The Business Side 100

Here's the deal: This is a lot of fun, but let's get organized. To commemorate that, here is a disorganized but lucid series of Business Side reports.

The simple goal and plan is as follows:
I'm not doing anything fancy until I have 100 stories online.
I've looked at a lot of ePub folk (and applied my otherfield knowledge), and worrying about advertising doesn't seem to have any noticeable effect until you have (or at least have the promise of) a big pile of material. I'll announce each story as it goes up on Twitter (and on this blog if I remember), then try my very best to ignore the sales numbers entirely. Besides, 100 stories is a fine goal. Wanna race?

Second, I put up my first SF short story five-story series (find it here), and since I have 15 stories up already it won't be too long before I have another one up. I don't know about you, but I can't keep track of all these, and I wrote them! I was trying to find a way to organize all this for obsessive types like me, and I did what I normally do when I'm trying to figure out something about ePublishing: wander around other ePubbers and see what they're doing. But none of you folk are doing it right, jeez. So I'm doing it my own way, thanks to Google Docs. If you go to Available Stories, you'll see a bibliography that's convenient both for me and you, with the added bonus of listing upcoming releases.

In the future I intend to roll out stories in the following levels: 1 @ .99, 5 @ 2.99, 10 @ 4.99. Oddly enough, on Amazon for the Kindle it's better for me if you buy 5 @ 2.99, because then I get about two bucks for five stories instead of the buck eighty I'd get if you bought them all separately. So weird.

I also want to do serial novels, because those are a lot more fun than regular novels. On that...
Note:
Because I ran the numbers (which sounds more impressive than "realized I did something dumb") and "discovered" that since I was planning on eventually selling the five Moon Base stories all together at 4.99, selling them one by one at $2.99 didn't really make much sense, so I set them down to a buck. They're on the border between "short novel" and "long story", so I'll put them in "story". If you bought one at the $2.99 price, shoot me an e-mail and I'll coupon you the full book free when it comes out.

I think this is shaping up to be quite a pretty cool plan, if I do say so.

And if I'm just totally wrong, hey! You'll know first, because Writing Failure is just another of this blog's missions.

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Since I did promise honesty, I do have to remark that this is a pretty cheap (but not lame!) way to get some new cover art. But, c'mon? It's got that big blue space in the middle, and it is one of my most popular stories, along with one of my favorites. It's good for everybody.

If you purchase a Series and happen to want the hand-crafted Cover Art you totally missed out on, I'll be happy to send it upon request.

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Words? Yes
Short Story "Bitsy Pollo Save Us!" - finished, submitted
Short Story "A Blot on the Escutcheon" - researched, beginning, mostly outlined
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Reading - ?

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