Even when I abandon a book I picked up on KU, I page through it to the end. Because just because I didn't like it doesn't mean that it's not still a product of hard work and dedication on the author's part. So they deserve their however-much-KU-pays. They do generally get two stars when I'm done, though. I don't typically post reviews to Amazon, primarily because there's a subset of trolls that get reviews taken down if they don't agree with them (and I've found the worse I dislike a book, the more likely my review is to disappear with nothing but an email from Amazon). So I leave stars sans reviews and if I have feedback for the author I try to contact them directly. That said, most of my ratings are 2-4 stars. I only give one star to books that merit the title of crime against the written word, and five stars are reserved for the books that have zero flaws. So unicorns, basically. Three stars are for books that I found enjoyable enough but ultimately forgettable.
It's hard to say, I definitely get more pages read with LoT and my other novels than Fragged, but that typically comes after a Fragged release/reads. So while my novels definitely get more money, I'd say that novellas and shorts are a great way to market them. (I.E. The majority of the money comes from novels, but I'd say 75-90% of that is because of Fragged pulling me back to the top of the new release pile)
Cheers. Don't get me wrong, it still has to be quality stuff (you can't just shovel crappy 2.5-5k shorts and hope it generates sales), but the best use of novellas and short stories IMO is to draw attention to yourself. It's one of the things that GRRM and King do from time-to-time. It's also a really good way to better your writing in terms of quality+quantity (writing Fragged has made it so I do about 500-1000 words a minute instead of 100-250 with less grammatical and punctuation errors, something my editor loves).
If you download the patch, there are certain upgrades that are available. One of those makes this totally possible.
In general, and i know ita going to differ between books and if you use stat screens, does 300 kindle pages equal about 75k words?
I'm going by my last book so I don't know for sure. Also I have bad luck with KENP pages but 75k should get you anywhere from 225 to 260 pages.
If I make it with writing and manage to earn 5 figures by next year, I promise that I'll pay you back for creating such an awesome forum by doing something stupid, like buying you a "free" BookBub promotion for Tower of Gates book one. Within my means, of course. Anywho, I've been transcribing more books lately and have come to realize that Kindle definitely makes works seem longer than they actually are. El Sexorcisto is about 40,000 words at the moment, but back when it only was 30,000, I decided to upload it to Kindle just to check it out to see how it would look. And it had over 2,000 "locations". Note: it's 1.5 spaced in Word. But an old romance story I still have that was 60,000 words has the same number of locations, despite being similarly spaced in Word. So altogether: it's f*cked. Just f*cking f*cked. Amazon uses f*cking quantum mechanics to determine KENP. Not even they know what happens half the time. You could figure out the codes to break into Fort Knox with their algorithm. Generally, though, you can expect a 50,000-word book to show up as around 200 pages in Kindle. So roughly 250 words per page on average is what Amazon registers, even if you play with your viewing options. Rule of thumb: double space your document. That's about how many pages of KENP you'll get. Doesn't matter if you publish the single-space version or not— that's still what KENPC registers. If you check on this website, you'll see what I mean more easily. Compare 50,000 words Times New Roman single-spaced vs. double-spaced. It goes from 125 pages to 206. For example, Ghosts of Smoke is 76,000 words altogether (though the stat blocks are images and aren't listed as part of the word count). As a result, it should register around 310 pages in KENP. This is roughly around Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone which is 77,500 words and is listed on Amazon at 322 pages. I mention this because I'm a greedy bastardoid of a goblin who cares only about money, but at the same time, I don't care quite as much about KENP compared to actual sales since it's the source of so much trifling drama and madness. If it weren't a good source of extra income, I'd probably go wide. Save yourself the trouble, don't try to artificially inflate your book with HTML coding, and just write a longer story! Maybe I'm a weirdo since I can push out so many words anyway. So to me, I feel you shouldn't worry too much about KENP page counts since Amazon typically gifts you almost 1.75x as many as Word will show you. Typically. Just get to at least 200 pages and you can price it at $2.99. From there, don't stress too much about KENP. That way, you can build onto a story without as much financial stress on your part. No, now you're about to suffer literary stress, a stress which has broken kings and gods.
Books I like: as long as possible Books I don't like: please end soon so I can at least say I've read it More seriously -- I think 300-500 pages is a good length.
Costs for audio production are linear (running around $150 to $400 per finished hour) with size. Also, the typical narrator can cover about 9300 words per hour. So a 93k novel would be approx 10 finished hours of narration. I.e. $1500 to $4000 to produce. Edit: I forgot! Audible listeners LOVE long audio books. It gives them more entertainment for their credits. I've been told (by Audbile) that longer books do better than short ones. However, many other production factors (construction time, authorial skill, cost of copy-edits, etc...) will scale poorly with novel length. Given that novel length doesn't change price or marketing impact, producing really long novels (say 150K words and larger) is a business practice that will have slower returns. That said, data shows that readers love longer books (to a point) and that longer books (90k to 120k) perform better commercially in the long run. So it's a balancing act in the end.
I'm trying to make short fiction work for me. As a way to finally get me over the fear factor of publishing, I committed to a series of 11-14k pieces. I really got hooked on the idea by a Udemy course by Geoff Shaw. Kindle has a whole Short Reads section that is broken into 15 min, 30, 1 hour, 90, and 2+ hour reads. I don't know yet if this will be something LitRPG readers will enjoy, but I'll let you all know!
The downside is you will never get a series page on Amazon. They refuse to make series pages for anything under 40k, and wont even add a shorter story to an existing series. The other downside is normally that short wont command more than 99c, and that isn't in the 70% range for royalty, meaning you get bugger all for a sale. And while you can make some money in KU, you need a lot more downloads to make as much as a longer book will.
