The novel is the The Beginning After the End, which really grabbed my interest.
Rosso, I'm like most other reporters who are left with a job in the ongoing newspaper apocalypse: underpaid. I just took a new job with a better periodical, where I now make only $10k less than the median income for my area, instead of $25k. I was shocked to learn last week that I now make more than my former editor at my old local daily.
Most on-the-ground writers of news don't make much. Many journalists leave the profession to become better paid advertising copywriters and marketing professional after an average of 10 years. $50 for a meal is something I budget for once a month. Granted, my reading budget is a bit more generous than my eating out budget, but like all budgets, it's limited. Reading is my only true indulgence. I don't go to movies unless someone pays me or lets me in for free in exchange for a review in print. I don't own a television so no, I don't pay for cable. Once in a blue moon, I rent a streaming video, like maybe once or twice a year.
As a reporter , I confess I am an expert at getting businesses to feed me for free. My favorite gig is being asked to be a food judge every year at the state fair.
I came to Tapas because I wanted to monetarily support a web comic I found which was cross-posted for free on a manga aggregator. I believe in supporting writers and artists for their work. I bought ink specifically to support the web comic, and did so.
Currently 80% of my professional writing can be read for free on ad-supported newspaper websites and news aggregators. I also have a book contract for a biography for someone who lived in Tudor England, one of my areas of expertise in academic research. But folks, those are different business models from sites like webtoon and manga aggregators and wuxia.com. There are varying business models for different genres and different media. As a professional writer, I familiar with almost all of them. My point is that a complete lite novel isekai-genre fantasy piece on the rest of the market place would be less than $50, depending on word count. Given how short the episodes are on Tapas for the premium content novel, I felt price gouged.
2a. I buy a lot of isekai and other lite novels on different platforms. I feel I have a good gauge of the market.
- I have no idea what the actual word count is on the novel but going rate on 70,000 to 400,000 fantasy books are $8 to $25, deadtreeware. Given an average of 400 to 600 words for the average episode (yes, I counted), 600 episodes would be around 360,000 words max.
3a. The book feels good enough to be sold on the commercial lite novel market. Maybe it should be.
- The insult on top of the injury was reading comments from other readers of the novel, saying they broke down and bought all the episodes for $15 in 2017. Pardon me for missing whatever magic window that was back them to buy in for that price. Running into such comments is not an incentive to drop more than $50. I love to read but the sticker shock here is rude because I can not help but compare it to other markets for similar products and to the price formerly available for this one book.