Publishing Children of Sophista

I had someone tell me that one of my early readers would be willing to buy the Collector's Edition of the Book #1, which is being produced simultaneously with the Readers's Edition. Both editions will have 22 spot art pictures inside. But the Collector's Edition uses a full color process so that all artwork and some of the text effects will be in color. The Collector's Edition is about four times the price of the Reader's Edition. And yet, before the thing is even published, with only a few pieces of art to look at, someone is already willing to buy it. The artwork in the book is nothing incidental either. A large chunk of it has the theme, "The Part of the Story I Couldn't Tell You". Whether you are a reader or writer, you know that the plot has to flow at a certain speed or there will be stall. As the saying goes, one picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes there are very valid and interesting things to be told, but you must just edit them out.

Quite frankly, it was a no loss proposition for me to do the color edition. A full color book is a great tool for give-aways and other promotional/review copies. Since it costs very little to load yet another project into the press, why not. But with interest in the color version in spite of it costing nearly four times the cost of the standard Reader's Edition there is another point to be made. To get a decent price for your book, you need not price fix. In fact, you need to move the focus away from price and towards value. Are you offering something worth paying the higher price for. This could be not only because you tell a great story with your writing, but because you tell one in pictures too. You, the writer, have something to contribute here since you  are the one with the great picture in your head. So put that down onto paper too. And this scheme can be carried to ebooks also. Again, no price fixing, people with color ereaders will see, guess---color artwork. And even if they don't have a color reader now, they know that when they add one to their electronic bookshelf, the color art will be there, at no additional cost. So in this scary, changing environment there is a way to make money as writer and a publisher without driving the price to zero or fixing the price to try and prevent that. Provide value.