A Smart Bitchery reader brought the following to my attention: Julia Quinn is offering ebook second-epilogues to her past publications on her site for $1.99, or $1.59 at 20% discount. According to her note to her readers, it’s a chance to find out “what happened to your favorite characters after you closed the final page,” and for Ms. Quinn to revisit some of her favorite character creations, I’m sure. I’ve wondered if authors who write a story miss the characters once they’ve finished the book; I’m sure they do.
The Bitchery reader, who is a self-professed Julia Quinn fan, was quite perturbed by the idea, and hopes this does not start a trend among big authors. Several have offered additional epilogues, such as Eloisa James, and multiple prologues, as did Kelley Armstrong, but neither party asked readers to pay for the privilege of a visit with the protagonists of a much-enjoyed book.
Personally, I’m not sure how I feel about this, either. I wouldn’t pay $2 for 30 pages to revisit with the characters from The Viscount Who Loved Me or It’s In His Kiss, but that’s because I like to imagine my own happily ever after-after, and don’t always enjoy the replay of matrimonial bliss when characters from past books come into the newer book I’m reading from that author. In fact, Quinn is one of the few writers who can pull it off and not disrupt my own imaginings of what happened to the protagonists.
Candy, after I emailed her the link, said, “It sounds like Quinn is basically providing a service usually filled by fanfic, i.e. providing a glimpse into what goes on with favorite characters’ lives after the book ends.” But she agrees with our source that it also implies that the story isn’t complete and finished, and doesn’t really stand on its own.
Yet neither of us blink even the slightest amount at James or Armstrong offering prequels and epilogues for registered visitors to their author sites, or offering later stories for download online. I agree that the issue is definitely the commerce involved. What do you think?
To quote another reader as I blogged on this same topic: The End is The End for me. Move on. I guess the whole money for epilogue thing is for fanfics of which I am not one of them. Like Jane mentioned, most authors provide these epilogues for free on their websites for their fans. I hope the trend dies a lonely death.
I bought the JQ epilogues … really, I even found them not so expensive (and I enjoyed them …)
I don’t really see the point of the discussion … if the majority of the readers won’t like this kind of idea, if it turns out it’s just a bad marketing move, it will go away and nothing will change.
Hmm … but I really didn’t manage to take it as a sort of personal offense to my being a romance reader.
Just as an opportunity that I was free to take or not to take.
Other than this, I agree that I would have liked more to have an anthology with these epilogues.
I don’t mind paying a couple of dollars for the stories. What I do mind, however, is the stupid encryption service on the stories that is currently not allowing me to read them at all even though I just paid for them.
I say more power to her, particularly if it pays off. I imagine that if readers as a group don’t respond positively to it, the authors will stop doing it.
I can’t see the problem either. ‘Shock! Horror! Probe! – Author sells story!’ – it’s all a bit ‘Dog bites Man!’.
Furthermore, it’s nothing particularly new – authors who write novels within a universe often sell short stories set within that universe – I’m thinking Bujold, Pratchett, McCaffrey, Wodehouse etc. Equally, it’s completely normal to write a story about a set of characters and later publish another story about the same characters – the ‘Temeraire’ books which I’m reading now are like that, as are many others.
>The price point was set by my publisher. The big e-book stores (fictionwise, ereader, etc.) fought hard to price the stories at 3.99 (each!) but I (and my publisher) put my foot down. I mean, that’s just ridiculous.
I hope Random House is giving you more than the Pengiun boiler plate! It’s a scant 10% there, which is laughable considering how low their overhead is for ebooks. I’d hold out for 30%, which is low-standard with ebooks. But I’m really horsey.
I wouldn’t buy a 40-page story for $2 from anyone…but then again, I’m just that cheap. *g* That’s about the length of the Dollar Downloads at Echelon, one of the large epubs—actually, they’re often even shorter, sometimes as short as 2000 words—so it’s not like no one’s BEEN doing it.
Faced with the same situation, I would have bundled the stories, 2 per $2 download. But that’s just me!