A subliminal message about how much you would like to pay for each book. :)
A week ago, Diana and I decided to try an experiment: All the e-books in the Renegade Writer Store (except one) would become Pay What You Want, meaning you, the reader, decide what to pay for each one.
The minimum price was $1 because that’s the minimum my order processor allows. (And they do charge me for each download!)
The deal was this: We would try this experiment for one week, and if we liked how it turned out, we would keep this pricing structure.
Here are the results:
- Around 330 writers took advantage of the Pay What You Want offer.
- The average order was $6.50.
- Sometimes an order was for a single book, but mostly they were for multiple products.
- Many, many people scooped up every book we have at $1 apiece. (Now you need to READ them all, LOL!)
- The lowest order amount was $1. The highest order amount was $30 (for multiple books). (That was pretty exciting!)
- Most writers paid below retail for the books…but some paid around retail, and just a few paid higher! (And this is not a judgement in any way…readers paid what they could afford or according to how much value they thought the books would bring.)
- We got orders from all over the world, including Canada, the U.S., Serbia, and Nigeria! (Discovered one reader from Serbia went to the same high school as our Serbian exchange student!)
- Several writers emailed me to say they hope to make sales based on what they learned in our books, so they can come back and pay more for them. Aw! (I’m actually thinking about creating a way for writers to come back and add more to their payments if they feel they’ve gotten a ton of value from the books.
)
So what’s the verdict?
Of course we, the authors, feel we deserve to be compensated well for the value we provide in our books. We worked hard on them, and they cost us beaucoup cash for design, editing and so on. I also pay the order processor, and need to pay for tech help—for example, I paid $500 to have the books pages set up, and another $500 to get them converted to PWYW.
And of course, these books are meant to get writers gigs and change their lives! We think that’s worth at LEAST the $5-10 most of the books were originally priced at.
On the other hand, once we eat the sunk costs, it costs us very little to provide these e-books.
AND…since our mission is to help as many writers as possible reach their freelancing dreams, having 330 people get their hands on our books is excellent news! We want to reach EVERYONE—including those who can’t yet afford to hire help, take classes, or buy full-priced books.
So…drumroll…we decided to keep the PWYW pricing structure!
That means from now on, YOU choose what to pay for each book, e-course book, and checklist…including Write Your Way Out of the Rat Race…And Step Into a Career You Love, which comes with a boatload of downloads (originally $9.99), The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success (also $9.99), and the Write for Magazines E-Course book (originally $29).
(And soon, very soon, I’ll be posting a meditation I created called Positive Thinking for Writers as a PWYW product. I wrote the meditation and it was produced and voiced by a former public radio reporter! It has everything…soothing music, nature sounds…IT’S AWESOME.)
Yep, you can get all these goodies for as little as a buck each.
Don’t have much cash? Pay the minimum. You’re rich? Pay more than retail and reap the karma that comes from covering a less advantaged writer.
Here’s where you can do that:
http://www.therenegadewriter.com/store/
Please do spread the word to all your writing friends! You can post it on forums, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and let your writing groups know they can now get these helpful, valuable books for a minimum of $1 each. (BTW, we reserve the right to change our minds in the future…but for now we don’t foresee getting rid of PWYW.)
Here’s a tweet you can use if you like:
Renegade Writer e-books are now Pay What You Want…permanently! That means YOU choose what to pay! http://www.therenegadewriter.com/store/
Thank you, thank you for helping us make this experiment a success! We’re so excited to get our books into as many hands as possible!
As you’ve probably guessed by the name of this blog, and the book it stems from, here at The Renegade Writer we’re all about doing what works for us. Experimenting. Trying new things. Bucking the status quo.
My personal life is the same way…yes, I LIVE what I preach. I’m proud of my freelance writer/board game designer husband; ballet-dancing Montessori-going son; and two lovely exchange students, from Serbia and Indonesia. (See the gratuitous photo of my three adorable kids to the left.) In October the nuclear fam and I are going to Europe, and in November we’re hitting Tokyo—because Eric and I can work on the road. (And if we time our trips to hubby’s business travel, he gets a free ticket, which is kind of key.
I tell you, we love not being normal…and I want to help others who want to be as weird as we are!
So: While most normal, status quo-type business owners want to squeeze every penny they can out of their customers, that’s not what we’re all about here at The Renegade Writer. Yes, I like money. However, I’m also passionate about helping writers earn a living doing what they love most. And, I’m someone who loves experimenting to figure out what works best for myself and for the writers I help—instead of always going with what’s expected and normal.
All that leads to this:
Not everyone who wants to become a writer has the means to get quality help—good e-books can cost $10 and more, and coaching can exceed $350 per hour!—so now, almost every e-book in the Renegade Writer Store is now Pay What You Want, with a minimum of just $1. I want to get the helpful info in these books into as many hands as possible, no matter what their situation.
That means YOU choose how much the books are worth to you. Yes, even the Write for Magazines e-course book that retails at $29 (and is based on a $267 course), and books like The Renegade Writer, Commit, and Write Your Way Out of the Rat Race—which retail at $9.99!
You can pay less than retail…or if you’re rich you can pay more and reap some good karma because you’re covering someone who can’t afford as much. (But $1 is the minimum my shopping cart service will accept for each book…probably because they charge ME 75 cents for every book I sell!)
HOWEVER…this is an experiment. I’ll be offering the books as PWYW for just one week—until Friday, September 18—and will then take stock of how it went. If we here at The Renegade Writer are happy, and our readers are happy, we can keep the PWYW pricing. If for some reason it just doesn’t seem to be working out…the books go back to retail prices.
Want to gather up a virtual armload of books that can help you write killer query letters, quit your day job to write, reach your goals through massive action, write faster, build confidence as a writer—and generally live and love the freelance life—all at a price YOU choose? Here’s the Renegade Writer Store, where every book but one is now PWYW. (The one that isn’t is only available on Amazon…and speaking of Amazon, our books will remain full price on that site.)
http://www.therenegadewriter.com/store
Have fun loading up on books…I think you’ll dig everything we have! I hope this helps many, many aspiring writers make their freelancing dreams a reality.
This is an excerpt from my e-book Editors Unleashed: Magazine Editors Growl About Their Writer Pet Peeves. I spoke with 10 assigning editors at national and trade magazines (under condition of anonymity) to find out what writers do that piss them off — and how to avoid being an editor’s nightmare.
Interested in reading the rest? The e-book is only $6.95 — check it out and order it on the e-book page.
The Editor: Assigning editor at a national, large-circulation general interest magazine.
The Peeve: Writers who change the story mid-assignment.
What’s your biggest grammar/style peeve and why?
I don’t think I should have to tell a writer twice not to double-space after periods. I told a writer once, and the first time he did it I went through the copy and removed all the extra spaces; it took me a while, but it was fine. I sent him a note saying to put only one space after periods, but the next time and the time after that he did it again. Why? I don’t want to spend 10 minutes going through a story taking out the double spaces. It’s about attention to detail. I don’t know why some writers feel like they’re in an ethereal existence where it’s all about the art. It’s about the other things too.
Can you share a writer horror story?
A lot of writers we have the most problems with have the best credentials—they’re the ones who drop the national magazine names. They say, “I’ve been in Vanity Fair, Time, Newsweek, blah, blah, blah.” But they have some of the worst habits. I had one that had basically every national sports magazine title to drop, and awards that sounded incredibly impressive. The fundamental story we assigned was a profile of the fitness and nutrition regimen of an older top-name athlete. We discussed the idea thoroughly, and this athlete was not easy to get. The writer turned in what was a passable sort of mini-profile of the athlete. There were only one or two paragraphs in the whole 1,000 words that dealt with his fitness and nutritional regimen. I know a lot of assigning editors tend to do this passive-aggressive thing, but not me—I just said, “I hope you have 700 more words worth of content in your notebook on the topic we assigned.” That wasn’t the case, and it just didn’t work out.
What can a writer do to assure you’ll never hire him again?
The main thing that stops a writer from being used a second time is that the writer just didn’t get it.
We always say to read the magazine; this gives you a certain sense of the style, tone, substance, and presentation. But to really get the DNA of a magazine, you really have to write for it and go through the editorial process. I don’t expect a writer to turn in something that completely matches the tone, style, and so on exactly as we discussed the first, second, or even the third time. Still, there are some writers who just don’t get the fundamentals of the assignment. They have an idea in their head and say, “This is what the real story is about.” But we’re the gatekeepers here.
It’s okay to argue your point in the initial assignment conversation; I don’t take it personally. You can fight for your angle, but at the end of the conversation, we’re going to have an understanding, and I’ll even send an e-mail to summarize. When the story is turned in, it needs to be at least 70 percent there. I can’t look at it and say, “This is so not resembling what we disc
