The quickly lowering price of Earthen Vessels for the Kindle (now $3.49, for a limited time) prompted this question from a friend:
At what point is that kind of painful? It's such a great book; you slaved over it for ages. And now Amazon wants to charge less for it than the latte I'm drinking?? This is a very messed up country.
The real question, of course, is why she was drinking a latte when there are digital copies to be sold. Does it matter that the supply is limitless? I think not.
But there’s a serious question here that prompted a lot of thought. I’ve specifically avoided writing about writing and publishing, in part because it’s rather clichéd for writers to go meta as soon as they’ve found a little success and in part because I still haven’t found much success. Ask me again when I write something that comes out like Oliver O’Donovan, Annie Dillard, or Rick Warren—three writers who all mastered their respective approaches, different though they might be. In other words, it seems presumptuous to speak about the craft of writing at my age (though probably not more presumptuous than speaking of theological anthropology—consistency, who needs it?).
Yet I have realized that with respect to this project, at this stage in my life, I simply don’t care how much the publisher charges. The less it costs, the better, if it increases the odds that the thing will be read.
As an author, I sometimes feel a tension between something like charity for my audience and a burning to simply say something that needs to be said, in the precise way I want to say it. Such a burning isn't necessarily rooted in a lack of concern for the audience. Rather, there is a sense of disaffectedness, a detachment from the need to listen to the market's opinions that selling a book necessarily introduces.
It is a little weird that we sell books at all, actually. Yes, we need to eat and publishers have to pay bills. All of that is well and good. But every now and then, we ought to think about our books outside that context and hope that we've written something that is good enough that (paradoxically) it should still be around even if it doesn't make any money at all.
Login to read more
Sign in or create a free account to access Subscriber-only content.
Topics: