A comment from an acquaintance has stayed with me for some time. It came in response to a question they asked me about my writing. I told them to have a look on Amazon. The next time I saw the person they told me that they had looked at my books but decided not to buy any preferring to wait until they were available for free.

I will admit, I have given my books away for free. I did it to try and reach new readers and, usually in vain, to get reviews. However, this is the exception, not the rule. Like almost every other person who does something creative I do not give it away for free. We do not live in a society where such philanthropy is rewarded. Mocked more like. Capitalist society relies on money to exist and so do the people who live in it. I do not believe that it is selling out to charge a nominal fee for the product of my work. Amazon do it, only they are more of a facilitator than a producer.

Writing is not something that I do to get rich, thankfully. It is something that I spend a lot of time doing though. I have invested many hours on each of my books. The War Wolf was published in 2013 and it took three years to write. Most of that was doing the research into the Saxon period, which is why the next in the series, For Rapture of Ravens, took me only a year to write. Eugenica took two years, appearing in 2016. There was a lot of research to do regarding the main subject of eugenics. The Blade’s Fell Blow followed the next year, again, it benefitted from the fact that I had done most of the research. Mesozoic also took a year to write, probably because I found researching prehistoric animals fun to do. Finally, The Queen of the Mountain Kingdom took some eighteen months to complete. It did not require anywhere near as much research as my previous books but, being a fantasy, it did require me to create a whole new world.

So, in nine years I have produced six novels. Each one sells as an eBook for less than £3 here and $3 elsewhere. In fact, that is less than the price of a pint of beer, which is £3.46 at the time of writing. The person I was speaking to at the beginning of this piece regularly goes out for a drink. They spend more than £3 each time. Occasionally, they can even remember what kind of night they had the following day. Despite the fact that my shortest book still takes several hours to read they do not think that it is worth less than the price of a pint of beer. I have never gone out of my way to inform them that any of my books are available for free. I know, that might sound a little petty, but I have my own sense of worth and it is higher than the price of a pint of beer.

The fact is that almost everyone seems to want everything for free, but they are seldom willing to give anything of their own away for nothing. I actually sell all of my books through Amazon at the lowest possible price. Considering the work that I put into them then I think that each one represents a great deal for any prospective reader. However, I seem to be in something of a minority on the subject.