Welcome to Tell Me Something Tuesday. A weekly discussion post here on Rainy Day Ramblings where I discuss a wide range of topics from books to blogging. Weigh in and join the conversation by adding your thoughts in the comments. If you want to do your own post, grab the question and answer it on your blog.
Do you feel like if a book is priced for $.99 or even free that it is a lesser quality book?
This is another tricky question to answer. When I first got my Kindle way back at the end of 2008, ebooks were a novelty. In the next couple of years, we say a huge surge of indie authors publishing their books and pricing them at under a buck or even better free. For me, it was awesome, or so I thought, to be snagging all these books for free or a buck. My enthusiasm quickly waned once I started reading some of these books because I found out the hard way that lots of authors had put their books out there without having them professionally edited, and I slogged through many subpar books. Too many authors thought they could get rich quick by self publishing their book and loading it on Amazon, and this thinking gave the indie authors as a whole a bad rap. My own desire to download freebies and cheap books was quickly squelched.
Fast forward to 2014, and my enthusiasm is renewed for the cheap ebooks. I think many readers were turned off by the bad self pubbed books out there so a lot of us stopped downloading them for a time. Indie authors are on the comeback because those who stuck around realized that they aren't going to strike it rich by self pubbing bad books so they take the time to do them right. Many of these indie authors have gone on to land big publishing deals and are now household names: Colleen Hoover, Jessica Sorensen, Tammara Webber, Susan Ee to name a few.
I have had great success with several indie authors: Cambria Hebert, Heather Hildenbrand, Misty Provencher and J.L. Bryan to name a few. I love that can get their books for a reasonable price.
J.L. Bryan's Jenny Pox is free on Amazon, and I can attest that this is an excellent book!
Thanks to these hard working indie authors, the bad image of self publishing is being shed, and many readers are being treated to excellent books for a low price.
I also love that many publishers and authors will put the previous books in their series on sale around the release of the next book in the series to help generate extra publicity and enthusiasm. I was lucky enough to pick up the first books in some of my favorite indie series either for free or for dirt cheap during promotions like Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison or Moon Called by Patricia Briggs. My advice, check the price of the earlier books in a series around release date, lots of times you can snag some great deals.
My final answer to the question is no I don't think a book priced at $.99 or even free is a subpar read. These days many authors are working their tails off to deliver high quality books. When in doubt, do your research before downloading. Read reviews, if there are only a handful of reviews, be leery, unless you know the reviewers, but then on the other hand, if you are spending a buck, you don't have a lot to lose, and you can't complain too loudly when the book is free.
What are your thoughts on this topic?
Next week's TMST:
Are you comfortable with the direction NA is going.... with all the erotic scenes and steamy covers?
