Recently I was talking with one of the early readers of California Bondage Sorority Book One about how I priced my novel. The issue of how to sell the novel is kind of a tricky one for me not only because I've never directly published an ebook before, but because I can't find a real precedent for my first novel.
Most erotic/romance novels by published authors (those who have traditional publishing contracts) sell at around $7.99 in Kindle form on Amazon, while those by self-published and non-traditional authors are priced at around $2.99. There's a good deal of variance, of course, but those seem to be pretty standard. However, most mass-market paperback romance novels are about 50,000 words long, and the average length of a free-standing "full" novel is about 100,000 words. At approximately 390,000 words, California Bondage Sorority Book One is several times as long as the typical novels in this field.
Maybe I haven't been looking in the right spots, but I haven't been able to find any novels of that length published as erotica or even romance. It's hard to make comparisons to "vanilla" novels of that length because so many of them are in the public domain, so publishers only need to recoup the costs involved with things like translations and glosses. Contemporary, non-public domain novels of "epic" length, such as A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, tend to have higher ebook prices than shorter novels, and that seems fair, but again, prices there vary a lot.
I am a published writer in my "vanilla" life, so I feel like I should have a better idea of how to price California Bondage Sorority Book One. Since I can't find any other erotic novels to compare it to, though, I kind of feel clueless.
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