How to make money as an author when your genre charges pennies for its novels.
Writing a novel is no small feat. Those who don’t write will constantly say “how hard can it be”, but they don’t know the countless hours, the emotions, and the money we pour into making our stories come to life.
So if this is the case…why do some genres undersell their work?
Genre reputation is killing authors. If you go into Sci-fi, Fantasy, Self help – All those genres price their books around $15 a copy. But then, if you go into the Romance genre – books prices drop as low as $5 a copy. A whole $10 sale drop just because of the genre.
And why does this happen? Because people will say that a romance book isn’t a “real book” (don’t get me started on this) and because of this, romance authors have felt pressured to lower their prices just to get some sales.
THIS IS KILLING THE GENRE! Writing a romance novel doesn’t take any less time, emotions, or money than writing a fantasy novel (not if you are writing a good one at least). So there is no reason we should under value our work. Not to mention that if you are pricing your novel below $10, that is telling the reader right there and then that you don’t believe your book is worth much. You are setting your reader up to believe that the quality of the content within those covers is less than $10, less than a sci-fi novel, less than a fantasy novel, and that the romance genre isn’t a genre to be taken seriously.
Needless to say, underselling yourself also makes it harder for you to make a living as an author. This has caused the worst possible thing, and it’s the one thing I hate most about the romance genre, and that is over saturation of the market with shitty writing. Romance writers feel pressured to undersell their work for sales but because they are underselling their work they are finding it hard to make a living as an author and thus are forced to pump out more and more books and those books tend to be not the best quality (to put it nicely). These books coming into the market then perpetuate the stereotype that romance books aren’t “real books” and the cycle continues.
The only way to break this cycle to sell at the price you think you are worth. If you’ve written an amazing romance story and you feel it’s worth $15, sell it at that. Don’t undersell yourself because of the peer pressure or stereotypes that your genre has exposed you to. Doing so will only hurt you and other writers in the end.