Set Your Own Price on Works by Ria Stone

I started publishing with Smashwords, a great site for new authors, in 2013. Founder, Mark Coker offers great advice on writing, formatting and marketing your eBook.

The Smashwords author dashboard is chock-full of choices. One important choice you will make is setting the price for your works. Smashwords' graphs give you an idea of the fees, and royalties you would receive to help you make a choice.

One pricing choice is letting the reader set their own price.

So, I altered the prices on my two books: Recipes from the Kitchen of a Frugal Non-Cook (RKFNC) and Gina's Dream, the first edition, (English only/eBook) to the Readers Choice.

As you can see by my posts, researching and writing RKFNC was fun. So much so, I am working on another cookbook for non-cooks.

I can't boil water but Amy Dacyczyn's Tightwad Gazette challenged and encouraged me to learn to cook and to shop economically.

Learning to cook is like learning a foreign language. I still feel like an alien in the kitchen. I mean what does "braise" or "roux" mean? I still don't know.

One appliance that saved my budget and gave me confidence was the crockpot. After several successes, I began to collect recipes I had adapted. 

After publishing Gina's Dream, I polished up those recipes, researched, cooked and tested many more to create RKFNC.

I am developing a passion for recipe research and adaptation. Remember, all I have is a finicky, electric two-burner stovetop, a crockpot, and a microwave with one setting: high. So, not only do I have to modify recipes in terms of portions, I also have to adapt the recipe for the stovetop, crockpot, or microwave.

Gina's Dream is an attempt to tell a "normal" love story with one exception, Gina is an alien. Gina's Dream is also a manifesto, a call to action. People need to start making changes in order to save our planet and ourselves. I can't believe people do not want to survive.

Researching, writing, and marketing Gina's Dream was fun and a major education in publishing.

There are tons of stats out there regarding publishing. One statement runs like this "50% of eBook authors make less than $500 a year." -- (Ted Summerfield) 

It is important as an author to do research and stay grounded in reality, at least for the bookkeeping.

Visit Smashwords and take a look at RKFNC and Gina's Dream. I hope you enjoy them.