ebook revolution – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Navigating Woke SF, Part 3: Toward a New Short Story Strategy

So I really love how China Mike Glyer cherry-picked the excerpts that he quoted from my last blog post, leaving out how I said that it’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt, or how you can’t take diversity statements at face value because of all the elitist signalling language. But the thing that I especially love is the way he characterized all of what I said as an “opportunity to learn from a professional why he’s self-rejecting from these short fiction markets.”

No, That’s Not Self-Rejection

There are so many things wrong with the phrase “self-rejection.” On its face, it sounds empowering, but the underlying assumption is that submitting your short stories to the traditional markets is your best/only option, and therefore you’d be a fool not to follow that path. Is that really an empowering message? Or is it actually more empowering—not to mention, straightforward—to say that it’s not you rejecting yourself, but you rejecting them?

For a long time, though, I really did believe that choosing not to submit a story to a high-paying market was tantamount to rejecting my own story. Even as an indie author, I still believed that for a short story to be successful, it had to be traditionally published first.

That was the thinking that informed my old short story strategy. Submit to the traditional markets first, and don’t self-publish until all of the high-paying professional markets have been exhausted, or (hopefully) until the exclusivity period of your contract wears off. You might spend years sending your story out to the markets, only to find that self-publishing is the only way to get it out into the world, but at least you have the moral victory of knowing you didn’t “self-reject.” Except, in a world where it’s possible to be your own publisher, you did reject your own story all those years, simply by choosing to keep it on submission instead of publishing it yourself!

To be fair, when it comes to short stories, self-publishing and traditional publishing are not mutually exclusive. And years of experience with self-publishing short stories has taught me that it’s very difficult to earn significant money with them. As I put it a couple of months ago:

…short stories can be useful to do just about every other thing except make money selling them directly. If you price the singles at $2.99, you might sell as many as one or two per year, making less than $5. If you price them at 99¢, you may sell as many as a dozen per year, if you’re lucky—again, making less than $5. I didn’t have much luck getting bundles of 3-5 to sell, but larger collections of 10 to 12 stories do occasionally sell, and at a decent enough rate that I’m earning more on those stories than I would if I’d sold them individually as singles. But short story collections don’t sell anywhere near as well as novels.

So if you can expect to sell a short story to a high-paying market in a reasonable period of time, it certainly makes sense to put it out on submission instead of self-publishing it first. But as I’ve established in the last two posts, when most of the high-paying markets have gone totally woke, that changes the equation—especially if you are a straight white male who refuses to bend the knee.

To review, here are the potential benefits of submitting to the traditional short story markets first:

The pay.
Marketing.
Prestige and reputation.
Networking.
Awards and SFWA membership, if you care about that. I don’t.

And here are the potential drawbacks:

Lost time.
Lost time in exclusivity.
Lost time in submission.
Lost time not submitting simultaneously.
Lost time running out of open markets.

In short, the biggest potential drawback is all of that lost time where you could have self-published that story, but didn’t. Tell me again how that isn’t self-rejection?

Costs and Benefits of Self-Publishing (and How Wokeness Changes the Equation)

So if you can’t really expect to make any money self-publishing short stories, what good are they anyway?

In my previous post, I compared short stories to pawns in the game of chess. The pawn is the weakest piece in the game, but many chess masters still consider it the “soul of the game,” not because of what each piece individually can do, but what they can accomplish when taken together. A strong pawn structure is key to both openings and midgame strategy, and in the endgame, pawns become critically important as they threaten to advance to the final rank, where they can be queened.

Short stories are similar to pawns in this way. Taken individually, they’re not particularly significant, and if you’ve only written or published one or two of them, they’re probably not going to have a huge impact on your career. But when you have a bunch of them and get them to work together, they can build your career (not to mention, help you develop your craft) quite effectively. And there’s always the chance that you can get one optioned for film, just like advancing a pawn to the back rank.

About a year ago, I did something very unconventional and made all of my short story singles free. Here was my thinking behind that decision:

As a short story reader, I’m already used to paying for anthologies—and I’m more likely than other readers to buy them, since I’m the kind of reader who seeks out short stories. So if I pick up a handful of free short stories from an author and come to really enjoy her work, I’m already primed to buy her collections when I finish each story—and that makes the backmatter of each free single the best place for her to advertise her collections.
It’s a bit like first-in-series free, except instead of the one free book pointing to the rest of the series, there’s a bunch of free short stories all pointing to the same one (or two or three) collections. The typical reader is probably going to need to read a few of an author’s short stories anyways to really become a fan, so making all of the stories free could really be the way to go.
Of course, the big downside to this as an author is that you probably can’t sell reprint rights to the stories that are available as free singles. Why would an editor buy your story for their publication if it’s already available for free? So you would have to make the singles free for a limited time, if selling the stories to the reprint markets is part of your strategy.
But if you’re going to eventually bundle those stories into a collection, that’s not really a problem. Publish them as free singles as soon as the rights revert back to you, and then take down the singles when you have enough of them to put into a collection.

In the past several months since embarking on this experiment, I’m happy to report that it’s been a success! Not only have these free short story singles brought in new readers by giving them a wider sample of my work, but they’ve also been quite effective at building engagement among my newsletter subscribers and driving sales of my other works.

So here are the benefits I’ve seen by publishing free short story singles:

Marketing. The free short story singles are great marketing tools because the cost to try them out is minimal, not only in terms of price but in terms of time.
Discoverability. Nothing is quite as good at getting your name out there as a free story.
Name recognition. They say the average person has to see your brand at least seven times before it starts to stick. By putting a bunch of short stories out there that readers can pick up for free, it helps my name to stick with them.
Engagement. My short story singles are some of my most—and best—reviewed ebooks. This is something I genuinely didn’t expect, but it’s helped to boost the effectiveness of everything else.
Converting casual readers into fans. This has also been a pleasant surprise. Every time I send out a newsletter plugging one of my free short story singles—even one that’s been out for a while—I see an uptick in sales of my other books, as well as an uptick in fanmail from readers who credit the short stories for really turning them onto my work.
Regularly putting out new work. This is potentially huge. At the end of the day, nothing else is as good at selling your books as publishing the next book. Ideally, all those books would be novels, but since I’m not the kind of writer who can put out a new novel every month, short stories can pick up the slack—especially if they’re free.

There are still a lot of things that I still want to tweak, both to drive organic newsletter subscribers and to drive sales of my short story collections, but in terms of overall strategy I think I’ve got the self-publishing end down pretty good. So what are the drawbacks?

Because most of the high-paying short story markets only purchase first publication rights, the cost is that you give up what you could have gotten by going with the traditional markets first. But if all of those markets have gone too far woke, that changes the equation considerably:

The Pay. If all but a handful of the higher paying markets have gone woke and are therefore off the table, it doesn’t make sense to hold out for the money—nor does it make sense to make pay rates the deciding factor in whether or not to submit. If you have the time on your publishing schedule to send it out, great! Go for it! But don’t let the hope of a couple hundred bucks keep you from putting it out yourself.
Marketing. If a market has gone woke, then it’s reasonable to assume that its readers and supporters have also gone woke. Since that’s not my target audience, it doesn’t make sense to hold out for getting published, no matter how large their readership or subscriber base. In fact, publication with a woke market may actually hurt me by turning off the very non-woke readers that I’m hoping to reach.
Prestige and reputation. Same as above. If a market has gone woke, their reputation precedes them for both good and ill. Better to know my target audience and stay true to them than to seek honors from those who insist I bend the knee.
Networking. If my predictions are correct and the culture is starting to shift decisively against everything woke, then the writers and editors I ought to be networking with are largely working on passion projects and semi-pro startups, not the established markets.

Revised Short Story Strategy

With all of that in mind, here is my new short story strategy:

Stage Zero: Put the Story on the Self-Publishing Schedule

The goal here is to publish something new consistently every month. Every time I write a short story, I immediately put it on the publishing schedule for a month where I don’t have a novel or a bundle already scheduled.

At a minimum, I should have enough stories to fill out the publishing schedule for at least the next six months. That way, if one of them sells to a traditional market, I can bump all the other ones forward, or have time to write something new. And ideally, I should fill out the schedule for the next 12 to 18 months, in order to have more time to put new stories on submission.

But unlike before, I’m not going to wait until a story exhausts all the potential markets before I self-publish it. If the story hasn’t sold yet to a traditional market and it’s slotted to be self-published next month, self-publishing takes precedence.

Stage One: Submit to the Traditional Markets

Before, my plan was to submit to all of the available markets that paid at least 5¢ per word, starting at the highest paying ones and working my way down until all of them were exhausted. But since most of those markets have gone incurably woke and it no longer makes sense to hold out for the pay, I’m now willing to submit to any market that pays at least 1¢ per word.

Since time is the key factor here—and the most relevant cost—instead of starting with the highest paying markets and working my way down, I’ll prioritize markets that allow simultaneous submissions and hit them all up at about the same time. Of course, if the story sells, I’ll promptly inform all of the other markets and withdraw my story. The same holds true if the story is still out for submission when I self-publish it.

For markets that allow simultaneous submissions, I’ll submit to any market that has an average wait time of 90 days or less, but for markets that do not allow simultaneous submissions, I’ll only send my story to them if their average wait time is 45 days or less. Again, time is the key factor here, and the most relevant cost. If a market can’t turn around my submission in less than six weeks, and still demands that I give them the exclusive right to consider my story, free of charge, I’m probably better off submitting elsewhere.

Stage Two: Self-Publish as a Free Short Story Single

This part of the plan remains exactly the same as before. But since ideally I’m turning around stories faster, that means I can put out short story collections faster as well. I’m not sure when I should decide to keep the short story single up while it’s also bundled in a collection, but that’s a publishing decision that has little to do with navigating the woke SF markets, so I’ll mull it over for now.

Stage Three: Bundle in Collections and Submit to the Reprint Markets

Again, this part of the plan is largely unchanged, with the caveat that I won’t be submitting my stories to any market that’s gone totally woke. Because of this, there may be times when my previously published stories aren’t on submission at all, but since that’s already the case, I’m not too worried about it. Besides, submitting to the reprint markets isn’t a high priority.

Conclusions

Thank goodness we live in a time when independent publishing is a viable option! If not, there’s a very good chance that none of my stories would have an avenue for getting out into the world, simply because I’m a straight white male who refuses to bend the knee to the woke establishment’s lies. In spite of all the insanity—and in spite of the fact that most of the major SF&F short story markets have gone completely woke—this is still the best time in history to be a writer and a reader.

Racism is trendy again

“People of color” is an inherently racist phrase.

There. I said it. I may get into trouble for saying it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Before we unpack the phrase “people of color,” let’s first define our terms. This is where the heart of the controversy lies.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, racism means:

: poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racism means:

Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.

I refer to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary specifically because they are the two highest authorities in the English language. In the interest of impartiality, I’ll include the Wiktionary definition as well, which anyone can edit:

Prejudice or discrimination based upon race.

Seems pretty clear, right? Racism is discrimination based on race.

That is, unless you’re a progressive. To them, the only people who can ever be racist are whites, because racism is systematic and the systems of oppression benefit whites at the expense of non-whites. This is called “white privilege,” and the fact that most of us cannot see it is further proof that it is true.

(Pay no attention to the fact that a black man became President of the United States—effectively the most powerful man on Earth—in the face of these “systems of oppression.” How do the progressives justify this? I have no frickin’ idea. The mental gymnastics it must take… but I digress.)

Because the system is racist, and all non-white people are oppressed, according to progressive “logic” non-whites cannot be racist. This effectively gives them a free pass to discriminate in almost any way, shape, or form against people who are white.

This is where the term “people of color” comes in. It’s simply a more polite way of saying “non-white.” Don’t believe me? Check out the Wikipedia article. It’s right there in the first sentence:

Person of color (plural: people of color, persons of color, sometimes abbreviated POC) is a term used primarily in the United States to describe any person who is not white.

In other words, it is a term that was invented to discriminate against whites. What do African-Americans, Punjabs, Japanese, Mayans, and Australian Aborigines racially have in common? Nothing at all—except that they’re all non-white, and therefore fall under the catch-all term “people of color.”

I despise the progressive redefinition of racism as much as I despise the term “reverse racism.” There is no such thing as reverse racism, because racism doesn’t have a damned direction! When ANYONE discriminates against another person based on ANY race, whether black, white, yellow, red, green, or purple, it is racism pure and simple.

Lately, I’ve seen the phrase “people of color” come up in the submissions guidelines of a number of short story markets. Usually, it will be something along the lines of a call of submissions for a special issue, though it sometimes appears in their diversity statements as well. To me, it always raises a red flag.

When all of the major markets are regulary running “people of color” special issues, with diversity statements calling for more submissions from “people of color,” then we’ve achieved a system that is racist to the core. If it weren’t for indie publishing and the Sad Puppies, I would be very wary of this trend. And if things change in the indie world to really put the squeeze on writers (subscription services, exclusivity agreements, royalty cuts, etc), I would be very concerned.

Make no mistake about it: “people of color” is a racist term. It’s also quite trendy, but that doesn’t make it any less racist.

I’ll leave you with this hilariously topical video from Sargon of Akkad:

Thoughts on series and perma-free

For the last five years, the conventional wisdom among most indie writers has been to write short books in sequential series and make the first book permanently free. It’s a strategy that works, to a certain extent. It’s what got me from making pizza money on my book sales to making a humble living at this gig. However, I’m starting to question that wisdom.

I have two books available for free this month: Genesis Earth and Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I). Genesis Earth was my first indie published novel, a “standalone with series potential” (specifically, a trilogy) written according to the conventional wisdom for breaking into traditional publishing. Outworlder is a very different book: the first in an eight-book novella series, strong enough to stand alone but short enough to leave the reader wanting more. And for several years, it was perma-free.

Outworlder was the first of my books to make it big. It’s gotten tens of thousands of free downloads and driven thousands of sales (I don’t have the exact numbers because I haven’t yet collated all of my sales reports from the past five years, but that’s something I plan to do). It was largely on the success of Outworlder and the Star Wanderers series that I built my early career.

But over time, downloads of Outworlder slowed to a bare trickle, and sales did as well. I could give it a short-term boost by running a few strategically placed ads, but it would always fall back down to a baseline that was simply unacceptable.

Also, when you have a book that’s permanently free, it tends to accumulate a lot of negative reviews. It’s strange, but some people seem to feel more entitled to XYZ when they get it for free, as opposed to paying for it. Or maybe these are the people who try to go through life without actually paying for anything? Who hoard everything, even the stuff that they hate, so long as they can get it for free? I don’t know.

Certainly, that’s not true of everyone who reads free books. But when you have a perma-free book, it tends to accumulate more of the barely-coherent “dis buk sux” kinds of reviews from people who probably weren’t in the target audience to begin with. And over time, that tends to weigh the book’s overall rating down, which unfortunately can be a turn-off for people who are in the book’s audience.

Contrast that with Genesis Earth. I launched it at full price with a blog tour (which I put together myself, among writer friends whom I knew personally and who had readers who would probably enjoy the book). It sold about a hundred copies in the first ninety days, then slowed to a very low trickle—maybe one or two sales each month, if that. Things continued like this for several years.

Then, back in December, I made it free for one month. Downloads immediately shot up, and continued strong throughout the entire month. Even without any advertising, I was still getting maybe 50 downloads per day on Amazon, plus a constant trickle on the other platforms. For the next couple of months, sales of all my other books grew as well

For April, I decided to make it free again, just to see if I could duplicate that kind of success. I haven’t done any paid advertising for it, but I have submitted it to various sites and newsletters that will promote free books. The result? Thousands of downloads, with a baseline rate of more than a hundred downloads per day.

Genesis Earth has never been perma-free, but every time I set it free for a limited time, it’s like I’ve released the pent-up flood waters. In contrast, Outworlder struggles to get any downloads at all, even when it’s free for only a limited time.

Part of this may have to do with the reviews. Genesis Earth has a much better overall book rating, simply because most of the people who read it over the years were the ones willing to pay full price. This also means that the book has grown into its own niche organically, since the people who have bought Genesis Earth also tend to buy other books similar to it. Retailers like Amazon take note of this, and tend to associate these books with each other in things like also-bought recommendations.

This is all just speculation, but when all of this comes together, it seems to result not only in a higher download rate when the book is free, but more downloads from people who are in the book’s targeted audience.

The mos fascinating result of this is that when the book goes back to full price, sales get a small but long-lasting boost. I’ve seen this with Bringing Stella Home, which was free in March. It’s not a huge boost—maybe only five or six books a month—but it boosts all of the other books in the series as well, and lasts for a couple of months. It’s not just Amazon where this is happening, either—in fact, it may be boosting sales on the non-Amazon platforms even more.

Bringing Stella Home is different, though, because it’s a full-length novel (about 110k words, or +300 pages) in a series that can be read out of order just fine. In other words, more of the “stand-alone with series potential” that was the convential wisdom in the old tradpub world. Like Genesis Earth, it has never been perma-free.

So what’s the takeaway?

That maybe the convential wisdom among indies is all wrong. That perma-free actually taints books and makes it harder for them to stick in the rankings, or to grow into their natural audience. That longer stand-alone books with recurring characters set in the same universe may be better for gaining long-term traction than shorter, more episodic books. Also, that the more books you give away for free—not just first in series—the better that all of your books will sell.

My experience is purely anecdotal, and there’s a lot more analysis I need to do before I can say anything for sure. From what I can tell, though, it seems that the best strategy is to write longer, fuller books that satisfy more than they entice, and to use free as a marketing strategy for only a limited time.

In other words, the collective wisdom of KBoards is completely off the mark, and Kris Rusch (who regularly gets vilified on KBoards) actually knows what she’s talking about most of the time.

Like I said, this is all anecdotal and more analysis is required. But I’m very curious now to make some of my non- first-in-series books free for a month, just to see if it has a similar boost. With Bringing Stella Home, for example, a lot of readers seem to be jumping over books 2 and 3 to read Heart of the Nebula, the direct sequel (but book 4 in the Gaia Nova series order). It would be very interesting to see if Desert Stars has an awesome free run as well, resulting in more sales after it reverts back to full price.

Lots of interesting stuff to consider. It’s definitely going to inform my writing and marketing efforts in the future.

The Self-Sufficient Writer: Makers vs. Takers

There are two kinds of people in the world. No, not those who can count and those who can’t. No, not those with loaded guns and those who dig. Stay with me for a minute, because this is important. In fact, it may be the most important realization I’ve ever had.

We have a tendency to see the world in terms of haves and have-nots. This is because it’s so easy for us to see the difference. The haves tend to live in nice houses, drive nice cars, and have (hence the term “haves”) lots of nice stuff. The have-nots, on the other hand, tend to scrape the bottom of the barrel just to get by.

This distinction between haves and have-nots, while real and present, isn’t actually that useful. Why? Because it doesn’t get to the crux of the issue: it doesn’t explain why some people have and some people have-not.

Sometimes, a have-not is just a have going through a downturn or temporary setback. Sometimes, a have is just a have-not who won the jackpot and is spending himself back to poverty as fast as he can.

This doesn’t just apply to socioeconomics, by the way. A writer who “lacks talent” may just be the next Kevin J. Anderson writing his way through his first million words. A bestselling author may just be a one-hit wonder who hit the current zeitgeist in just the right way. This also applies to personal virtues and character traits: there are haves and have-nots of honesty, compassion, generosity, charisma, etc etc.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter at any given moment who has and who has-not. What matters is what you—what anyone—chooses to do about it. And that’s where we get to the heart of the matter.

There are two kinds of people in this world: the makers and the takers. A maker, when presented with a narrow slice of the pie, immediately thinks “I should go make more pie,” while a taker grabs the knife and tries to re-slice everyone’s piece.

Makers recognize that there isn’t a fixed amount of wealth, or success, or happiness in the world. They don’t feel threatened by another person’s success because they know that it doesn’t take away from their own. They are confident in their ability to go out and create, knowing that their only limitation is their ability to innovate and solve problems.

Takers, on the other hand, are obsessed with fairness and equality. They view wealth as a finite resource that need to be redistributed in order for everyone to get their “fair share.” They are threatened by other people’s success and feel that it diminishes their own. This often leads them to sabotage their relationships, leading to things like gaslighting, manipulation, and abuse.

Makers believe in freedom; takers believe in control. Makers judge people by what they do; takers judge people by what they are. Makers pursue opportunity; takers try to shut other people out. Makers are pioneers and entrepreneurs; takers are parasites and thieves.

I’m deliberately oversimplifying this in order to show the two extremes. Of course, no one is 100% to one side or the other. There are areas in our lives where we are makers, and other areas where we are takers. Humans are complex variables that don’t fit neatly into any equation.

What isn’t gray is that making is a virtue and taking is a vice.

So what does this have to do with writing and self-sufficiency? In the age of indie publishing, just about everything.

The publishing industry today is full of both extremes. In the contract clauses of traditional publishing, we have some of the most eggregious rights grabs that have ever been penned. Non-competes, rights reversions, right of first refusal—it’s a minefield out there, littered with the bloody, dismembered limbs of broken dreams.

On the other end of the spectrum in indie publishing, there is a perfect confluence of opportunity for makers to do what they do best: make. In the indie world, you have no one but yourself to blame for your failures, but your successes are all your own. Yes, there are a lot of failures—but there are also a hell of a lot of successes.

In other words, publishing is the wild, wild west right now. And just as the west was notorious for robbers and bandits, it also saw some of the greatest pioneering the world has ever seen.

Do you want to be self-sufficient as a writer? Do you want to be able to live off of your writing through the good times and the bad?

Be a maker, not a taker.

When you see an author outselling you with a crappy-looking cover and a blurb/sample rife with grammar and spelling errors, don’t fall prey to jealousy. Don’t be petty about it. That book is not preventing people from reading yours. That author’s success does not diminish your own. Don’t try to take his success away from him; go and make success of your own.

When you’re talking shop with other writers and things get into an argument, don’t throw down the gauntlet by demanding that everyone share their sales numbers. Don’t turn it into a dick measuring contest. The only circumstance in which sales numbers prove one side right is a controlled A/B test, where everything else is constant except for the thing that you’re trying to test.

Again, it’s not about the haves and the have-nots. Just because another writer doesn’t currently have as much success as you doesn’t make them wrong. Be a maker: strive to learn from everyone.

Avoid your toxic writer “friends” who seek to diminish your success because you haven’t hit such and such bestseller list, or won such and such award. Don’t attach your emotional well-being as a writer to the opinions of other people. Hell, don’t attach your emotional well-being to anything that isn’t in your control. Be independent, not codependent. Cultivate self-sufficiency by making your own success.

Don’t obsess about book piracy. If your books are fairly priced, DRM free, and widely available, a pirated book is almost never a lost sale. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with takedown notices, focus that energy on finding new readers who are willing to pay for your books.

Don’t obsess over book reviews. Don’t try to control every little thing that people say about your books. Let readers freely and honestly express what they liked and didn’t like about your books, without any interference from you. And if it turns out you wrote a stinker, learn what you can from it and write a better one next time.

Be a maker, not a taker.

Only makers are truly self-sufficient. When the takers run out of haves to take from, they inevitably tear each other apart. If you’re in a writing group or online community where that is currently happening, don’t let yourself get caught up in that. Leave.

A maker is someone who can leave everything behind and start over with nothing. It’s never easy, but when it has to be done, you will always be better off for it. The self-sufficient writer recognizes this, and strives to live and writes in such a way that they can start over if they have to.

Being a maker is a choice. It is something that you can always control. Even as an indie writer, there are a lot of things you can’t control. You can’t control how well your books will sell. You can’t directly control how much success you experience, or how soon you will experience it.

You can’t always choose to be a have or a have-not. But you can always choose to be a maker instead of a taker.

Be a maker, not a taker.

The Self-Sufficient Writer (Index)

Guest Lecture to Brandon Sanderson’s English 318R class

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a guest lecture to Brandon Sanderson’s English 318R class at Brigham Young University. I was one of Brandon’s students back in 2008, and he wanted me to talk about my experiences as a self-published indie writer. The lecture wasn’t recorded this year, but here is a rough outline from my notes. Enjoy!

How many of you know for sure that you want to write fiction professionally? (about half) How many of you know enjoy writing as a hobby, but know that you don’t want to do it professionally? (a handful) How many of you aren’t yet sure? (the vast majority)

Eight years ago, I was where you are today: sitting in Brandon Sanderson’s class, wondering if I should turn pursue this writing thing as a career. Back then, self-publishing was the kiss of death. If you self-published any of your books, you would never be taken seriously by anyone in the publishing world again. They would treat you like the kid who ate the paste in kindergarten.

You see, back then there was a very strict and well-defined path to get published. First, you wrote query letters to agents. You did not write them to editors, because none of them accepted unsolicited submissions, and submitting to them directly was bad form. You had to personalize your query letter for the agent you were submitting it to. You had to spend almost as much time revising and reworking your query letter as you did on your manuscript.

If you were lucky enough to get picked up by an agent, they would (hopefully) get you a publisher. If you were lucky enough to get a publisher, they would (hopefully) get you into bookstores. And if your books got into bookstores, you would (hopefully) get readers. Get enough readers, and you’d be swimming in caviar, having dinner parties with Castle as a bestselling author. That was the dream.

After taking Brandon’s class, I decided to pursue writing as a full-time career. I graduated in 2010 and immediately faced a dilemma. The Great Recession made it virtually impossible to find a day job, so I had to figure out how to make the writing thing work. Writing was my plan A, and there was no plan B.

Brandon Sanderson had taught us to attend the major conventions, where we could rub shoulders with the bigwigs in publishing and maybe score a book deal through networking connections. But when I attended World Fantasy in 2010, I noticed a couple of things that were disconcerting. First, there were a lot of other aspiring authors trying to rub shoulders, many of whom were more aggressive about it than I was. Second, none of the major publishers seemed to want the stuff that I was writing (far future space opera and military SF).

Brandon’s advice, I realized, basically amounted to “if you want to get struck by lightning, wave a metal pole from the rooftop while standing in a bucket and shouting at the wind.” Which is good advice if there’s a thunderstorm. But it’s not so good on a clear and sunny day, and since none of the major publishers seemed to want the kind of science fiction I was writing, I realized I would have to find another way.

I kept trudging along, writing more books and querying agents (most of whom never responded). Then I submitted my novel Genesis Earth to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. To my surprise, it passed the first two rounds of voting and became a quarter-finalist. It looked like this could be my lucky ticket into the world of publishing.

Around this same time, Amanda Hocking became one of the first self-published writers to sell more than a million books on Amazon. When she did that, it made me sit up and take notice. Here was a twenty-something aspiring writer just like me, who had decided to eat the paste and do the thing that you were never supposed to do. Instead of failing at it, though, she made it big. What was going on here?

I began to re-examine the traditional path to publishing that before had seemed so sure. I started following Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch, Joe Konrath, David Gaughran, The Passive Voice, and a bunch of others who were breaking out of the mold. I questioned the established wisdom, and started to find all sorts of inconsistencies in what I had always believed.

For example, why has the slushpile been outsourced to agents if they aren’t getting paid for it? Is an agent really going to go up to bat for you if you only represent an income stream of a couple hundred dollars for them? Why should publishers take 75% of net for the lifetime of the book for something that you can do on your PC in a couple of hours with open-source software?

In the Writer > Agent > Publisher > Bookstore > Reader value chain, there are really only two people that matter: writers and readers. Everyone else is a middleman. In the traditional publishing model, however, the bookstore takes half, the publisher takes most of the rest, and the agent takes a 15% cut of whatever you make. Most books never earn out their advance, and most book advances for SF&F are $5,000 or less!

As I was sorting through all of this, I heard back from the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Genesis Earth had not made it past the quarterfinal stage. The review from Publisher’s Weekly read like someone had handed the manuscript off to an unpaid intern and said “here’s one of the books that didn’t make it past the quarterfinals, write a half-assed review that makes us look good so we can fulfill our contractual obligations to the contest.” It was clear from the review that the person at PW didn’t even read science fiction.

It was at that point that I realized I didn’t want to win the publishing lottery or be struck by publisher lightning. I wanted to build a career.

Now that I’m self-published, am I swimming in caviar or having dinner parties with Castle? Hardly—or at least, not yet. There’s nothing about self-publishing that makes it easier or less work than the traditional publishing path. But it does give you a lot more control, and a lot more ownership over your successes and failures.

My first year of self-publishing, I put a lot of money into my first couple of novels and published them to a resounding chorus of crickets. In my second and third year I wised up a bit, wrote a series of short novellas, published them on a shoestring budget, and made the first one permanently free. Sales began to rise, and I went from making pizza money to learning just how much it sucks to pay self-employment taxes.

Ever since then, I have been running a profitable business. Of course, it’s had its ups and downs, but even in the bad months, it’s made more money than it’s cost.

In fact, my second and third years were successful enough that in 2014, I made enough to support myself on my writing income alone. It was then that I learned one of my most important lessons: that you always need to have an impossible dream to strive for. Up until that point, my impossible dream was to make a living telling stories that I love. When I found I had achieved that, I lost direction and went into a writing slump that lasted the better part of a year.

One of the other important lessons I learned was not to underestimate the importance of marketing. When Amazon rolled out their Kindle Unlimited program, my sales took a major hit because Amazon’s algorithms started prioritizing KU books over non-KU books. Until that point, I’d been relying almost totally on Amazon to market my books for me, which was a major mistake.

My biggest mistake, though, was to underprice my books, which I did for the better part of 2015. In order to push sales of my other series, I dropped the prices of all my Star Wanderers novellas to $.99. It backfired spectacularly. I did glean a lot of data from it, however, and learned that the best price points for my own books was between $2.99 and $3.99. The $.99 price point did not see enough of an increase in sales to offset the lower royalty, or lead to any noticeable increase in my other books. However, the $3.99 price point did see increased sales and revenue compared to $4.99 and $5.99.

As you can probably tell, self-publishing is the sort of thing you learn how to do as you’re doing it. There is no clear path, no one true way to success. But I’ve learned a lot over the past few years, and I’ve seen my sales and readership grow from it. I’m no longer as worried about my future as I was back in 2010, because I know that I can make it work. And if you’re willing to put in the effort and learn from your experiences, you can too.

I sincerely believe that this is the best time in history to be a writer and a reader. There are so many publishing opportunities available to us now that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago, and this has led to an explosion of fantastic new books that would have never gotten published under the old system.

So is it possible to make a living as a self-published writer? Yes! It’s not easy to make your own path, but it’s definitely possible to do it and find success. So set your sights on an impossible dream, and when you’ve achieved it, find another one. When you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, don’t let your fears hold you back.

Can you make a living writing short fiction?

This question has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks, ever since I made a couple of semi-pro story sales. From all of the classes and conventions I’ve attended, the answer has been no, but I’m starting to wonder if that hasn’t changed in the last few years.

First of all, it’s worth pointing out that short stories are not like longer books. In my experience (and I am not a master of the short form by any stretch), short stories do not sell as well in ebook form as longer books. That’s been corroborated anecdotally by virtually every indie writer I’ve spoken with.

At the same time, they aren’t like longer form books in the traditional sense either. I have three deal breakers when it comes to traditional publishing: no non-compete clauses, no ambiguous rights reversion, and no payments based on net. Short story markets typically only buy first publication rights with a 6-12 month exclusivity period, and pay by the word. That means that there’s no reason (unless you want to self-publish immediately) not to sell your short stories to a traditional market first.

(For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that you’re not writing erotica. It’s a completely different market with its own idiosyncracies, which I’m going to ignore just because I don’t write it. But numerous indies have already proven that it is definitely possible to make a living writing short-form erotica.)

So let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope to see what a professional short-story writer can make.

According to SFWA, a short story is any piece of writing less than 7,500 words long. For the sake of argument, let’s say you average about 4,000 words per short story.

If you write one short story per month, you’ll have 12 by the end of the year. If you write two per month, you’ll have about 25. That comes to about 300 words per day.

If you buckle down and write one short story a week (only 600 words per day), you’ll have about 50 short stories by the end of the year. Raise that to two short stories per week, and that’s 100 short stories per year.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you’ve written 100 short stories. The next step is to put them on submission, using a database like The Submission Grinder to help you find markets. Here are the basic rules you’ll follow:

Start at the top-paying markets and work your way down.
Don’t submit to a market that pays less than $50 for your story.
Don’t submit to markets that purchase full copyright (in other words, markets that won’t allow you to self-publish it after they buy it).

The professional markets pay upwards of $.06 per word. For a 4,000 word short story, that comes to $250 per sale. If we apply the Pareto principle to short story sales, only about 20% of our 100 stories will sell at this level (which is pathetically low for a professional short story writer, but let’s err on the conservative side). That comes to $5,000.

For the other 80 stories, let’s say you only manage to sell half of them at the minimum $50 rate—pathetic, I know, but we’re trying to be conservative. Forty stories at $50 each comes to $2,000. Together with the professional sales, that comes to a total of $7,000.

For reprint rights, let’s just apply the Pareto principle again to say that reprints account for about 20% of your income from traditional story sales, and original sales account for 80%. $7,000 divided by .8 is $8,750, which we’ll round down to $8,500 just to make the math easier.

So before you do any kind of self-publishing, you’ve got a positive balance of $8,500 just from writing and submitting those 100 stories. It’s not a lot, but it’s not insignificant either.

Now let’s say it takes about three years for you to make that $8,500, since it takes about two or three years to submit a story to all of the pro and semi-pro markets. That’s about $750 per quarter, or two professional sales, two or three semi-pro sales, and two or three reprint sales.

If I were going to self-publish short stories in order to make a living off of them, I would bundle and price them like this:

Singles for $.99 (ebook only).
Bundles of 3 for $2.99 (ebook only).
Collections of 10–12 for $6.99–$7.99, with paperback editions.

For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the $.99 singles. They only bring in 35¢ per sale, and you’re probably not going to release all of your short stories as singles. They can be useful for promotions, especially if you make them free from time to time, but they aren’t going to be moneymakers.

If you put all 100 stories into the $2.99 bundles, that comes to 33 (which we’ll round up to 35, just to make the math easier). The royalty rate on each of those sales is 70%, or $2. If you average only 8 sales each month of the $2.99 bundles, that comes to $560.

Looking at it another way, let’s apply the Pareto principle to say that 20% of those 35 bundles are selling a book a day. That’s 7 bundles making about $60 a month, or $420, and the rest are making $105, bringing the total each month to $525.

So for argument’s sake, let’s round down and say that you’re making $500 a month on your $2.99 bundles.

For the larger collections, let’s say you average only about 5 sales each per month, earning about $5 per sale. That’s $50 per collection, or $500 for 10 collections. Paperback sales may add to that, but let’s be conservative and just roll print sales into that number.

If it seems unusual to sell that much with self-published short stories, remember that each story published in a magazine serves as a de-facto advertisement for your self-published stories. With each new magazine publication, your name is put in front of hundreds or even thousands of short story readers, a portion of whom will search for you online and find your other work. Combine that with periodic free promotions on your singles, and it shouldn’t be too hard to build an audience.

So a typical month at these numbers would look something like this:

A pro-sale or a couple of semi-pro / reprints ($250)
About 250 sales of the $2.99 bundles ($500)
About 100 sales of the print/ebook collections ($500)

This is after only a year’s worth of work, writing 2 short stories per week or about 1.2k words per day. It might take a few years to get to this point, since it takes a few years to submit a short story to all of the markets, but if you can keep up this pace then by the time you’ve got 100 self-published short stories, this is probably what your career is going to look like.

And this is using conservative numbers. If you manage to sell half of those 100 stories to professional markets, the numbers go way up. Same if you have a couple of bundles that sell more than 1 copy per day. Same if you build a respectable email list that can push a couple hundred sales with each new release.

So is it possible to make a living writing short fiction? Well, let’s flip that question around and ask: is it possible to make a living writing short non-fiction? Of course it is—it’s called freelance writing. If anything, writing fiction gives us an advantage, because with fiction, the author is the brand.

These numbers look meager ($1,250 a month isn’t a great living), but remember, it’s only after 100 stories, or a year’s worth of work, writing at 1.2k words per day. If you can keep that up for several years, your income will scale up accordingly—especially on the self-publishing side.

Before the digital disruption of publishing, short fiction was dying a long, slow death. There weren’t a lot of paying markets for it, and self-publishing wasn’t a viable option. Now, there appears to be a renaissance of the short form. New pro and semi-pro markets are popping up all the time, ebooks and print on demand are opening up all sorts of new opportunities, and reader engagement has never been higher. That’s true of short fiction just as it’s true of the longer forms.

Is it easy to make a living writing short fiction? Hell no! It requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline, personal organization, and dedication. Even though 1.2k words/day isn’t a whole lot, headspace does become an issue with multiple stories. Above all else, you need to have an iron-thick skin when it comes to rejection. I’ve accrued over 150 rejections and only 4 semi-pro story sales over the course of my career.

But if you’re a prolific, hard-working writer with an efficient system for submitting, self-publishing, and marketing, then in theory at least it appears to be possible to make a living writing non-erotica short fiction.

A blast from the past: predictions from 2011 on how the ebook revolution would turn out

While cleaning up some of the unpublished drafts on this blog, I came across this interesting post which I wrote in August 2011 but never published.

At the time, I had just published my second novel, Bringing Stella Home, and was very much committed to the indie career path. Self-publishing was still a very new thing, however, and most of my writer friends thought that I was crazy. Sometimes, I couldn’t tell if I was crazy or if everyone else was, and I was the only sane one. Because self-publishing had such a stigma, I actually lost a couple of friendships over this. That’s probably what prompted this post.

Looking back, this was the reason why online self-publishing communities like KBoards were so important. The ebook revolution was in full swing, and self-publishing still required a massive leap of faith. No one really knew how things would turn out. Writers who had chosen to stay the traditional route of querying agents saw us indies as subversives and heretics, and every week saw a new article go viral bashing either indies, or Amazon, or ebooks in general. It was pretty wild.

Those days are over now. We won. Self-publishing no longer has its stigma, at least in the mainstream, and it’s considered perfectly normal to forego submitting to agents and editors altogether. According to some reports, indies control more than 30% of the ebook market.

But back then, everything was still very much in the air. It was in that vein that I wrote this post.

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1) Ebooks will radically change the way we read, write, and think of books.

Nothing has demonstrated this more to me than owning a Kindle. It is truly a revolutionary device. Not only do I have instant access to practically any book I want to read, I can hold my entire library in the palm of my hand and take it with me wherever I go. I can see what others are saying about any given title, and interact with them as well. It’s incredible.

For writers, the changes are even more profound. Printing, shipping, and warehousing costs are nonexistent in the digital realm, and with increasingly ubiquitous internet access, distribution is no longer a problem. Put simply, ebooks are game changing–this is nothing less than a technological revolution.

Where are we going? No one really knows, but I find that exciting.

2) Not all major publishers will survive the change.

For numerous reasons, the old publishing system is being rendered obsolete, and I’m not convinced that all the major publishing houses are adapting rapidly enough to weather the changes.

How many will go under, and which ones? I have no idea, but since I don’t want my book rights to get tied up in a bankruptcy case, I’m forgoing traditional publishing for a year or so until I have a clearer picture.

However, please note: this is a business decision, not an emotional one. I have nothing against any of these houses; in fact, I’m quite grateful to them for providing me with so many good books over the years. I hope they make the necessary changes to succeed, but until they do, I’d rather go it alone.

3) To succeed, it is critical that we acknowledge and embrace these changes.

This is why I focus so much on issues that can be so controversial. Change can be frightening, but I think that it’s important that we engage in an open, honest, and critical discussion about what’s going on. Doing this will help us to adapt to the new world and take advantage of its many opportunities.

4) Writers and readers are more empowered than ever before.

This excites me more than just about anything else. If I want to read a quirky science fiction story that most people would find strange and bizarre, I can find it. I don’t have to rely on tastemakers to tell me what is literature and what is crap; I can decide for myself. And frankly, for someone who loves science fiction as much as I do, that’s quite liberating.

Perhaps this is why I come across as antagonistic of traditional publishing sometimes: I tend to believe that they’re under-serving the science fiction readership. But if I am upset, it’s more with the top-down corporate system than any house in particular. I love what Tor, Baen, Pyr, and Night Shade Books are doing, and will keep reading their titles as long as they’re still around. I just wish they’d put out more of them, and at lower prices.

5) The future is bright.

There’s a lot of opportunity for creative types right now–not just writers, but illustrators, game designers, programmers, and a host of others. That’s why I don’t buy into the doom and gloom arguments, and perhaps I can be a bit overzealous about it at times. However, if I had to err, I would rather be an overzealous optimist than an overzealous pessimist.

Well, this post is getting a little long, so I’d better end it soon and get back to writing. I just want to say that if I come across as a jerk sometimes, it’s not because I’m trying to tear anyone down–quite the opposite. My message to my fellow writers is to not be afraid, but to recognize some of the really cool ways in which things are changing, and what that means for you and your careers.

Why my books are not in Kindle Unlimited

Last year, Amazon came out with a book subscription service called Kindle Unlimited. As a reader and an Amazon customer, I’ve noticed that they’ve been pushing this service quite aggressively. As a writer, I’ve been following it quite closely, especially with some recent changes with how they compensate their authors.

However, if you check my Amazon catalog, you will find that none of my books are available on Kindle Unlimited. And if I had to tell you why, I could sum it up in just one word:

Exclusivity.

In order to enroll your books in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon demands that the content of your book cannot be available anywhere else. Not on competing retailers. Not on your website. Not on a site like Wattpad or posted on social media. It’s KU and KU only, take it or leave it. And you can’t get around that by doing separate editions, since it’s the content that must be exlusive, not the book.

Recently, Hugh Howey argued that KU’s exclusivity doesn’t really hurt writers or readers, because all of Amazon’s competitors in the ebook market suck so hard that it’s no big loss to lose them anyways. I disagree, though. Different readers have different needs, and as great as Amazon is, it isn’t the best choice for everyone.

I believe that readers should be empowered to make their own choices, not only in what they read, but in how they read it. Some readers would rather sideload their ebooks, and don’t want to deal with Amazon’s proprietary .mobi format. Others would rather keep their books native to their device and not deal with Amazon’s apps. Others live in parts of the world where Amazon tacks on an arbitrary $2 USD surcharge to every kindle store purchase, and that obviously doesn’t work for them.

Put simply, I believe that exclusivity is a bad deal for readers—and that because of that, it’s also a bad deal for writers. The less control that readers have over what they read, the less they are going to read. The more control that middlemen have over the market (and for all the wonderful things that it does, Amazon is still a middleman between readers and writers), the less pressure there is for them to innovate and improve.

On many of the indie writers forums and communities that I frequent, it appears that other writers are more interested in short-term monetary gains than in doing what best serves their readers. And that’s unfortunate, because Kindle Unlimited is structured in such a way that it pits writers against each other in a zero-sub game. Instead of paying a fixed rate for each page (or KENPC) read, Amazon sets a “pot” and pays each author a share of it, in proportion to how many borrows/pages they got. Thus, if one author gets more reads than another (or games the system to make Amazon’s algorithms think that he had more reads), that means less money for the other author.

A lot of writers argue that it’s not really a zero-sub game because Amazon usually adds to the pot after the month is over, thus manipulating the borrow rate to hit some undisclosed target. Even if that’s true, though, it makes things even worse. If Amazon has a target borrow rate in mind, why not tell authors up front? It basically amounts to not telling authors how much they’re going to be paid until after their books have been sold. In any other supplier relationship, this blatant lack of transparency would be insane.

From what I can see, it’s all about control. Exclusivity gives them a great deal of control, not only over the marketplace but over authors as well. The lack of transparency and ever-changing borrow rates make it difficult for authors to gather the data they need to decide whether to stay in KU or to publish their books widely. And authors who decide not to opt into KU are punished by having their books rank lower, thus achieving less visibility in the Amazon ecosystem. In the year since KU came out, my Amazon income has fallen by at least 60%.

Even with all of that, though, I would be happy to enroll all of my books in Kindle Unlimited if Amazon dropped the exclusivity requirement. There are a lot of readers who prefer Amazon’s KU subscription service, and I would love to make my books available for them.

But exclusivity is a bad deal.

Thoughts on Clean Reader

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new app in the book world that is stirring up quite a bit of controversy. It’s called Clean Reader and it basically goes through an ebook and filters out the profanity, with settings for “clean,” “cleaner,” and “squeaky clean.” It was designed by the parents of a teenager who expressed dismay at finding profanity in an otherwise clean book.

The response from authors has been vociferous. Chuck Wendig (WARNING: Chuck uses so much profanity, he probably deserves a Clean Reader filter setting of his own) predictably came down hard against it, as well as Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat. Over on KBoards, there’s an ongoing thread of indie authors slamming it as a denial of artistic expression, as a copyright violation, as malicious censorship—basically, the whole gamut. Interestingly, though, Cory Doctorow came out in defense of it.

Personally, this app reminds me a lot of CleanFlicks, a movie rental place here in Utah that edited out objectionable content such as sex, violence, and profanity. I watched the edited version of Zombieland while I was in college, and while I enjoyed it, it was… short. CleanFlicks did a lot of business, right up until the US Supreme Court shut it down.

While I can see why some writers would hate this app, I actually sympathize more with the readers. Living in Utah, I know a lot of people (some of them in my own family—hi Kate!) who are exactly the kind of people for whom Clean Reader was made. And much like Cory Doctorow, I think that their right to control their own reading experience trumps the writer’s right to freedom of expression.

The act of reading is fundamentally a collaborative experience. Until someone opens a book and reads it, that book is just symbols on a page, or bytes of data on a storage device. Meaning is only generated through the act of reading—in a very real sense, the story is created by the reader just as much as by the writer. As much as we writers like to think of ourselves as free to write whatever we want, without readers, that freedom counts for very little. And that’s exactly the way it should be.

A lot of writers are making fun of Clean Reader on the basis that the very premise is flawed—that filtering out profanity won’t do anything to clean a fundamentally dirty story. But while that’s true of some books, I do think there’s a middle ground where the app can give some value.

For example, my first novel Genesis Earth is a mostly clean science fiction adventure romance with a few tense moments where the characters use a mild level of profanity. As a writer, it didn’t feel right to have my characters say “darn” instead of “damn,” or “crap” instead of “shit.” Sanitizing the book on that level would have kicked most readers right out of the story. But if a reader who is sensitive to that use of language wants to read a filtered version of Genesis Earth, the story is not going to be fundamentally changed by filtering out those words.

Probably the biggest objection to Clean Reader is that it enforces or promotes a censorship regime that many writers find objectionable. Of course, most of the people who make that argument probably have no idea what “censorship” really entails, just like the people who throw out accusations like “socialist,” “sexist,” “racist,” etc. But putting that can of worms aside, is it right for people to use apps like this—say, parents of young children—to control what other people read?

I am a diehard libertarian, but I actually think that beneath a certain age, parents do have a right to censorship. As legal guardians of their children, parents have a right and a responsibility to raise them as they see fit. If you don’t allow parents to censor what their children are exposed to, then you’re basically saying that society as a whole should raise them, or (God forbid!) the government. I think that’s a horrible idea. Children should be raised by the people who are closest to them, and responsible parents/guardians should be free to raise their children as they (and only they) see fit.

So I’m actually rather supportive of the Clean Reader app. I personally wouldn’t use it, either for myself or for my children, but if other readers do then I have no objection to that. Writers should be free to write whatever they want, and readers should be free to read whatever they want, however they want to read it.

A Letter to Mr. Bezos

Mr. Bezos,

I know you’re a busy man, so if it’s true that you read all the emails directed to this account, I’ll keep it brief.

I recently read an open letter written by Douglas Preston that encourages readers and writers to email you to let you know what they think about the hardball negotiating tactics in the contract dispute between Amazon and Hachette Book Group. I am an author who has published more than 20 books via Kindle Direct Publishing and is now making a living thanks to the ability that your company has given me to put my books in front of readers.

I think that you, Mr. Bezos, have done more to “defend literature” and advance books and reading than all of the Big 5 publishers combined. The big publishers are middlemen whose existence depends on inserting themselves between readers and writers and extracting as much value from them as they can. They are parasites who would rather treat authors like indentured servants and hold them as collateral than treat them as valued business partners.

For all of our sakes, I hope that you squeeze the bastards at Hachette until they beg you for mercy. The fact that Hachette is using their authors as hostages should not stop you from sticking to your guns. You are taking power from the monopolistic big publishers and putting it back into the hands of readers and writers everywhere, and we–the little guys–can see that clearly.

Stick to your guns, Mr. Bezos! Make the bastards squeal!

Joe