(I know, I owe you a post about imagining the “death of the library.” But this is a big deal.)

I recently got into a Facebook thread with a former (now grown up) student over e-book pricing decisions. She’s an avid reader but refuses to buy any e-book that’s more than a dollar or two in price. It was nothing against the authors, or the books themselves, she explained. She just didn’t see why she should ever pay more than that for a book. Neither did her friends.

It’s a fair point, especially if all you’ve ever known about the experience of acquiring books is looking at price lists on Amazon and clicking a button. From the producer’s side of the transaction, it’s more complicated.

There’s the author, who creates a labor of love until the minute someone decides to click that yellow button that says “Buy”. There’s the editor, who toils over the manuscript to make it readable. Some editors will carve out whole chunks of text to achieve that, others will simply correct the grammar, spacing, and spelling, but the effort is the same.

There is the cover artist who brings a point of story from inside the pages of the manuscript into blazing life.

The point, as Kevin G. Summers makes clear here, is that books cost money to make. Considerable amounts of money. In the case of indie publishing, everyone except the author makes money, at least until he or she sells enough copies to recover the costs of the book in question. Speaking as someone who has just started down this road, it’s a steep learning curve.

Indy authors Nick Cole and Michael Bunker, and ThirdScribe creator Rob McClellan have made a thing, called Apocalypse Weird. I’ve mentioned it on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve reviewed a bunch of the books they’ve released.

To be blunt, they need money to keep the ball rolling, and have built an Indiegogo project to raise it. Three greats ways of donating stand out:

First, just drop a buck into the bucket. It makes no dent in your budget and still helps us out.

Second, you can drop a fiver into the bucket and get a neat perk.

Third–and my favorite option–$20 buys you the first eight AW novels, which have been getting rave reviews across the board for months. Or, for the same $20, you can pre-order the next eight AW novels in the series, which are sure to be every bit as good.

Sixteen outstanding works of End of the World fiction for $40. It doesn’t get better than that.

Actually–it does get better. There are plenty of awesome perks to choose from. But, the sale ends in 8 days, so check out the fund raiser to donate now!

[books_custom size=”150″ type=”random” custom_sort=”publisher” custom_sort_value=”Wonderment Media Incorporated”]