It Will Never Be lawki To Me

On a whim, I checked Amazon to see if they knew when the paperback of This World We Live In was coming out, and by golly, they did:

Paperback
$8.99
This title has not yet been released. You may pre-order it now and we will deliver it to you when it arrives.
Publisher: Graphia
Published: April 18, 2011

I knew it was scheduled for this spring, and my guess is April 18 will be more like March 18, since my publisher tends to get things to stores before actual publication dates. But it's nice to have an actual publication date.

What leaped out at me, in addition to the actual publication date, was the actual price, which is a dollar more than the paperbacks of Life As We Knew It and The Dead And The Gone. For those of you who didn't commit to memory my blog entry about how writers get paid, I get 6 or 7% of the list price of each paperback that gets sold. So if we start at a list price of $8 (I'm a firm believer in rounding up except for my weight), 6% means I get 48 cents per copy sold. But round it up to $9, and suddenly I'm getting 54 cents per copy.

Guess which I prefer.

Possibly coincidentally, a few days ago, I got an email from my editor discussing print type for LAWKI. Notice how only LAWKI has its title in all capital letters.



I think I'm the reason d&g is in all small letters, and my publisher decided without consulting me to put TWWLI in small letters also. My editor said the publishing house was discussing whether to change the print type on LAWKI to small letters as well, to make the three paperbacks uniform in appearance.

There are things I care about in this world, and things I don't, and the print type of the paperback of LAWKI falls into the category of whatever, so I said fine.

But now I'm wondering if they're planning to make the price uniform as well. I mean, they'll have to print whole new covers, so why not accidentally print $8.99 rather than $7.99? Who would notice (except me and my bank account)?

On the other hand, there's no reason for them to print new covers of d&g, since it's already d&g, and not D&G. So maybe they'll keep the price the same for it, or for it and LAWKI. Or maybe Amazon got the price of the paperback of TWWLI wrong.

I guess I'd better hold off on spending that extra 6 cents!