my eyes, and he's well known, I paid it and enjoyed the books.

Then his latest book in the series came out.

It was $14.99. I'm thinking: Hot Damn! For real? I'm sorry but that's a rip off! Of course I bought it although I nearly had a stroke while doing it, because I'm not going to ignore the next book in such a great series, but I made a decision after that purchase right then and there: no more ebooks will I purchase beyond $9.99! Even at $9.99, the writer will have to prove to me that he/she is a master storyteller.

Personally, (and this is just my opinion, nothing scientific) I think that an ebook novel shouldn't be more than $6.99 and that's at the upper end of the price range. I think $0.99 is reasonable for short stories and novelettes and novellas, especially if you are an unknown author and $1.99 - $2.99 is reasonable for a novel. Omnibus novel editions can cost $9.99 - $14.99. After all, you are getting a group of novels together. I think well known authors can get away with higher price points on a single work.

But really, charging readers more than $8.99 for an ebook is outright greed! That's just how I feel about it.

Getting started on the third book

Well, having nothing to do right now besides some marketing efforts on my latest book, I've started writing the third book. I hope people like the one I just released. I'm so proud of it and I think it's even better than the first one.

Here's the thing - this third book is going to be a bit darker than the first two. In fact, I wonder what people will think because The Pumpkin Princess is darker than The Green Door. I hope no one gets offended or upset. When I say dark, I don't mean "Clive Barker" dark, only that the heroine has more challenges to face and more is at stake. When I get to the fourth book things will get a little lighter.

Anyway, I've made it to chapter 5 already. Sometimes, the best way to pass the time is to just get started writing your next book. If I've learned how to do anything right in all of this, it's keeping busy with more writing. Downloads of my latest book seem to be going well.

If you still want a copy of The Pumpkin Princess pick up your copy now at Smashwords, Scribd or Feedbooks! The Pumpkin Princess will be $0.99 everywhere after October 20th!