I grew up reading science fiction in the days when most books were under three hundred pages. Anything larger was rare. And, being as old as I am, I remember paying $.95 for many of those books, or $1.25 or $1.75, or as I grew older, many were up to $2.99. Since then, the industry has suffered book bloat. Books often are 500 to 1000 pages and might cost $12.99 for a paperback. There are many factors going into this trend, but they don’t matter to me. I wanted to make science fiction works of the sort I read as a youth: a book that didn’t cost much and you could get through in an afternoon of intense reading. I loved the Harry Potter series, but I’m not the world’s fastest reader. Some of those volumes that came later in the series took me 24 hours or more of straight reading. I don’t want to put a good book down. Eat? It can wait. Sleep? It can wait. To me, an author who writes a thousand page book is cruel to readers like me. So, I determined to keep my books under 300 pages of text. (Appendices hardly count.) I also wanted to keep my books inexpensive. I thought about starting low and going up as people got hooked on my series. First book: $2.99. Second book: $3.99. Etc. But I decided $2.99 is good enough for every volume in the series. I want teenagers and college students able to afford my books as I was able to buy the works of Philip José Farmer or Christopher Stasheff or the reissues of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Beam Pipers books.
So, I promise that the books in this series will be priced at $2.99 and that each book will have no more than 300 pages of text which is about 150,000 words. Is that fair?