What's a fair price for a 500-page trade paperback?

[Jon Miller]

I would buy your book, at some point, for any price under 20. However, most of my 'not from a traditional publisher' purchases are below 5.

JM

[Ming]

If you charge 9 or so, it's still below the top selling books that are going for 13 or more as ebooks.

But since you aren't a best selling author YET... go for 5 or 6. If it doesn't sell, you can always drop the price later

[Elok]

I get 70% profit from ebooks within the $3-10 range. That means I'll make more money from ebooks than the physical kind (outside the estore which nobody uses) even at the lowest price, so I'm inclined to be generous. $4.76?

[Ming]

I was thinking 5.99, but it's your money
Either way... GOOD LUCK!

[Elok]

So, will I need a TOC with fairly regularly-spaced links to make the reading experience pleasant? Say every twenty or thirty pages?

[Ming]

Do you need to add "fake" chapter breaks? Don't really know... but for me, it does help enhance the experience. And EVERY book I've seen has them...

[rah]

I've never needed them when reading an actual book. As mentioned, it has helped when reading the few e-books that I have.

[Lorizael]

I regularly used the breaks between journal entries as chapter breaks when reading. I'm not sure I see why that wouldn't work for a ToC.

[Elok]

Well, that gives me something like fifty "chapters," none with identifiers beyond date and writer.

[rah]

That's just as good as anything else. So what if your toc is a couple of pages?

[Elok]

All right, it's almost done, sort of. Possibly. Is it typical for page resizing in an ebook to cause weird wraparounds of pages? I'm posting an example below, where the copyright page bled onto the TOC:

EDIT: Also the TOC itself is FUBAR. That "11" at the end is a page number, but if it's possible to tap on it to get to the right page, the previewer doesn't give me that option.

[Jon Miller]

What previewer are you using?

[Elok]

The one provided by Kindle Direct Publishing. It can simulate a tablet, Kindle, or smartphone, and the overlap appears on all three. Since it handles other page breaks decently, I assume I simply failed to include a page break there when creating the original book. Easy fix. The TOC is a bigger issue. Do ebooks usually have a TOC that isn't part of the text itself? Not sure how to describe this, but at the top of the simulator there's the option to reset the font size, and next to that a little drop-down TOC menu that currently shows only "beginning" (which redirects to the cover). I assume this is something in metadata or some such, and I don't know how I would include such a thing. Would a functioning touch-TOC using embedded hyperlinks do the trick, or is this meta-TOC an essential?

[Jon Miller]

We use TOC to jump to the place we were reading when something happens so the kindle loses the place, so it needs to be responsive. I use it even in my non-touch second generation kindle.

JM

[Jon Miller]

I would go to a support forum.

jm