Eric James Stone is a successful short story writer. You can read my review of his excellent “Like Diamond Tears From Emerald Eyes” here. Now, in Tips on Keeping Short Stories from Becoming Long Stories he shares excellent insights on how to keep those short stories from growing out of control. As someone whose stories always tend to go long, let me say that I know from experience that these tips work.
Some promo tips from mega-seller Marie Force.
I just changed the cover of a book (Maid for Love, book 1 in my McCarthys of Gansett Island Series) that’s been on sale for three years and free for two as a loss leader for a series that has 11.5 books (as of today–release day for book 11). I changed the cover (of books 2 and 3 as well) just ahead of a BookBub ad for Maid for Love. This book has been on BookBub quite a few times since it’s been free and lately, I could expect about 25,000 or so downloads across the platforms after a BookBub ad. This time, the number was closer to 70,000 downloads with a huge conversion to books 2 and beyond. Another thing we did before the BookBub ad was drop the prices on books 2-3 from $4.99 to $2.99 and books 4-6 from $4.99 to $3.99, leaving the front list at $4.99. I realized with 11 books and a novella in the series, it would cost a new reader more than $50 to buy the full series, thus the price break on the earlier books. Both the new cover for Maid for Love and the new pricing for books 2-6 yielded very impressive results. The series has sold more than 1.3 million ebooks since it debuted in 2011 and the last three have been top 10 NYT bestsellers. I was hoping to gain many more new readers from these strategies, and so far, it seems to be working just as I’d hoped it would. I love being able to try these things as an indie author!
Another poster congratulated her and said he’d gone and purchased the book. It was free; why not give it a shot?
Thanks, Bill. Hope you enjoy Maid for Love, and thanks for the congrats. The 1.3 million sales is especially thrilling when you consider that Maid for Love was rejected all over the place. Except by the readers. 🙂
Find more at The Passive Voice.
What’s Marie using? A series with a number of titles in it, competitive pricing, loss-leader sampling that sometimes includes a free book, and BookBub.
More about Marie and her books on her website.
David Gaughran puts it all into perspective.
Since the huge shift to online purchasing and e-books, a common meme is that there is some kind of “discoverability” problem in publishing.
The funny thing is readers don’t seem to have any problem finding books they love. Any readers I talk to have a time problem – reading lists a mile long and never enough hours in the day to read all the great books they are discovering.
The real discoverability problem in publishing is that readers are discovering (and enjoying) books that don’t come from the large publishers. What these publishers have is a competition problem not a discoverability problem.
They have reason to. I had a stab last year at estimating how much of the e-book market self-publishers have grabbed in the US, pegging it at around 25%. The much more rigorous Author Earnings reports have confirmed that estimate, showing that self-publishers had captured 30% of the unit sales on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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So when large publishers say that the discoverability puzzle hasn’t been solved online, they are really expressing despair at retailers recommending books not published by them.
And when large publishers say that online retailers haven’t matched the experience of buying in physical stores, they mean that they wish there was some way to relegate all that stuff from small publishers and self-publishers to the warehouse, and have tables piled high with James Patterson and Snooki.
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The fear-mongers always forget Amazon’s core philosophy: recommend the product the customer is most likely to purchase. It’s interesting to note that this is the exact opposite of traditional co-op: recommending the book that the publisher wants purchased.
While it’s revealing to look at sites like Bookish and consider what Big Publishing would do with retail or discovery, we already know what it does with self-publishing. Exploitative vanity press Author Solutions runs self-publishing companies for HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Harlequin, is owned by Penguin Random House, and is now recommended by Publishers Weekly.
Large publishers want to decide what gets published, what gets distributed, what gets recommended, what gets discovered, and what gets sold.
Amazon – and the digital revolution it instigated – has made that impossible.
Anyone can publish. Distribution has been blown wide open. Large publishers have lost power over what books get recommended and discovered too, with the agnostic approach of sites like Amazon, Goodreads, and BookBub. And large publishers have definitely lost control of what is getting sold: self-publishers have grabbed a huge chunk of the market, and more and more writers are beginning to realize they don’t need a publisher to reach readers and make money.
This is the real reason why Big Publishing hates Amazon. Large publishers face real competition for the first time and they don’t like it one bit.
More at Let’s Get Visible.
Publishers have lost the barriers to entry that used to keep most of the competition out. Amazon set up a totally new distribution channel that has grabbed at least 41% of the book market.
And of that 41% percent, it appears self-publishers have about as much of that channel as traditional publishers do.
Think about that for a second.
Almost half of book distribution is now out of publisher control. With no barriers, the hordes are running in to sell their books, pushing publisher books out of the good spots. The number of competitors is growing. And the publishers can’t get Amazon to relegate the riffraff to the back rooms. Can’t get them to feature only their books.
Worse still, it appears lots of readers don’t mind that at all.
We already know that many people break into the novel market WITHOUT writing short stories. So they’re not necessary for starting a writing career, although they might have helped some folks. See this page http://johndbrown.com/writers/writing-business-facts-figures/ for links that will show you how people break in. But some people just love short stories, so the question is can you make a living writing them?
The answer is yes, you CAN do it–you go into television and get hired to write scripts for TV series (grin).
But what about doing it in print? Well, let’s try some conservative math.
TARGET: a conservative $30,000 gross per year.
The median household income in the USA is $50,000. But you can find a place (rural Ohio or Indiana or North Dakota etc.) where housing is relatively cheap and live on $30k. I think this is a reasonable target. So let’s make some assumptions about the stories. We’ll assume each short averages around 4,000 words and that you get paid seven cents per word. To earn your target amount you’d have to sell:
At 10 cents a word:
No, this doesn’t count reprints, movie deals, gaming contracts, etc. But reprints usually don’t pay well and movie deals, while they pay well, can’t be counted on. Besides, we’re being conservative.
Again, a little math.
TARGET: 2 stories, 8,000 words average per week
If we assume you write five days per week for six hours per day at a rate of 500 words per hour, which may be very aggressive if you try to include thinking and revising time in that, then you’ll produce 15,000 words per week.
So, yes, this is a feasible, if aggressive, production rate–on paper. But I don’t know anyone finishing this many stories per week. Furthermore, it’s highly unlikely you will sell 100% of what you send out. So you need to actually produce MORE than two stories per week. You might have to end up writing three or four. Week after week after week. That’s one story every day or two.
Theoretically, yes, that rate of production still fits in the 15,000 word capacity. But I’m going to say it’s doubtful anyone can do this because I haven’t seen anyone do it. Have you?
But even if you were the Lizard King of writing and could pull this off every week of the year, the question is can you sell all those stories?
According to http://duotrope.com/index.aspx there are about 200 venues for short fiction paying pro rates, which for them is 5 cents or more. No, anthologies are not represented there. But I’m not sure it will change the equations that much. So you have to sell 107 stories to these 200 markets. I don’t know how many slots are open in these places. Some of these venues publish one story per year, some publish twelve, some more. Some are published semi-annually, quarterly, bi-monthly. Let’s say there are 2,000 slots. Of course, we might need to count total wordage up for hire at these venues instead, but we’re just doing this on the back of a napkin. So 107 stories out of 2,000 slots means you’d have to make up 5% of the market. You sell five of every 100 stories these folks buy.
FIVE PERCENT OF THE WHOLE MARKET!
Nobody makes up 5% of the whole short fiction market. NOBODY. Okay, let’s say there are 4,000 slots. Each venue averaging twenty stories per year. So you have to make up 2.5% of the market. Nobody does that either. What about 1%? Anyone? One out of every 100 stories? No.
Is this because writers are lazy? Could it be done? You might be the first?
That’s lotto thinking. What you want is demonstrated income, i.e. people have DEMONSTRATED it can be done. Nobody has demonstrated this can be done in the current market. So it’s not reasonable to expect you’ll do something nobody else is doing.
So the answer is that even if you produce three to four short stories per week, you’ll never be able to sell enough to make a living. Now, I know of a few authors who can make a few thousand dollars per year writing short stories. I’ve heard of one guy who made $10,000 a year for a few years. But can you live on that? Even if you move to a place where housing is very, very cheap? Besides, we’re trying to avoid lotto thinking here. We’re trying to be practical and conservative. This is one guy. Do you yourself know anyone who has done this? I wouldn’t want to base my future on what one guy did.
CONCLUSION: there’s no evidence that strongly suggests it’s feasible to sell at the necessary rate to make $10,000 per year let alone $30,000.
Go back up and look at the annual output of words. If you can write 300,000 to 450,000 words per year, you could write four to six young adult novels (averaging 70,000 words per book) or two to three adult novels (averaging 120,000 words per) in that same time.
Why not build a career in novels?
Yes, you may start at $5,000 – $6,000 advance per book. But if you sell well, that goes up. Plus, if it does sell well, you get royalties. Plus you can sell foreign novel rights. Plus you get an advance to help with some expenses. More importantly, we have thousands and thousands of folks DEMONSTRATING they can make a living writing at that pace.
So write short stories if you love them, but don’t expect to make a living at it.
Could you make a living selling your shorts out there?
Only if your shorts were once worn by Brittany Spears.
For more on e-book sales, let me recommend you read a few posts by J. A. Konrath. I’ll let you decide. But please note that he’s selling NOVELS. And as always, you want to be realistic about this and make sure you see many people DEMONSTRATING it can be done. Do you think Konrath presents such evidence? You tell me.
Read these two posts by Dean Wesley Smith where he busts some big myths about not being able to make a living writing:
Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Only 300 Writers Make a Living
Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Can’t Make Money in Fiction
From Russell Blake.
I get a lot of emails from authors who are just starting out, or who are on the road but frustrated at the level of success they’ve seen thus far. I wish I had more time to correspond with everyone, but the truth is I’m usually slammed with writing/publishing related tasks, and don’t have a lot of opportunity to do more than offer a brief sentence or two.
But the last few missives I received got me thinking about what I wish someone had explained to me before I started self-publishing in June, 2011. So here’s my top 10 list, such as it is:
1) There are lots of talented writers out there. Lots. And it seems like everyone’s now got a book, or books, on Amazon. Being good isn’t enough to guarantee you anything but satisfaction for a job well done. It should, but it doesn’t. Don’t take it personally.
2) There are lots of crap writers out there. Lots. And while many sink to the bottom of the swamp with nary a whimper, some sell well, and some even become bestsellers. This is because the world’s unfair and, depending upon the genre, oftentimes readers don’t care much whether they suck or not, as long as the story entertains or reaffirms some conviction or bias the readers have. These authors succeed in spite of their abilities, rather than because of them. Don’t take it personally.
3) The internet is filled with gurus who know nothing. It’s hard to turn around without bumping into a writing or self-publishing expert. Most of them are completely full of shit, and don’t sell many books – but that doesn’t stop them from trying to get you to part with your money to hear them tell you what you need to do to sell well. Whenever you hear advice, consider the source. If it’s a million selling author, that means more than from someone whose work ranks slightly lower on Amazon than the collected love poems of Adolf Hitler in original German. Seems like everybody but me is selling seminars, courses, or how to books that promise much and deliver nothing. Must be a good business there, but I prefer labeling my fiction as such and putting in a car chase or gunfight rather than trying to trick the dim or desperate out of a few bucks.
4) You need to be able to put out books at a decent clip. Sure, you might hit huge off one, but probably not. You’ll be building your readership the hard way, which means one reader at a time, and the more quality books you have on your virtual bookshelf the more likely one will catch someone’s eye. This doesn’t appeal to a lot of authors’ wish that they could write a book every year or two and have a nice living. Sorry. I have yet to see that happen. But it’s a seductive siren song, so lots of newbies listen to it like it’s still a viable way to go. In self-publishing, not so much.
More at “10 Things I Wish I’d Been Told”.
I know, I know. Stop making blog posts, John, and finish CURSE.
Here you go. And here’s the presentation in PDF: Story lessons from The Hunger Games handout. Thanks again to Stephen Nelson for the recording!
I read this article today, laughed, and then thought a while. Don’t know if tie-ins will ever be in my future. I would hope to do it just once for a series or film I love. In the meantime, it’s great fun reading about someone else’s experience.
‘Burn Notice’: The Novel
Does a real writer accept a gig doing books spun off from films or TV shows? A real writer found the answer to his own question.
By Tod Goldberg, Special to The Times
August 24, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-tie-ins24-2008aug24,0,1463672.story
