There has been many an article written about the good or the bad that comes with the low prices of ebooks. And we can see valid points from each side. But in the end we only care about what we are doing here at The Public Factory. We price most of our books at 99 cents. And if we have collections in the future or longer works they'll probably be at the 2.99$ mark unless something dramatic happens. Yes, we'd like to make a living from our writing. Pay off some student loans. But we just don't feel comfortable selling at higher prices.
Anyway, as I said just a few sentences ago here at The Public Factory we are trying to keep everything super low and super affordable. Why? Because we want these pieces read by anyone with the ability to access ebooks. In a perfect world we would be able to send out cheap physical copies as well. But we can't so we strive for cheap digital works. And why besides feeding the minds of readers everywhere?
For us it comes down to pulp magazines, aka the pulps before that dime novels and before that penny dreadfuls. Most of us here love literature. And more than that. We love pop culture. And we love adventure and weird stories. And amazing characters. No one here grew up with pulps. They came later. We knew their next of kin, comic books though.
Before comics became 4$ each they were good inexpensive forms of entertainment. Monthly and short. These were our pulps. Looking at the history of comics and their heroes we found that before them pulp heroes such as The Shadow, The Avenger and Doc Savage were making their rounds in super cheap serialized books. These books came out frequently and were all over the place. Magazine racks were saturated with pulps in their heyday. Competition was fierce and it was about how much great entertainment you could put out at how low a price.
People now are worried about what cheap ebooks are doing to sales. And the satuartion of the market. That good authors and books will just be lost in the ocean of cheap crap. But why be worried about that? Why not embrace it! We have it easy compared to the pulp publishers of old. Low overhead. Small staff. And easy distribution. Imagine supporting a publishing company with tons of editors and writers and a warehouse and monthly printing by selling 15 cent magazines. Even in the 1930's that's a lot of magazines to sell.
So what am I getting at on this post? That maybe we shouldn't worry too much about cheap ebooks. Let the old literary industry price their books at 6.99$ up. It's fine with me. I still pay those prices for writers I really admire. But let those of us who are into writing fun and weird stories do that. And don't worry about us selling low and cheapening the craft. We are the starting point to the love of reading. We got our love of stories from comics. Before that our parents had the pulps. Before that our grandparents had dime novels. We're just continuing the tradition.
In your eyes equating ourselves to pulps may seem backwards. And perhaps to you we may not seem like much. But we are. We are genre and we are strange and we are something to entertain. And hopefully along the way something that makes you think. Something that sticks with you and makes you want to pick up the next book out there. Cause in the end we'll take our cues not from the huge publishers like Random House. But from places like Street and Smith Publication. And if the history of cheap entertainment can teach us anything it's that there's room for both the cheap and the expensive, all things inbetween and unthought of. Cause the good books will rise to the top despite the price. And hopefully take their readers along for an amazing ride all the while.
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