Refining my short story strategy

I’ve blogged several times about my short story strategy. To restate it briefly, I’ve found that it works best to self-publish all of my short story singles for free, and to take them down when I have enough of them (+40k words, usually about 10 stories) to bundle into a collection. I earn more this way than I do from selling the singles at 99¢, since all of the free stories help me to sell the collections. Also, I get better engagement from my fans and better discoverability with new readers, since when time is the only cost for reading a story, readers tend to prefer something short.

I’ve also found that with just a little bit of a marketing push, consisting mostly of my newsletter, reddit, free promotion sites, and group promotions such as Book Funnel and Story Origin, I can get my stories out to as many readers as most of the professional and semi-prozines. This was surprising to me, but when I compare my download numbers to the magazine circulation numbers published annually in Locus Magazine, there’s actually not much of a disparity. With a more aggressive marketing push, I can probably exceed those numbers.

Partly because of this, and partly because of how batshit crazy insane woke most of the traditional and award-winning SF&F short story markets have become, I no longer prioritize selling my short stories to the traditional markets, and am just fine self-publishing them first, even if that means forfeiting the couple hundred bucks they might have earned by selling them to a traditional market first. Many of my stories have languished on my hard drive for years while I was pursuing that path, and since time is money, I find it more worthwhile to publish them now. However, I do like to take at least a few months to submit them to the markets that aren’t insanely woke, and occasionally make a sale.

But still, I’ve been struggling lately with some of the finer details of this plan. How often should I publish my short story singles? How long should I keep them on submission before self-publishing them? Should I self-publish all of the stories that will eventually go in the next collection, or should I hold a few back so as to give my readers a reason to buy it? How long should each story be available as a free short story single?

From September 2021 through March 2022, I self-published at least two new titles every month. The purpose of the experiment was to see how this would impact overall sales. My sales did go up quite a bit by the end of this period, but that may have also been because of a few lucky BookBub Featured Deals that I got.

(It was a lot harder to get BBFDs back in 2021, largely because traditional publishing dumped all of the books that were in the production process when covid hit, so there was a lot more competition for spots. But now, it appears that there’s a bit of a drought of trad-published books, since all of the stuff coming out now was acquired during the time when they were still adjusting to all of the pandemic lockdown measures, and weren’t nearly as productive.)

However, the experiment was useful in demonstrating just how difficult it is to maintain such a rigorous self-publishing schedule for a lengthy period of time. I think that at least part of the reason I’m going through something of a creative slump right now is because of how much energy and mental space it took to publish 14 new titles in 7 consecutive months. Perhaps when I was still single, I could have kept up that pace indefinitely, but not with a wife and a baby daughter who deserve my attention. I can still occasionally publish more than one title per month, but not for multiple consecutive months without suffering some detrimental consequences.

At the same time, I do think there’s something to be said for consistency. For a long time in my early career, I would publish only intermittently, sometimes with several months going by before I put out another title. If instead, I’d spent the last ten years putting out a new free short story once a month, in the first week of the month, I’d probably not only have more fans right now, but more loyal fans.

So the plan from now on is to publish a new free short story each month, on the first Saturday of the month, and to publish it under my Joe Vasicek name (stories published under any of my pen names don’t count, even if they’re under an open pen name).

But at the same time, I don’t want to have more than six free short stories out at a time. Six, because 1. that’s how many stories appear at a time on the series carousel on Amazon, at least with a wide screen monitor, and 2. I don’t want to have more than half of the stories I plan to bundle together out at the same time. Since I’m never going to put less than ten stories in a collection, and one of the six free singles is always going to be “Paradox of Choice” (it’s published under a CC BY 4.0 license, so there’s no sense in ever unpublishing it), six is the magic number.

As for whether or not to hold some stories back, so long as no more than half of the stories in the next collection are available as free singles at the same time, I think it’s okay to put them all out there. My loyal fans will have already downloaded all of the stories when they were free, but they’re also my loyal fans, and that seems like a good way to reward their loyalty. Besides, some of them will probably go ahead and buy the collection anyway, both to support me and to get the author’s note.

What about putting stories on submission? How much of a buffer should I keep to ensure that each story gets sent out to all of the markets that I’m willing to sell it to?

I think a buffer of six months is enough. It might require doing some simultaneous submissions, but a lot more markets allow simultaneous submissions nowadays. And with a six month buffer, if I sell a couple of them, I won’t be scrambling to write new stories to fill up the next publishing slot—not unless all six of them sell within a few days of each other.

If a story sells to a traditional market, I’ll probably just put it straight in the next collection when the exclusivity period expires, rather than putting it on the schedule to publish as a free short story single. But it depends on what’s going on at the time, and whether it’s more important to get that collection out or to refill the buffer. I won’t put out the next collection until I have at least six other short stories to fill out the free singles.

So that’s the plan. Maybe it makes sense to you, maybe it’s clear as mud, but the important things are 1. I’m going to put out a new free short story each month on the first Saturday of the month, come hell or high water, and 2. I’m only going to have six free short stories available at a time. And all of the stories in my collections will appear first either as a free short story, or in one of the magazines/anthologies. Sometimes both.