One of my takeaways from the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference had to do with the cost and the value of books.

There’s an old joke about people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It’s a trap for those who give away their books or sell them cheap. Hands up those who have an ereader full of free and 99c books they’ll possibly never read?

I guess it’s way too easy, as an author trying to be noticed in a bazillion book market, to focus on the financial cost of an ebook and think that tweaking price is going to help with sales. We know that our book has cost us many hundreds of hours to write and edit. We probably know to the cent how much we’ve spent on professional services to produce the book, and on marketing to get it in front of you. What we maybe don’t think about is how much our readers commit when they buy our books.

The money people pay for a book is the smallest part of their investment. When you buy a book, you’re making a commitment to invest time — anything from a lunch hour to weeks of spare minutes, depending on the length and how fast you read. In return, you expect an emotional payback. You want the story to suck you in, let you live in the shoes of the characters while you’re reading, and leave you at the end feeling satisfied with the experience.

I’m still thinking about whether this insight might change my view on pricing. But I know it’s going to change some of my marketing. I want readers to know the promises I make when I put a book on the market.

First, I promise that things will work out, that my protagonists will have a happy ending (whatever that means to them), that villains will eventually be defeated (and punished even if not in this book). I also want you to have enough information to decide whether my kind of slightly dark and often convoluted story is your preferred type of read.

Second, if you like to read the kind of story I like to write, I promise to take you out of the everyday world into the one I’ve created. I don’t promise that things will go smoothly. They won’t. I don’t even promise that bad things won’t happen to good people. All I can say is, enjoy the roller-coaster. By buying my book, you’re asking me to play with your emotions and I promise to do my best to make the ride worthwhile.

Third, I promise to keep learning and innovating. I’ll work on my writer craft. I’ll try not to write the same story over and over, just changing the names and places. I’ll try new things, some of which might not work, but I hope we’ll have fun, you and I.

Thank you for your investment in me. You cannot know how much your appreciation motivates me to keep writing.