So I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how best to leverage my short stories, not just from the traditional publishing angle, but from the indie publishing side as well. The problem is that self-published short stories really don’t sell much, so after you’ve sold them to a traditional market, what are you supposed to do? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve tried all of the following things, with varying levels of success:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Taken individually, there are problems with all of these strategies. Short story singles don’t earn very much at any price, and while they garner a lot of downloads if you make them free, they don’t really lead to sales of other books unless they’re part of a larger series. Even then, not so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bundles and collections don’t do much better. Dean Wesley Smith says you can bundle 3-5 short stories together just fine, (or at least, he used to say that) but I tend to think that readers prefer collections with at least 10-12 short stories in them. At this point, I don’t self-publish a collection unless it has at least 40,000 words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Short stories can be useful as newsletter magnets, but I’ve found that first-in-series books get a higher CTR than standalone shorts. Besides, it’s much more useful to send a follow up email to a first-in-series book (“Have you read ____ yet? Here’s what comes next.”)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what’s the best way to self-publish short stories?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s take a look at this from a reader’s perspective for a moment. These days, most short stories from the magazines are available for free. They’re either available on a podcast feed, like Uncanny or Escape Pod, or they’re published on a website for a limited time (sometimes for an unlimited time.) There are a handful of magazines like Asimov’s and F&SF that put their content behind a paywall, (usually a subscription of some kind) but there are also magazines like Clarkesworld that put their content up for free on the podcast AND offer an optional subscription. In fact, I believe it was Clarkesworld that discovered that revenue actually went up when they put everything out for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So as a short story reader, there’s really no need for me to purchase single short stories, since so many of them are available from the magazines for free. In fact, I would probably prefer to get my stories from a magazine, since I know they’ve been vetted by an editor. If I like a particular author, I may pick up some of their short stories, but I’m more likely to wait until they’ve bundled them into a collection of some kind, just to maximize the value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anthologies are a different story (sorry for the pun.) I have yet to see a short story anthology that isn’t priced like a regular book\u2014no free or 99\u00a2 ebooks. That’s probably because, as a short story reader, I know I’m getting a bunch of stories for that price. It’s kind of like buying an album, back in the days before Spotify: I know I’m going to get a couple of stinkers, but I also know that I’ll get some really great ones too. But if there are only 3-5 stories in that bundle, I’m going to think twice before buying it unless it’s at a super deep discount price. After all, I can always get my short story fix for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So if there are enough high-quality short stories availabe from the magazines for free, and self-published singles don’t really earn much at all, what’s the best way to go indie? Here’s my thought: sell anthology-sized collections at full price and make all the singles free, with the backmatter in the free stories pointing to the collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a short story reader, I’m already used to paying for anthologies\u2014and 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\u2014and that makes the backmatter of each free single the best place for her to advertise her collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So under this hybrid publishing system, the typical lifecycle of a short story would look something like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The goal of the first stage is to sell first publication rights to a professional or a semi-pro market (typically a magazine or an anthology.) So before self-publishing, you would submit to all of the traditional markets, and keep the story on submission until it has sold. But you would have to limit yourself to the markets with a pay rate that you’re willing to accept, otherwise you might as well just self-publish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If my goal is to be a 6-figure author, I should value my time at $50\/hour at least (since $50\/hour X 40 hours\/week X 50 weeks\/year = $100,000\/year.) That means I can use my writing speed to calculate my minimum pay rate. If I can write 2,000 words in an hour, then that’s $50\/2,000 words, or 2.5\u00a2 per word. Round that up to 3\u00a2 per word, and that’s the minimum pay rate that I should be willing to accept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once the story has sold, the contract will dictate when I can self-publish. Most contracts have an exclusivity period of a few months to a year. Every contract is different, so how long the story remains in this phase depends on each contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is where you start to implement the strategy that I discussed above. As soon as the rights revert back to you, you self-publish them as short story singles\u2014but rather than trying to make money with them, you give them away for free in order to point readers toward your collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In other words, after a short story has been traditonally published, it goes through a temporary period where it’s used as a free loss leader. This period ends as soon as the author has enough shorts to bundle into a novel-sized collection\u2014but since there are always at least a few free singles floating around, it serves as an effective way to attract new readers and win over new fans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the final stage, where you take down the free singles and bundle them into collections instead. Once that’s done, you update the backmatter in all of the other free singles to include links to buy the new collection, and the story starts to earn money for you again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because the story is no longer a free self-published ebook, it makes sense to start submitting to the traditional markets that buy reprint rights, since why not? At this point, it’s free money. I generally don’t accept anything less than 1\u00a2 per word, since I’ve found that the token-paying markets don’t make an appreciable dent in any of my stories’ lifetime earnings, but that’s just me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think this three-stage lifecycle may be the best way to extract the maximum value from my short stories. Like pawns in the game of chess, it’s not what each story individually is doing, but how they’re working together. A self-published single that sells only a dozen copies (if that) per year isn’t doing much for me, and while I can use them to gain new subscribers, there are more effective tools for that than standalone short-stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In any case, I’m going to give it a try. It will be interesting in a few months to see how it turned out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how best to leverage my short stories, not just from the traditional publishing angle, but from the indie publishing side as well. The problem is that self-published short stories really don’t sell much, so after you’ve sold them to a traditional market, what are you supposed to… Continue reading A New Short Story Plan<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[170,1],"tags":[89,529,1092,502,670],"class_list":["post-12980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","category-uncategorized","tag-career-decisions","tag-indie-publishing","tag-publishing-strategies","tag-self-publishing","tag-traditional-publishing","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-3nm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12981,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12980\/revisions\/12981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}