Short Stories Challenge Practical

This was going to be a quick addendum to my Business: Short Stories article, but it snowballed. Think of that article as the ‘Theory’ and this one as the ‘Practical’. Apply it to your life, if you dare. 

Will this happen? Probably.

To summarize the previous article, I laid out why I wasn’t going to sell individual short stories anymore, based on the Amazon 35% Royalty on $0.99 vs. the 70% Royalty on $2.99. That point still stands so far as I’m concerned, but I left out a few nuances, craft and business.

Craft: I Like Finishing Things

Short stories get the creative juices flowing. Using scientific tracking methods, I’ve found that my word count per day on books increases if I’ve written and completed a short story in the near past. And I’ve also got a new short story to sell for everybody to admire, which is nothing to be sneezed at. I suspect I just like finishing things, and so when I do it gets the adrenaline up, but there’s also the Middle of books to be considered. That’s the most dangerous part, creatively (that is, where I tend to get bored and try to start a new book unless I chain myself to the text document)...and taking a little break to write and finish a short story reenergizes the mind. 

Business: Smashwords

My standard complaint about Smashwords is it makes my books look ugly, but it’s still a good place to sell short stories. There’s not that much formatting in a short story to mess up or for Meatgrinder to mangle, and Smashwords sends them all over the place and pays somewhere around 50% royalty. I’ve had especially good success selling short stories on Kobo via Smashwords, so I think it’s a good idea to use it as my ‘short story distributer’. This meshes well with the Theory article, because Smashwords makes it incredibly easy to make a story Free, whether via price control or via coupon. As we speak, Smashwords’ sales tracking is improving, and I suspect at some point soon they’ll work out the deal with Amazon. If I can just upload a short story DOC made from a template and watch the cash flow in from five to ten markets every quarter...well, I’d say Smashwords has earned its 10%. 

Short Stories Challenge

For business and craft reasons it’s desirable that I write and finish a short story on a regular basis. Well and good. Dean Wesley Smith declared a fancy challenge with a One Year time limit and everything, but it’s already October, and I’m too lazy to wait until January to officially challenge myself. I’ll just ask how often is the optimal regular basis? Science Says: every weekend. 

So, every weekend I’ll write a short story. Start on Saturday, finish by Sunday. Stick it up on Smashwords for free until the next story goes live, after which it’ll be a buck everywhere fine eBooks are sold (once it’s gone through the Meatgrinder). I’ll even do a little blog post about it, whynot? I’ll do this for five years, give or take. Probably. 

I’ll write books on weekdays.

Story Covers

I’d rather make my own cover than buy some ‘generic art’, but because this is a short story challenge, not a crappy-slappy cover art challenge, I made a template for my short story cover art. Remember, I’m lazy.

So lazy...

That should do it. Big author name, big title, an inconspicuous number, a logo, and clearly labelled “Short Story” so nobody can possibly be confused. As noted in the previous article, I’ll spend the big bucks on the collection covers, but whatsay for a popular short story? If it comes down to it, I’ve one idea that may or may not be reasonable.

Sketch Covers

I provide a two-sentence cover description, give an artist $50 to sketch it, add the title and author name and save it as a 600x800 jpg. I’d expect the total working time to be about an hour, so I wouldn’t expect it to be fine art or done to a deadline. Just a quick art project between big jobs, wham-bam-done: fifty bucks later, I’ve got a short story cover. Fair? Sounds fair.

Heck if I know, I’m making this up as I go.

-daB

feel free to comment

Business: Short Stories

Executive Summary: I’m not selling short story singles as eBooks anymore. To avoid ‘juggling too many sea-shells’, all my eBooks will be priced between $2.99 and $9.99, except for some free short stories for promotion. 1500 words. (Yeah, I just HBR’d your collective asses. feel free to comment, bitches.).

Since this is a reversal of my previous sexy business plan, “The Short Story Octopus”, I’ll deploy some arguments to support my new, sexier conclusion. Since this is a business article, most of them will be made with my publishing hat on, but there’re a few more drawn from other hats. There may be pictures. Also, I wish I could come up with an equally awesome nautical name, but I’ve already rejected “Big Mussel Barnacles” for sounding too ocean-porny, and my morale is low.

Publishing

Background: Amazon pays a 35% royalty on eBooks priced between $0.99 and $200 sold throughout the world, but pays a 70% royalty on eBooks priced between $2.99 to $9.99 sold via Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon FR (and more coming). The best price for an individual short story is $0.99 (yaknow, like music). Short stories do, indeed, sell. Great! But...

$0.99 @ 35% Royalty = Lame

Everything else in this article is going to build on a “juggling too many sea-shells” metaphor (and not just because it fits the ocean-porny theme.) Every story is a sea-shell, because every sea-shell is different...but most people would rather have one great sea-shell on their mantle than a big pile of good sea-shells. It’s more organized! Likewise, a savvy sea-shell seller’s shelves (say it out loud!) should be filled with those sea-shells that can be sold for the most. Selling ten one dollar sea-shells to get a quarter is not as good as selling a three dollar seashell to get two bucks, because you have to spend about the same amount of time fiddling with the one dollar sea-shells as you do with the three dollar (or the five dollar or the seven dollar or the ten dollar) sea-shells.

I’d rather sell a collection of ten short stories at 70% than 10 single short stories at 35%. Thirty-five cents is lame, esp. when I have to track it (and promote it, and manage it, and, even more basic, remember it.) It’s just better business: The official H2NH price point is “one dollar per ten thousand words plus a buck”. The $1 per 10k is to get the $100/hour I, the publisher, pay myself, the writer, while the extra buck is to pay for the formatting and cover art, whether it’s me doing it or somebody else. I can calculate how many books I’d have to sell to cover those expenses, after which it’s all profit. ‘Getting to Profit’--to bust out the HBR lingo again--takes significantly less time when I, the publisher, am getting 70% of every sale. Under the current Amazon-style royalty system, I’ll not price any eBook below $2.99 or above $9.99 again.

A few extra publishing arguments, to let me expand on the ‘plus a buck’ a bit:

Sexy eBook Formatting

Good formatting takes time, but, if you follow the H2NH workflow (and/or Paul Salvette’s excellent guide) it doesn’t really take all that much more time to do a full book or collection than it does a single short story. You have to make a more robust table of contents, and scroll through longer checking that nothing mysteriously broke in the converted files, but that’s about it. I would say two hours, maximum, if you’re comfortable with your workflow. Average it as an hour, because any less and you probably didn’t do enough checking. (No need to rush, it’ll be on the Internet forever.) Since I’m almost certainly doing it myself, I bill myself, publisher, for two hours and pay myself about a dime per sale from the ‘plus a buck’.

I Like Cover Art

It’s not professional cover art unless it has characters from the book on it, and H2NH is still seeking professionals, but, as usual, I assume ‘professional rate’ is $100/hour. Later on, especially for print books, I’ll need a professional to do my cover art. Something around fifty cents of that ‘plus a buck’ will go to that end, and it’s obvious that a collection of short stories is a more cost-effective use of a professional cover artist than a single story.

For the moment, though, I make my own cover art, and I like it, I enjoy it, and it gets the job done. Some of it is even artsy, and it only takes me about an hour, even counting taking the pictures. So, until I fire myself as cover artist, prepare for such masterpieces as

*almost definitely not by David Barron

Writing

So much for business. Let’s talk about me!

WWdaB...er...D?

It doesn’t really flow as an acronym, but what would I do? I’ve only bought two individual short stories ever, The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke by Lawrence Block and Ur by Stephen King (which, I suppose, is technically a novella...). On the other hand, I’ve brought a whole bunch of anthologies, fiction magazines, and collections. I prefer to have a whole bunch of short stories all in one place, so that I can skip around. In my reading experience, there’re always a couple lame (by which I mean, of course, ‘not to my taste at that time’, not ‘sucky’) stories in any grouping, and buying only one story is an annoying risk of that experience. Anyways, it’s more organized, I don’t want to deal with lots of files on my eBook reading device, and it’s easier to recommend a collection than to recommend a single short story. So...daB would buy a daB collection.

I’m Prolific

I write a fair amount of stories, as you may know. I’ve somewhere around fifty stories for 2011, and I’ll probably get about ten more out in between all these books I should be writing. Some of them are wandering around the pro markets, and the rest are selling on Amazon. Because I don’t remember most of them (for the simple reason that I’m always writing the next one), I’ve completely lost track of them. Just picture what it’ll be like if I had eight-hundred short stories, like certain long-time writers. And I use ‘will’, because it’s just a matter of time. (I write a lot now, and I’m not a full-time writer yet.) So, you know what? For my sanity, I’m only doing collections:

Science Fiction A Future Darkly

Fantasy To Another Shore

The Language of Ice Cubes (i.e. ‘the Alan stories’)

Undoubtedly, I’ll do various ‘themed’ collections (yaknow, like music albums) and, soon enough, I’ll put together a big ‘super-collection’:

Science Fantasy Romance

which will be fifty or so stories (including some of the ones in A Future Darkly and To Another Shore, but obviously not the Alan stories). It’ll be fun? It’s my super-genre, it’s awesome, it’ll be a nice thick print book, and, bonus, I’ll never have to think of another super-collection name again: My next fifty stories will go into “Science Fantasy Romance II”. Just consult the Wikipedia Roman numerals page for each fifty stories after that.

Synergy

Let’s stick both sides together and see what it looks like! We could call this part “Promotion”, I guess, but we’re doing it Harvard Business Review-style this time. It’s a theme, and you have to respect themes or what, really, is the point?

Pro Sales!

Let’s face it, it’s just a lot more fun to submit stuff to fiction magazines than to put it up on Amazon.. I love rejection letters (not that I bother to read them), because it means I can send the story somewhere else, and when a story is accepted, they give you money and you get to write an About the Author blurb and everybody visits your website and buys one or all of your many books. Then, after that run’s done, you can put the story in a collection. Really, there’s no downside.

I regularly read, often submit to, and have been rejected repeatedly by pretty much every fiction magazine that pays pro rates (according to Duotropes), but the only magazine I’m absolutely obsessed with being in is Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Sorry, all others: it’s focused!

Free is Fun

All that said, I think short stories make great promotions. They’re craft pieces, showing off my awesome writing in a convenient, no-hassle package. Leaving aside the argument against free (hypothesis: many download, few read), I think it’s a good strategy, as well as just being fun. I recently made my steampunk short story “Timpani the Ostrich Rancher” free on Amazon, and, last I checked, more than two-thousand people have picked it up. Since it doesn’t suck, I like to think that’ll lead to sales in the long run. I figure if I make one short story free for each collection, and put links to every other H2NH book and collection in the back of the free eBook, it’s as good a promotion as any. Or, at least, incredibly low-maintenance.

Which is just as good for the busy publisher.

Sexy Conclusion

I’m not selling short story singles as eBooks anymore. To avoid ‘juggling too many sea-shells’, all my eBooks will be priced between $2.99 and $9.99, except for some free short stories for promotion.

-daB

feel free to comment

Like Unto a Rubber Tree is the Business of Writing

Folk hereabouts have rubber tree farms. Now the interesting thing about these trees is that before you can get any rubber out of them worth anything, you’ve got to plant the trees and grow them for five years until they’re ripe, then you can harvest the rubber and sell it steady for the next thirty years, and then you cut down the trees and make some really nice furniture. Some owners just hire people to harvest and sell the rubber in exchange for forty percent of the profit while they sit in the house counting their sixty percent. Or they plant some more rubber trees. It’s a good life.

So, what’s my point? Calm down, writer guy. It’s too hot. Work in the shade, stop looking at your sales numbers. You’re getting all anxious over something that ain’t ripe yet. Add to it, it’s lonely. Don’t even think about quitting for at least five years, and don’t huff the fertilizer you should be using to tend it and make it grow.

BAM! Spreadsheet --


Here’s a real basic spreadsheet. You can make it too, so long as you know where to find the SUM function in Excel. I’d make it interactive, but I’m super lazy. It’s all monthly, and I’ve set it up to do all the royalty math (using Amazon’s setup). At the top I input my basic minimum income, and included an hourly wage based on that. All that done, I just input how many of each product H2NH has at the moment and see what happens. This leads to two basic conclusions:

I don’t have enough rubber trees.
I need more titles to get to my basic minimum income, unless the lightning strike of sudden popularity hits me in the business (read: Magic! Fairy Dust! Bubble!). I can play with the numbers and see exactly how much more I’d have to write to get to my basic minimum income, but the inescapable conclusion is “I should write more.” Getting this result is a good test of any Writer’s Business Plan. Five hundred rubber trees will earn you one thousand baht a night...

My rubber trees ain’t ripe.
For the average monthly sales, I input the “scraping-the-bottom” benchmarks culled from Dean Wesley Smith’s various series. Right now I only have actual data for my short stories, and it’s a number that’s a little less than 2. Then again, the reason I only have actual data for short stories is that I’ve only been doing this for six months. That’s kinda the point. Nobody cares about a field of six-month rubber trees except some random people who happen to notice it while they’re walking down the highway. You can’t even sit under a six-month rubber tree to get shade from the sun. But, you spot a mature five-year rubber tree farm and you’ll wander in, say hello to the rest of the people sitting around. What else’ve you got to do? It’s hot.

So, here’s my plan: I’m going to Write for five years, give Amazon et al thirty percent to sell my writing, and then sit in my house counting the seventy percent. Or write more.

It’s a good life.