Innovative bookcover, bookcover of the future!

I was on one of my favorite forums today and ran into this. It's called the book cover of the future. You can find it and more about it on the GalleyCat site. Wow! One of these days I'm going to figure out how to do this! I want a book cover like this. Anyway, feel free to check the book out when it drops. I'm sure it's going to be a great book.

I love innovation sometimes. It can be a wonderful and exciting thing.

Sample chapters

I've changed a few things around when it comes to showing drafts. As it turns out Scribd has a moratorium on new submissions to their store so I've decided to drop them as a vendor for sales but I will still post to Scribd when I have a good draft out that I want to share. Be aware that I will only post a few chapters of my novellas and novels on Scribd from here on out. No more entire drafts for free. I will still post short stories for free there and elsewhere, whenever I get around to writing another one. Of course, there will be links here where you can download them as a .pdf to your ereader.

My sample draft will probably be available for download in a couple of weeks. That's what I'm shooting for anyway.

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.