A couple years back in December I did a series of posts here about writers setting goals for the new year. And last year I brought some of the old posts forward. But frighteningly enough, the publishing industry has changed so much and so fast, those posts from just two years ago felt dated. The basics are the same, sure. Things like knowing the difference between a goal and a dream. But even with the basics still being solid in the posts, I don’t feel good enough about those old posts to even link you back to them.
So I’m going to talk about writing goals a little again as they fit into this new world of publishing. And my own writing goal as an example. Then in the comments maybe we can discuss some other basics of goal-setting for writers and how others do it.
Let me start off with a goal and a challenge I had last year at this time that I told very few people about. Simply put, I challenged myself to get one new book per week into the mail.
Okay, take a deep breath and relax. Let me explain what I was doing.
I was writing the opening of a novel (usually about thirty pages), then doing a proposal for the rest of the book (usually about ten pages) and mailing the package to five editors at a time. I did that for thirteen straight weeks, ending up with seventeen novels in the mail counting the submissions I already had out when I started the challenge. (Can you imagine an agent handling that? (snort))
That’s right, I had seventeen different novels in six different genres under five different pen names in the mail at the same time to over eighty editors. And to be honest, it was a blast. November 1st, 2009 to Feb 1st, 2010. Only reason I stopped is that I had a ghost novel to write. And then I got busy doing other stuff and other projects.
Now, I am known for being nuts when it comes to writing challenges. And I’m sure even the professionals reading this are thinking I am nuts. But it was a goal, a challenge that kept me going, kept me submitting, and got me a ton of great mail and some new projects to write. And most of all, it was a ton of fun.
And you know what, getting off to that good of a start really helped the year feel better. In fact, this has been a great year for both writing and publishing and money for me. I wonder why? (grin)
So what am I going to do this coming year? I’ll tell you in a moment.
Goals vs Dreams
What is the difference between goals and dreams? Getting them confused can really, really stop you cold, so you should know the difference.
A Dream is something you want to attain that is out of your control for the most part. For the longest time I had a dream of having five different novels on the shelf at my local Safeway at the same time. I wanted to stand there in the aisle and just smile and stare at my books. I came close one week with four, but never hit that dream. It is a dream because it is out of my control. There are so many other people involved with the process that even if I had ten books in the pipeline in New York publishing (which I did one fine year) not all of them will make the Safeway book rack, let alone at the same time.
A Goal is something you control completely, such as writing and finishing and mailing one short story per week. Or mailing one new novel every week. Now that I can control. I can’t control if an editor buys the story or not, I can’t control the mail losing it or not, but I can control the writing and finishing and mailing.
Goals are in your control.
Dreams are some event that your goals are working and building toward.
Note: The WORST thing you can do is set up as a goal like “I want to sell a novel by the end of the year.” Selling a novel is out of your control and shows almost no understanding of how publishing works. Since I started writing I have heard writers say such things and always fail. However, if you want to work in a constructive manner toward that dream, set the goal to write three or four novels and get them all in the mail to editors by the end of the year. You still won’t hit that dream because publishing and buying books is so slow, but you might the following year.
So those of you who have a dream of making a living at writing fiction, let’s break down what that will take these days.
New York Traditional Publishing Only.
Remember, writing is in your control. Selling and advances are not.
1) If you write only one book per year, then you must get lucky and have your book sell for at least a hundred-grand advance year after year after year, book after book.
2) If you write two or three books per year, then you can make a nice living with lower advances, but there still has to be some luck and high advances in the mix. And a bunch of secondary sales overseas and audio and such.
3) If you write more than four books a year, your advances can range all over the place and some books not sell and you’ll still make a nice living writing fiction every year.
It’s just numbers. In this modern world, the less you have to depend on high advances, the better off you will be.
So, if your dream is to make a living writing fiction and you only produce one book per year, the odds are bad and luck has to figure into your dream. But if you write four or five books a year, you have limited the luck factor, given yourself more chances to place books, and the freedom and opportunity to take lower advances.
So if your GOAL is to write one book a year, you are not making much headway toward your DREAM. (And thus fall into the place where so many selling writers say it is impossible to make a living at fiction writing.) However, if your GOAL is to write four books a year, then you are making great headway toward your DREAM of making a living with your writing.
Electronic Publishing Only
This world is still so new that numbers are not really solid yet, but it works pretty close to the above numbers. If you write one book per year and that’s all you have up electronically, it won’t make a difference at all how much blogging and promotion you do, your one book won’t sell enough by itself to make you a living without a lot of luck. So here, just as in traditional publishing, the GOAL would be to get up as many products as possible for sale electronically to get closer to your DREAM of making a living with your fiction. Again, this is a game of numbers.
Electronic Publishing Combined with New York Publishing
Combining electronic and tradition publishing is where many of us are making some really nice money. We put up our backlist and some new products electronically. Then when something of ours comes out of a traditional publishing source, the push that the regular publishers put on a traditionally published book helps drive readers to our indie-published work and we make even more money.
So here the GOAL is to get up electronically as many things as possible while mailing as many submissions and manuscripts to traditional publishers at the same time to get to the DREAM of making a living with your fiction. Again, just numbers.
Just be clear on what is a goal you can control and a dream that you can’t. Interestingly enough, if you are clear on this, rejections mean less because you never think of the dream when mailing. The end product is finishing the story or novel and just mailing it. The mailing is the success point for you. Selling is something that happens if your craft is good and the story hits a market that the story fits. But that is out of your control. All you can control is finishing and mailing or putting up electronically.
MY CRAZY CHALLENGE THIS YEAR
I told you about the thirteen new novels mailed in thirteen weeks last year. It was a great challenge and I had a blast. And even if some of those books don’t sell eventually, I might go ahead and finish a few of them anyway to publish electronically. But honestly, five or six of them I will never write unless a publisher offers me money.
As I mentioned above, short fiction, if you love it, might be a way to go these days to make some nice money electronically. And I love short fiction, so my new goal for this next year concerns short fiction and electronic publishing.
Note. I am not talking novels from here on out, just short stories, because that’s my challenge.
First off, some background for those of you not up to speed yet on publishing your own work electronically.
Fact:
There are hundreds of electronic bookstores around the world and more coming on line every day. Yes, I said hundreds.
Fact:
To get to the majority of these bookstores, you only have to put your story up on three places. Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. You won’t get to all of them, but you will get to a majority.
The stories on Amazon only sell on Amazon and Amazon UK at the moment, but more countries are rumored to be coming up shortly. And at the moment Amazon is the biggest. That is changing slowly.
Barnes & Noble online store inventory powers many, many bookstores around the world not counting their own Nook stores, and the money comes back to you, the author, through B&N.
Smashwords gets your story up on Smashwords (a store itself), but it also functions as a gateway site to get your work into bookstores powered by Kobo, Sony, iPad, and others. For example, through Smashwords I just sold stories through online stores in Australia, Europe, Great Britian, and Canada through Apple. And some of those, because of the exchange rate, I am making a bunch more than 35 cents per sale.
Fact:
It is not simple, but not hard to learn how to put your books and stories up on these sites. Just take your manuscript in Word, format it to the Smashwords guidelines, do a cover in PowerPoint with one of your own photos, save it as a jpg file and you are ready. Takes a little learning and some frustration, but very possible and easy to do.
Here is the simple math for short stories:
Each story sells for 99 cents. That number is pretty standard these days for short stories. The author gets on average 35 cents per sale.
Let me say that each story just sells on average 5 copies per month. That’s total across all the stores. (You won’t have even this bottom number happen until you are up near thirty stories or so. Why I say at least thirty stories is because no one can find only one story. After thirty or so you start becoming a web presence and when a reader finds something they like of your work, they can easily find other stories of yours as well to read.)
So each story makes $1.75 per month. (35 cents times 5 sales around the world total.)
Note: This is bottom level. And many stories depending on your cover and blurb will sell higher than five per month, but for this example let me just use bottom numbers. My backlist short stories up already are doing much better than this, and Kris’s are selling factors higher than this. But for this math I’m using these bottom numbers.
Total Income Per Story for the Year: $21.00. Not much. Ten year income if nothing changes $210.00 per story.
Let’s say you could write and put up electronically one short story per week. End of one year (taking two weeks off and for math ease) you would have 50 short stories up and at fifty stories you would make $87.50 per month or $1,050.00 per year (or $10,500 over ten years).
Collections: With 50 short stories up, you can put together at least ten five-story collections and five ten-story collections. That’s minimum because there is no rule that the same story can’t be in a number of different collections.
Sell a 5-story collection for $2.99. You get about 65% of that on average or $1.95 per sale. Five sales per month per collection gets you $9.75 per month per collection. With ten collections (made out of the 50 short stories) you get $97.50 per month or $1,170.00 per year (or $11,700.00 in ten years).
For a 10-story collection you sell it for $4.99. Again you get 65% so you get about $3.25 per sale. Five sales per month gets you $16.25 per month per collection. Or with five collections made out of the 50 stories you get $81.25 per month or $975.00 per year (or $9,750.00 in ten years).
So at the end of one year of writing one short story a week and getting them up electronically and taking two weeks off, you would be making $1,050.00 plus $1,170.00 plus $975.00 which equals $3,195.00 per year after that for the work you did the previous year.
That’s only one year.
And that’s at the bottom rate of only five sales per month over hundreds of bookstores. And of course, that’s not counting POD publishing. For this discussion let me stay just electronic.
HOURLY RATE:
Let’s say your stories average around 3,000 words. And take about five hours to write per week on average. 50 stories is about 250 hours spread out over the entire year.
$3,195.00 divided by 250 hours equals $12.70 per hour. Not great, not bad.
And, of course, once up selling electronically, there are no changes needed and no more work needed to be done. Your stories will just keep selling. So say the sales continued along the bottom like this for another year, your hourly rate would go to $25.40 per hour by the end of the second year. Of course, if the stories kept selling at this bottom rate for ten years, your hourly rate would be $127.00 per hour spent writing short stories during that one year. Now that’s getting decent.
A NEW WAY OF THINKING
So many people in this country work a job, get a paycheck, and that’s the end once the bills are paid. There is no thought of the person who worked those five hours on a Tuesday in 1999 being paid yet again for those same five hours. Never happens.
But writers create a product that when put into a magic bakery can earn a ton of money for years and years and years. So a short story written now can still be earning money for the writer in ten or twenty or fifty years. This is a very difficult thing to grasp for most writers when setting year-end goals. An hour spent in this new year finishing a product will be an hour that will continue to pay you money for decades.
Some writers tend to look at books as produce. Once done and sold, it somehow is spoiled. If the advance or the sale isn’t enough, or the story doesn’t sell, the story isn’t worth anything. But with this new world, that has really, really changed. Now it is economically viable to build an inventory, even though the upfront money isn’t that high. And that inventory will earn money for a very long time for the writer.
Writers must learn to take the long-term view in this new publishing world.
What if…
For fun, just do the quick math. What happens if the fifty stories you write in one year average 10 sales each average per month around the hundreds of sites around the world. One story sells three, another twenty. So that would double the $3,195.00. 15 stories average per month per story would triple the $3,195.00 to just under $10,000.00 for the year.
What if…
…you managed to do this for another year? By the end of the second year you would have produced 100 short stories. At the bottom rates, you would be making $6,290.00 per year. Every year, with no extra work needed. Selling ten average would be making you $12,580 per year every year.
What if…
…you set up a plan and a routine and did the same thing regularly for five years? At the bottom rate, which you would not be at by that point, you would be bringing in $15,975.00 per year. If your sales had increased to averaging ten sales average per story, you would be bringing in $31,950.00 per year.
Again, this is just short fiction, not novels, and working about five or so hours a week. (Note: It takes me less than a half hour to reformat my short story manuscript, do a quick cover and get it up on all three electronic sites, so I’m not counting that time. Early in the process it takes longer, but becomes very easy as you go on.)
You have a dream to make a living with your fiction. I just outlined one that has short, weekly goals, that will get you darned close in five years.
So What Is My Challenge for 2011?
Starting the week of January 1st, 2011, my goal is to write at least two new short stories per week. I have a book about old books with weird titles. I will just use those old weird titles and write stories around them. And I might find a photo I can use for a cover and write a story around the photo. Or I might write around something else I heard.
But every story I will get up electronically when finished and post here for everyone to read. And I will say where the story came from and how long it took to write and any problems in the writing and that sort of thing.
The goal is to do at least 100 new short stories in 2011. I will miss some weeks, miss with some stories. Nature of the beast.
But the goal is to write at least two per week and get them up electronically for sale, plus put them up here for free for you all to read for a short time.
For those of you watching, it should be an interesting window into the life of a working writer. And crazy, yes. I also have novel projects to write and workshops to teach and conventions to attend and so on.
But it’s going to be fun. Last year I did the novel challenge, this year I’m back to my true love of short fiction thanks to this wonderful new world of publishing allowing me to make real money with a challenge like this.
I haven’t been this excited about a writing challenge since Nina Kiriki Hoffman and I challenged each other to write and mail a short story per week back in 1982.
Stay tuned. If nothing else, it will be interesting.
David, you could use a simple Word table or excel spreadsheet to track that. I had one that had columns for market, submission date, rejection or acceptance date. Made it easy to track mss.
Jeff, Annie Bellet and I have talked about the scoring for e-subs pretty heavily and we both came up with a system. You can check it out on my blog.
amandamccarter.wordpress.com
Jeff- Amanda McCarter and I sort of came up with our version of the Race for self/e-publishing: http://overactive.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/appropriating-and-updating-the-race/
I figure with my goals my traditional Race score will hopefully stay above 50 anyway. I’m almost there now…
“It’s hard to build up much money at 35 cents per sale as my math laid out. But if you have enough, it builds up nicely. And I’ll report the collection sales and such as well when I start doing them. One thing I have seen and been reported from others is that the first magic number of products is around thirty for some reason. Sales seem to jump slightly at thirty. We shall see above that number. I think I have about twenty-five short stories up, no novels or collections, at the moment and I’m above the five story per month average.”
Yes, I can see that having more than a couple of titles up really seems to help sales, and I know it’s a long-view thing. I’ve seen some of the writers who hang out on kindleboards post numbers, and some have gone from five sales a month to hundreds, even more than a thousand sales a month in some cases, simply from adding a few more titles and letting momentum accrue. (The flipside is that there are many writers there with small sales who have been at it for quite awhile with several titles, so there’s no magic formula.)
Anyway, if you have twenty-five stories up, you need to turn that into five five-story collections and two ten-story collections as well.
@Brad
“Also, I want to make 2011 the year I re-discover my love of reading. That might sound nuts, but in 2009 one of the things I told Kris and Dean about at their workshop was how my recreational reading had suffered — it too often felt like a chore, I wasn’t enjoying it, I was always too easily distracted and looking for excuses to not read, and so forth.”
Hey Brad,
I had the exact same problem you did. Reading felt like *work* instead of recreation. What helped in my case to get me enjoying reading again was to stop reading what I felt I “ought” to, which was various science fiction or fantasy novels that were considered the latest hot thing by critics.
To break the reader’s block, I switched over to reading genres I knew I never wanted to write in, and chose books that looked like fun to read. So lately it’s been Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, John D. MacDonald, John le Carre, and Louis L’Amour on my “to read” pile. I’m so much happier, and reading again. And lately I find I can toss a science fiction or fantasy story into the pile without my brain freezing up.
Hope you break it. I vividly remember how much it sucked.
Dean — I think you misunderstood what I was asking. I wasn’t asking about e-submissions (of course those would be part of the race!), but, rather, when you self-publish your story at Amazon, Smashwords, and B&N.
Amanda — Thanks for the link. I’ll look into it.
Jeff, I had not personally thought of a “race” type thinking for electronic publishing, but it does sort of make sense. And it seems like Amanda and Annie have come up with a pretty good score. On Amanda’s blog she said this:
“Fellow writer Annie Bellet and I have discussed this and come up with something that may work a little better. This focuses on stories published, not stories in the mail.
1 point for short stories, that stays the same.
3 points for short story collections of 5 or more.
5 points for novels
Repeats are okay for short stories, but not for novels. In other words if you have a short story for sale on its own and one in a collection, you can count it twice.”
I think that makes sense, and the score would just climb over time, that’s for sure, with no top end, which is kind of fun as well. Call it “Electronic Race.”
A couple of side additions I might suggest. If your New York publisher puts it up, the points don’t count. Only self-published, or “indie published” as many are calling it. The regular old race works great for submissions to traditional publishers. However, if the book or story was first published traditionally and the rights reverted and you got the story or book up indie published, the points would count then.
And I would consider changing the points for a novel to eight. They are that much harder to do than a short story.
You two want me to do a regular front page post on this topic talking about the benefits of hitting certain point levels and such? Seems like it would make a good New World of Publishing post.
I think a large number of titles also helps with the “risk vs reward” trade-off that a new reader subconsciously goes through. Spending even a little time and money on trying a new-to-that-reader author is worth it if the payoff is a motherlode of stories to read. Not so much if it’s only a handful.
Alastair, hadn’t thought of that. Good point. And also if you have fifty or a hundred different items for sale up, putting up a free story makes some sense. Never have understood the reason for giving a story away for free when there are no other stories to sell. No sense to me.
Brad –
I agree 100% with L.M. May. The best way to break “reader’s block” is to change genres. Even go from fiction to nonfiction.
I find I have about a four-month enjoyment period. After that, I get bored with a genre. So it’s time to move on. This is probably the result of college, when I was switching classes three times a year (I took a lot of summer classes).
Over the last two years, some of my best finds have been Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Robert B. Parker. Can’t believe it took me this long to find them. They’re great.
I’d especially recommend:
Block — THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART, or HIT MAN
Leonard — GET SHORTY, or KILLSHOT
Parker — SMALL VICES, or JUDAS GOAT
But really, I haven’t read a bad thing by any of these Big Three of crime fiction.
Great stuff.
Dean, your mixing up titles sounds like great fun. A game I used to play with my sibs involved mixing up cliches and sayings from a book of same, giving results like “paddle your own sinking ship” and “if wishes were horses, look before you leap”. I’m also toying with the idea of using titles of obscure scientific papers, like Niven did with his “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation,” taken from Frank Tipler’s paper in Physical Review.
I have a hard time coming up with good titles. Starting with a title from somewhere else sounds like a great idea.
David —
FWIW, here’s a sample of the spreadsheet layout I use to track submissions. It’s fairly self-explanatory. http://www.jdsawyer.net/submissiontracker_sample.xls
-Dan
Thanks for all the suggestions!
Looks like I’ll be best served by cobbling together a system of Whiteboard (hardcopy+calendar), In-Manuscript (backup), Excel Spreadsheet (all-in-one), and Duotrope’s (stats+check anywhere).
As for the programs: The Writer’s Scribe was fancy, Sonar3 was free, but neither fit me. The Writer’s Database was Duotrope’s without all the stuff I use Duotrope’s for already.
Good stuff.
Regarding the short story sales vs book sales, if we assume it’s about 5 hours to write a short story vs. about 300 hours to write a book, if I wrote those 60 short stories to 1 book and each of them sold one copy at 35 cents, that’s $21. That’s a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Assuming they keep selling, I can then write the book in style.
Jeff@Dark Elms
“Over the last two years, some of my best finds have been Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Robert B. Parker. Can’t believe it took me this long to find them. They’re great.”
Yes! Totally agree with you, Jeff, on those picks.
Brad–hope you can find some writers outside your usual genres to read instead. Pick fun stuff.
Also, another thing that helped with shutting up the critical voice was watching foreign films with subtitles for a few weeks. Thanks to the wonders of Netflix instant play, I saw Bollywood films for the first time.
It was hard for the critical voice to keep yapping when the movie was all spoken in Hindi, and once the first dance number kicked in, the voice shut up completely and stayed quiet for the rest of the film. I found the same thing happened when I watched Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman films. Having to deal with an unknown language seems to make it easier to ignore the critical voice and eventually silence it.
Just threw onto the instant queue some major films out of Hong Kong and China. I love modern technology
I would actually love to read a comprehensive post on the race — both for trad publishing and indie publishing. What I’m really interested in are the numbers. I’ve read other places on this blog that you hover around 70 to 90 points, whereas Kris is more around 120 points. But when you started out, where were you at? Where was Kris at? Did you see a certain point level that made the difference.
For indie publishing, you’re absolutely right — the numbers just keep growing and growing and growing. But for us who are just starting out, what are the mountain peaks. You might not be able to answer all of this — it’s all so new.
All of this stems from a concern I’ve had for a long time. How do I know I’m aiming for the right target? I have my 2011 goals outlined, and I have my daily and weekly goals outlined. And I know my long-terms dreams. But what I personally find frustrating is the empty space between short-term goals and long-term dreams. I know I’m moving forward, but I’m not sure how to track the journey. By way of analogy, it would be like driving from L.A. to D.C. without having a clue as to what kind of country and cities lay between those two cities.
I know where I am, I know where I hope to be, and I know how to get there. What I don’t know are some of this middle-ground milestones that I can make into concrete goals with real meaning. Those small moments where one can be pleased with one’s progress while also knowing that one has distance to travel.
What I see in the Race Score is a way to give some real goals that have a bit more meaning than 25 short stories and 2 novels. Not to say that 25 short stories and 2 novels isn’t meaningful. But its only about 31 to 41 points, depending on if the novels are partials or subs. Is that good, bad, mediocre? I want to do my best to work as a professional. That’s my aim. And while I’ve learned a lot about how pro writers work, I still find it difficult to know if I’m aiming too low.
I hope you understand what I’m trying to say.
This is probably way more than you wanted. But maybe you understand exactly what I’m saying. After all, you were once standing exactly where I am.
Jeff, after about two years I had my race numbers, all short fiction, up in the low 70s. Of course, during the days from 1975 to 1982, when I often had only two points, I sold nothing and rewrote everything to death. However, once I stopped doing that and mailed things and wrote a lot and got my points up in the 70s, things really started happening. And honestly, for me I had a hard time keeping my points at that level because of sales. Tough, but true.
As for what made a difference, I know exactly where the number range is. When I was publishing a writer magazine called “The Report” I started this “Race” idea and had writers (pre internet, of course) reporting to me and every issue I would list their points. Those at the top of the race month after month after month were writers like Kevin J. Anderson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Ray Vukcevich, and me. And we were selling all the time and building careers. Those in the mid-range, from 30 to 60 points, sold every-so-often, and those in the 20-30 range didn’t end up building writing careers. I looked back at those old race listings in an old copy of the Report and was stunned. All the names at the top had careers, no one below did. It seems that work ethic and mailing have a direct impact on career success. Hmmmm, sounds like most businesses and professions, doesn’t it?
And I sure do understand. I do remember and it was my exact need to try to put some sort of yardstick up against my own performance back in the early days that lead me to come up with the race in the first place. Note: I did not call it “The Race.” That name just sort of stuck and when someone would call me to report in numbers for the month, or write me (snail mail) they called it that so I started putting that name at the top of the page and it stuck. You are not racing against other writers, just yourself. That’s the key.
When we fired this back up again for a short time among the professionals coming here, Jay Lake blew the top off the thing with numbers far into the hundreds. He seems to be doing just fine as well, and is writing like crazy as well as fighting cancer and working a full-time day job and dealing with his family.
As for electronic, I have a hunch it will be like climbing into a mountain range. You get to the top of the first peak and there are higher mountains beyond to climb. My gut sense and from what feedback I have gotten from a few others, and what has worked for me and Kris, is the first peak is 30 items, which would put the points in the range from 30-50. At that point sales seem to make a clear jump, mostly due to people finding your stuff and having enough up to interest them. Konrath and other professionals have a mixture of traditionally published and indie-published work up and they are doing great. Points there are above that number for most, including Kris. I know Kris’s income from this has jumped again past one hundred, but she also has a mix of traditional and indie-published work. Her indie race points are over 100.
So it’s going to take time to figure out, but looking at the math, things get very interesting up around 400-500 points using the scale Annie and Amanda came up with and at minimum sales. In fact, my guess is that if you have points up in the range of 600-800 you are making a six figure income. I’ll let you know in a year or so. (grin)
Silly question to everyone, but hopefully applicable since there is so much ePub discussion going on. More of an informal poll, might be a better way to describe it.
To those who post on Smashwords, do you allow free sampling and if so, at what percentage? I ask because I have eighteen stories up and have gotten literally hundreds of sample downloads, but a whopping *one* sale. I’d enabled sampling because I was thinking that would help sales. Am I hurting my sales instead?
I’d love to hear what has worked for others. Has anyone experimented with different percentages, or not enabled the sampling at all?
Thanks in advance.
Deborah, 10%-20% is normal. And I wondered about this as well at first, but then had a couple of ebook readers explain it to me. They download samples that look interesting, but night not get to them in a week or two or longer.
And remember that Smashwords is more of a portal than a bookstore. Sure, they sell books and that’s great, but they are important getting your work to Apple and Sony and Kobo and Diesel. Those reports are delayed. Check on your dashboard down on your sales page on the left side of the dashboard. If any of the other sites have reported it will show there. For example, Kris just sold 110 copies of one section of the Freelancer’s Guide through Apple in Australia. It hasn’t sold one copy on Smashwords site itself.
Thanks, Dean!
(lol Ok, the web site is saying the two-word comment above is too short. So, I’m adding more. Anyone else care to chime in with sampling experience?)
I do like the Race and the e-Race as guidelines/yardsticks. I think Amanda and I decided on 5 points for novels because we’re including novellas and shorter novels into that measurement and those take less time to write than a 120k + word doorstop.
Hmm… if I manage to complete my goals this year my Race score should be around 80-90 (if I have no fulls out, I have one full out at the time of this comment) and my e-Race score should be about 110. So we’ll see if that helps me “break out” as a writer since I’m sitting on the neo-pro cusp of a few sales at the moment
Completely anecdotal- I personally didn’t see much improvement with my writing or my results on submission until I got over 20 points in the Race and I’ve definitely seen more interest in my writing from editors since I’ve gotten over 30 points. I haven’t quite hit 50 yet (my score right now is about 42). I think though that having more work out in front of more editors gives me a much better chance of selling, which seems pretty obvious when it is put that way, doesn’t it?
Okay, when talking here we need to be clear. (grin) Race is for Traditional Publishers, meaning how many points do you have in the mail under submission to editors.
e-Race is for the points counting stories and books that have been indie-published.
And Annie, that does make sense to keep it at five. Kris has about nine short novels up in the e-Race selling for $2.99. Only one novel up. I only have short stories at the moment.
Okay, I think that I just got hit with a clue stick here. Probably the most important thing that I learned, among many important things, at the Marketing workshop was to consider getting the writing done and turned in as a success. Translating that to stories and novels, getting them done and submitted is considered a success. Like Dean has said here, you can set being published as a goal because there’s too much that is out of your control.
Now here comes the clue stick: The Race, and now the e-Race, is set up to encourage that mentality and help you focus on what you CAN control.
I can be thick sometimes but I think I’ve got it now. (grin)
Yeah, Steve! That’s exactly right, we can control the numbers in the race, and focus on those, and the out-of-control results like sales will follow in their own time. You got it.
Wow, lots of stuff going on.
Thanks, Dean, for the long response about the race — especially back in the olden days. It looks like 60 points is where one needs to aim who hopes to one day make a real living doing this. On the one hand, this seems rather daunting (only in the sense that I can’t do it tomorrow; it’s the eating the elephant, you know?). On the other hand — like so much of the cold facts you provide — it’s a breath of fresh air. A concrete marker in this long journey. Thanks!
Deborah,
About the sampling…
I have found giving 50% of the novel and 30% of short stories to be a great lure on Smashwords.
Once someone picks the story up to read, as Dean said, in a week or two or longer, and they get into it and suddenly they’ve invested in the characters, there’s sympathy, and they’re loving where it’s going…
It all comes to a stop. An abrupt stop and they have to see if so-and-so makes it, or how does this part resolve, and…
Well, you get the picture.
Daryl
So
1 point short story published
3 points short story collection 5+
5 points novella published
8 points novel published
?
Megs, no, let’s stick with what Andrea and Annie came up with for points. Only five for any novel of any length. No point in making it too complicated. And realize that most of the planet doesn’t understand the term novella. Sure, it’s a real word but only used in science fiction. Just use the term short-novel when putting up your shorter novels. Basically Kris and I are considering anything under 15,000 words or so as a short story, anything above that as a short novel up to about 50,000 words, then a novel. All lines are fuzzy however.
So e-race is 1 for short story, 3 for collections of stories with five stories or more, 5 for all lengths of novels.
Interesting! I’d never heard about the Race before – I’d love to see an article about all this too, although I think I understand the concept.
The Race is sort of like tracking your “miles per hour” as you go, right? If you’ve got a 70 or 80 or something, you’ve got your foot planted firmly on the accelerator. If you’re trundling along with a 20 or a 30, then you’re not really “going that fast”.
The E-Race sounds to me more like blasting into orbit! The higher your current “escape velocity”, the higher you go? Or something like that? =) I didn’t immediately see a clear comparison like I did for the original Race.
Like you’ve said before, the best way seems to be a mix of both – so you’d say pushing for progress on *both* ‘races’ is a good goal, Dean?
Kevin, yes, progress on both race totals is a good thing. The regular race has a top speed because of sales and limits of markets, but the e-race basically means that the higher your total, the more money you are making. And that’s good also. (grin)
And you are right in the thinking that if you have 70-80 points in the regular race, your foot is planted firmly on the floorboard, all gas and go. And at that level, sales start eating into the total very quickly if you are learning craft as you go and doing decent marketing.
A thought occurred to me while making coffee.
Do you think the old Race numbers hold for writers who are walking down both the trad and the indie path to publication?
Here’s reason I ask. Suppose I write a SF story. I’m going to shoot to this all the pro markets. Duotrope’s Digest tells me there’s about 20 pro SF markets and about 14 semi-pro markets. In this new world of publishing, anything below semi-pro, why consider? (That’s a legitimate question. I noticed that Kris has stuff in some of these small markets — like Drabblecast — so what do I know). But let’s say after all the pro and semi-pro markets, you indie publish your story.
Thus, the story gets moved from the Race to the e-Race after about 30 trad market submissions.
There are dozens of these low-level markets that would’ve kept this SF story in the Race for much longer time (provided it didn’t sell). Thus my Race score is higher. But if those of us who are doing both trad and indie are moving stories from the Race to the e-Race, that’s going to bring the Race scores down some — at least when compared to the scores from 20 years ago.
I know I’m over-analyzing it way too much. The point of the Race is to get you producing, to get those numbers up, and if the numbers are up high, then great. I suppose my only point is that maybe, with e-publishing doors open and (perhaps) a move away from the low-paying/small markets, a race score of 60, 70, or 80 from 20 years ago may be more like 40, 50, or 60.
I simply don’t have the numbers to back any of this up.
And I don’t plan on pushing the point beyond this post. The Race/eRace is what it is, and its a great motivation tool, but that’s it.
Just thinking out loud and wondering if anyone else has thought about it.
Jeff, you are hitting on the one aspect of the traditional Race that has bothered many of us. When the darned story sells, it vanishes from the point total. One week I wrote two stories and mailed them, but sold three and my race total went down. I was actually slightly annoyed until I realized the point of the race wasn’t to maintain high numbers, but to get to high numbers and then let the sales eat the total downward.
A lot of the writers, such as Kevin and Kris, can no longer maintain a race total for very long because their stuff sells far too fast. I got mine back up to beginning writer levels of 80 or so because I did so many novel proposals and chapters so fast, and got ahead of the business.
So yup, you lose one point when you publish your short story from the race but gain a point on the e-Race. And what is interesting is that if you had a short story in the Race, sold it to Asimov’s, the point would vanish, but then nine months after Asimov’s published the story, you could then put it up electronically and the point would return in the e-Race. Kind of a cool balance, actually.
Dean: Yes! Definitely do the Race for Electronic Publishing as a full post!
Deborah: as for Smashwords – I do tend to do a little better percentage-wise than others at Smashwords, and I always do the maximum sample possible (which is fifty percent). Now with short story collections, it may work against you because people get several stories for free and that may satisfy them.
For novels, though, people like to read naturally and come to a natural pause in their reading session when they’re ready to buy. The longer the sample, the more relaxed and receptive they are to the idea of buying. Also people who prefer a quick sample can still just read a few pages and buy but a short sample cuts off those who prefer a longer one.
Finally – a lot of people sample at Smashwords because of the long sample length, but they buy somewhere else – such as Amazon.
Camille
My goals for the year are:
* Finish three novels (one of which is already way overdue; I want the other two to be on time)–which is a BIG goal for me, since two books in a year is a pretty tough goal for me. But it’s what I need to do, and I’ve presented the goal to myself in a way that I’m excited about the challenge rather than freaking out. So, excelsior!
* Get about half my backlist packaged and uploaded to e-book venues. (Then decide whether I want to reissue the other half of my backlist: my 12 old Silhouettes and one old erotica novel I wrote under an untraceable pseudonym. I won’t know until I have a chance to start reading these old books whether I want any of them back in circulation, or would prefer to let them remain part of my mysterious past.)
* Write my usual monthly column 12 times.
Obviously, I’d never win a race against full time writers, but the point system amused me enough to compute my own score and I realized something I’d hadn’t been too conscious of in the process.
I decided to “turn pro” in 2009, and I submitted four stories that year (4 points). This year, I submitted 3 short stories, a graphic novel proposal (and finished the script, so it’s more than a simple proposal), and epublished a previously written novel. That’s 6 points plus 5 epoints if I get credit for the novel even though I wrote it a while ago (I’m going to count it below).
So in two years my ‘race’ total is 15 points. Not much in comparison to the pros on this discussion list.
Except that I realized my batting average was pretty damn high. All 7 short stories sold. The epublished novel is selling a few copies a month. The graphic novel proposal was only submitted a week ago and so it’s too early to draw a conclusion on. That means my batting average on those 15 points is 12 sold and 3 points too early to tell.
In other words, I sold 80-100% of my submissions. Holy cow!
Even if that doesn’t hold up, it certainly provides a glimmer of what might be possible if I could up my ‘points’ in 2011.
So I appreciate the discussion.
Wow, Big Ed, that’s a fantastic “sell-through!” Wow.
Sell-through is another topic that I haven’t talked about here before, but Big Ed explained it pretty well. Basically, of all the stories you write, how many do you end up selling?
Now this used to be pretty cut-and-dried back in the day before electronic publishing. Early on I had a sell-through (over three years time frame) of about 20% once I started selling. Then as the years went by and my craft improved, that got better and better until I sold upwards of 70% after a time. The ones that didn’t sell were literature or just too strange. Kris has gotten to a 100% sell-through over the past decade, with everything she writes eventually finding a home.
Now, with electronic publishing and the ability of all of us to make money from our fiction, this sell-through can only be figured for traditional publishing, and isn’t really as important as it used to be. But it is a great indicator of how your stories are coming up in skill and the ability of you to write inside a genre market.
Jeff: Why consider semi-pro markets in a world with indie publishing? Advertising! Exposure to a wider audience.
Camille –
I meant those markets below semi-pro. What’s called the “token” markets. For Duotrope, a token market is anything below a penny a word. I’m perfectly if a magazine wants to buy my story for a penny a word. At least right now, I am.
But below that? I don’t know. I’d rather put my story out as an ebook than sell it for $5 or $10 (unless it was a 500 or 1000 word piece of flash fiction!).
So right now my plan is to send my short fiction to all applicable pro and semi-pro markets, and then put it up on the web.
However, I just finished a short story today. And I don’t want to send it out. I want to create a cover (which I love to do) and put it out. I LOVE the indie process … and it’s hard to resist it.
But I tell you, it’s tempting to throw all caution (or wisdom, or prudence) to the wind and just focus on my e-Race.
A friend pointed me to a blog where a literary today is (perhaps for reasons of masochism) asking people to post their agent “horror” stories:
http://betsylerner.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/i-see-the-hate-in-your-eyes-damn-them-boys-is-too-fly/
Needless to say, I contributed a post.
Jeff – even if they give you a token $5, or even nothing at all, they aren’t taking “all rights.” You can still publish it there AND epublish it too, a little later.
It’s like Dean putting his stories up on his blog. It’s exposure. It’s an ad for your work that they paid YOU to publish.
Once you’ve gone through all the other opportunities for first rights, then your only consideration is opportunity cost. What do you lose by publishing it in a rinky dink zine? Loss of reputation for publishing in such a market? Then you don’t brag about it. The people who would look down on you for publishing there would not read the magazine in the first place. But the people who DO read the magazine will be wowed by how your story is so much better than the rest. (If it IS better than the rest.)
So you gain exposure… the question is what do you lose?
Camille
While I can see your point, Camille, I don’t consider it worth it to go below semi-pro rates. My writing is my job and I want to get paid for it. A place that can’t even afford 1 cent a word probably won’t have enough readers to matter in terms of exposure. I can do better than that in a couple months up on Kindle, so why bother losing the time for no or very little money? My rule is basically I want to make at least 10 bucks an hour, so if I can’t make 10 bucks for every 1k words, it’s more worth my time to put the story up online where in a few months for no extra effort on my part I’ll make that 10 bucks.
But goals differ for people. That’s just my view on it, but I’m notoriously mercenary about this stuff.
I agree completely with Annie. I would never go below 4 cents per word. And at one cent per word, you are right, Annie, no readers, so not worth the time and energy. Besides, you can make more than that in a year electronically now. (35 cents times one sale per site times five sites = $1.75 per month times 12 months = $21.00. You sell a 2,000 word story for 1 cent per word and you only make $20.00. So what’s the point? And that’s if your story only sells along the bottom levels. And at that rate, you sure wouldn’t want to tell anyone you sold the story.
My rate lowest is 4 cents per word. I broke that once in the last twenty years for one friend at a magazine and he paid me 2 cents per word. But that was it. Only time. I also am a professional writer. I want to be paid. Nature of the beast.
I have to ditto what Annie and Dean are saying. And it was my original point. The only time I see that it’s worth to send a story to a token market is if that token market has a pretty high reputation in the field — such as “Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.” As I understand it, editors such as Dozois and Daltow read that magazine — and if either like your story and pick it for one of their Year’s Best anthologies . . . well, that’s big time exposure.
I usually don’t go below a nickel per word, but I’ve had amazing luck with a few pieces that I initially gave away. It isn’t something you can count on, but publishing in any legitimate publication can sometimes lead to reprint and anthology sales that you won’t get otherwise. It can also lead to awards that you aren’t eligible for with self-publishing, which is stupid, but true.
I first learned this with a piece of nonfiction that started life as a letter to the editor. The editor liked it, published it as a guest column, and from there it just took off. One editor after another requested reprint rights, four, I think, before I even offered it.
They read the column, and contacted me. Over The years, this piece has earned me several thousand dollars, which isn’t bad for something that started out as a letter to the editor, and that took twenty minutes to write.
Since then, I’ve had much the same thing happen with short stories. The first sale goes to a very low-pay magazine, after I’ve started at the top and worked my way down, of course, but then the story takes on a life of its won and gets reprinted hither and yon.
Sometimes it goes better the other way, of course, selling a story to a high=paying mag first, and then to progressively smaller mags as reprints. I sold one short story first to Sports Afield for an even thousand bucks, sold it again to Cricket for, I think, three-twenty-five, and then to several penny per word mags.
Anyway, I’m often fine with selling a story to a low pay magazine, if all the big ones say no, and I’m only going electronic with stories I’m reasonably sure have no future in print.
I’ve also had two short stories that burned out their lives in print, and I then turned them into successful novels. My first piece of fiction was published decades ago, but it, too, is about to become a novel.
All of which means there are sometimes more possibilities than many see, and many approaches that can work, depending on the writer.
I have an open question for everyone — more like some advice seeking.
Like many of Dean’s posts, this one has really got me thinking about how I want to approach this crazy world of publishing.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
Make 2011 a year in which I focus 90% on the e-publishing. For me, this means I put up 100% of all short fiction, and that I simultaneously self-publish novels AND send them to NY editors.
Why?
A couple of reasons.
1. It seems to me that the e-book revolution is moving FAST. The sooner I can get a good back list up at Amazon, Smashwords, B&N, the better. Short fiction allows one to do this quickly. At a story a week, you can have a sizable back list in a year’s time, as Dean points out in his post.
2. Traditional publishing in the magazines isn’t going to change all that much over the next year — if at all. Maybe ANALOG and F/SF will become open to online subs.
3. This means that at the end of 2011, the e-book world could be a very different place, and that’s and I’ve lost a year trying to get on this speeding train. However, the magazines will still be there.
4. Thus, if the e-publishing falls completely flat on its face, all I’ve really lost is a year of submitting stories to traditional short fiction markets. Novels still go to NY, remember. I’ll have produced around 400K words (that’s my goal) and put up a sizable back list of stories and novels (both long and short) on Amazon, Smashwords, and B&N. And at the end of 2011, the magazines will still be there for me to submit new stories to.
Is there a downside to this approach?
For the life of me, I can’t see one right now — except that I won’t be getting as many rejection slips in 2011.
Whadaya think?
I would probably agree with you guys if I wrote much fantasy or sf any more. But I am biased by the fact that the short mystery market has very few pro-rate magazines.
Here’s one way “for the love or $5″ magazines have helped me: because I published short mysteries in some of those smaller zines, I was able to get to the final ballot in the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Awards several times.
So in the description of the collection, I can say “previously published and award nominated.” When I say that, the collection outsells everything else I write. When I just say “previously published”, it sells about the same as other things.
Yes, I’m a professional writer, but I’m also a marketer. I do agree with Dean that most of the promotional things writers do are a waste of time – except for one: get your work out there, and spread it as wide as possible.
At the same time, I do understand your point, and I think it’s reasonable – I just want to point out that there is another side to it.
Downsides to going straight to Kindle with your short fiction? Hmmm.
I’ve been studying this for a year. Talking to writers and readers, and dipping toes in the water. And I have to say that things are changing too fast to give a definitive answer. But I have three general thoughts.
1.) Getting something up NOW is good so you have a presence.
2.) Maybe put some things through the traditional rounds – as it takes exposure to get your sales going, and schmoozing the forums takes time.
3.) I suspect the 99 cent price point for single short stories is going to crash. Right now, there are two audiences for them – one is looking for short stories, and they will buy all your stories if they like the first. The other (and it seems to me the larger) buy 99 cent items as samples of new writers, and they aren’t pleased if all you’ve got are “samples” at 99 cents.
Of course, I could be completely wrong on #3 – it could be that as the mainstream hits the ebook market, and as everybody here hits the market with millions of short stories, a new market with a new price will pop up. I’d really like to see the bargain novel pushed upward from 99 cents, I would I would.
Camille, I agree this is far, far too early in the process to know with any kind of certainty what will settle out. I agree with your #1 however, now is better. With a lot of things up. I agree with #2 also that traditional publishing of some stories first will help drive readers to your electronic publishing. I have no idea what you meant by #3. The 99 cent price point for short fiction is pretty stable. Not sure why anyone would put up a full novel for 99 cents. As a reader, I would be suspect of it unless it was a short-term promotion and the first book of a series to draw readers into the series. Otherwise no reason to do it. New York is staying with traditional price points of $5-10 range for the most part, except for new releases. And since they do 99% of all electronic books, readers are adapting just fine. I think the best price point for a long-sale novel is $4.99 or $5.99. Both are still impulse buys and make the author decent money.
@ Camille —
We who write sf/f are blessed to have a number of pro and semi-pro magazines. (Though compared to when Dean started, the market is painfully small; I woudn’t even want to compare it to when Ellison or Bradbury were just stating out.) But even with mystery fiction — which I also write — there’s more pro-level markets than places like Duotrope would lead you to believe.
Get the a copy of the last two THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES and see all the places where those stories are published. Last time I looked, only TWO in the entire collection came form AHMM and EQMM. The rest came from rather well-know and well-paying literary magazines.
But I do feel your pain. Once you move away from the pro markets, there’s almost no such thing as a semi-pro mystery market. At least none comparable to WEIRD TALES or INTERZONE, and at least none that I know of.
Jeff, weirdly enough, there are far more markets for short fiction in sf/fantasy now than there were when I came in. A ton more, actually. And inside sf, not even counting the thousands of markets that will take sf if you don’t call it that when you submit it. For example, the New Yorker regularly publishes a science fiction story of one sort or another. They never call it that, but they do, something that they never even would have allowed when I started. Science fiction has spread out and become mainstream fiction for the most part. The markets are far, far, far more now than when I was coming in.
When Bradbury and Ellison started, the pulps were almost done and the digests were booming, but that all suddenly stopped with the national distribution collapse of 1958-60. Very, very few sf magazines and very few writers survived that crash. Ellison became an editor and then moved to Hollywood to write screen plays. He also in the 1960s started selling regularly to men’s magazines. I once asked him if he would sign his story in a men’s magazine from that 1960s period and he said sure, and he would sign the other story in the issue and two of the articles as well. He had written them all. Silverberg to stay writing went to nonfiction for a decade or more. And so on. As I have said a number of times, this is the Golden Age for short fiction again, and that’s NOT EVEN COUNTING the electronic indie-publishing.
I’m probably influenced by hanging out with too many indie writers. Many of them are Joe Konrath followers (as am I really) and I think his low price strategies had a lot of influence over a lot of writers. He no longer recommends 99 cent novels, except as a special, but there are a lot of writers out there who swear by it. And a few of them are finding some real success. Others, not so much.
When Kindle started, prices for short stories were something like 1.99, and the audience was a less price conscious first-adopter group which was willing to pay it. And that may be stable. I don’t know.
But there is a huge audience that is beginning to enter the game now – as I notice on Amazon’s kindle communities – who were formerly used book buyers. I’ve always thought that the used market was really a part of the whole economy of publishing – that it supported the high prices made necessary by the cost of publishing. But ebooks have a different paradigm. There is no used market and so lower prices are going to become the norm. The question is where it will settle.
IMHO, even the 2.99 recommended now by Konrath for novels is a “bargain” price, although I am a member of that audience who feels the pinch when they’re priced much higher. (Actually, I head for the library if a book I want is priced over 4.99, or I wait and hope it will go on special.)
The thing about the $2.99 price, Camille, is that novels won’t settle below that while Amazon keeps that as the bottom of their “preferred range”. It’s an artificial price, set by Amazon, for bargain basement ebooks. It’s not a real price, vetted by the customers.
I did a survey last month of SF, fantasy, romance, and some other genre, forget which (mystery?). Almost no books on the top fifty bestselling from any of those genres was below $3.99. And even more importantly, almost none were lower than $3.99 from the top HUNDRED for each of those genres. Most were between $6.99 and $11.99.
Large publishers are not going to drop to $2.99. It’s just not going to happen; it’s not a sustainable price tag for them. They claim they need $9.99+. I’ve done the math – they really don’t (or shouldn’t), but they *do* need more than $2.99, even for an ebook. So traditionally published books are going to settle, if they go down at all, at a higher price tag than $2.99 – maybe, as low as $4.99, but I would guess never lower than that except for sales and special deals.
We’re already seeing a serious split, with most “indie” work coming out at $2.99, some at $1.99, some at 99 cents. With Joe now pushing the $2.99 level, we will see most indie novels rise to that point, and few below it (just makes sense, economically – go for the 70% royalty, not the 35%). Shorts should continue to do fine at 99 cents, if that happens, because novels will be out of that price tag for the most part.
On the other side of the split are the small press or large press – professional press – works that are all coming out at $3.99 or higher. Usually higher. Generally MUCH higher, like $6.99-$11.99. Even if those numbers drop some, there will still be a big difference in price between $2.99 indie stuff and say $4.99 traditional stuff. And as more and more people post up “whatever they want” slush books to the internet, being at that $2.99 price tag might stop being such a good thing… And higher prices might well end up associated with higher quality.
This is quite a bit of speculation, and of course things can and will change fast, but I think we may already be seeing some of this – seeing readers buying what they perceive as professional quality work, not just ignoring higher prices but *preferring* higher prices because they are a perceived indicator of quality.
Kevin, I also am seeing some of what you talked about myself. Readers go for cheap samples, no issue. And readers go for cheap introductions in one fashion or another to authors they don’t know yet, which is why 99 cent short stories are so great. But once in, if they love the author’s work and the quality, they think little of spending from $4.99 to $9.99. Above that a study just came out showing resistance on price climbs. But remember, readers are used to buying $7.99 mass market paperbacks and $15.99 trade paperbacks and $26.00 hardbacks. The $4.99 to $9.99 range is fine.
It’s why I think Joe Konrath is both helping many writers and hurting them at the same time. He’s been a fantastic leader to bring writers to indie-publishing and taking control of their own careers, but his silly demand that all books need to be priced so cheaply is hurting writers at the same time. I wish he would move off that one point. He’s hurting too many writers who would sell the same numbers at $4.99 than as $2.99. The writers just think they have to discount their work like the crap at a dollar store to get readers to like their work instead of trusting that their quality of writing and fiction is good enough to be worth a slightly higher price. All confidence issues and writers are full of confidence issues, of that there is no doubt.
Kevin, what you say makes sense, and appeals to me logically. I’ve pretty much decided at 2.99 for novels under 60k, 3.99 for those over, 4.99 for the monsters. I’m not convinced about 99 cents for single short stories, though. But we’ll wait and see.
One thing that keeps coming back to me though – whether it’s short stories or novelettes at .99 – is that there is an audience for the lower prices, and this is a golden time to go back to pulp writing. To “dare to be bad.” Or just write fast and short for a cheaper price.
I cringe when I see indies with one book on the market, or even two or three, who post over on Kindleboards “I just can’t get enough sales, I guess I should lower my price….” No! Write more. Write things that fit that lower price. Write lots of them.
There is a woman who made much much more money on her lone book by dropping her price, and it is hard to argue with her strategy – but I’d heard a lot of buzz about her book before she dropped the price, and I suspect the price drop was just a catalyst.
Oh, and the point about pricing too low that I forgot: hey, it’s great to price your stuff like penny dreadfuls, but if it’s not dreadful, and it wasn’t cheap and fast to write, isn’t it a good marketing move to price it closer to the books it is like?
Dean, thanks for the provocative post. I completed at least one story every two weeks in 2010, so my goal is to better that by 50%; three stories per month (I tend to write longer stories). And because I was sending them out (again, thanks for pushing us all to do that!) I’ll be appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine next year.
But I also want to make some specific goals about LEARNING THE BUSINESS. What kind of goals would you suggest that would be quantifiable? I have already accomplished these goals:
*Listed the best markets for the type of story I like to write.
*Dedicated reading time to sample copies (or to stories posted on a site).
*Planned to write specifically for some markets.
*Dropped some types of writing that weren’t working for me. (Non-fiction didn’t suit me well, and I wasn’t satisified with the articles, so I won’t be doing any non-fiction outside of my own blog next year.)
What could I put down as a goal for next year? I would welcome your comments, as well as those of other readers of your blog.
Eric, that’s a fantastic goal idea and one that most of us just sort of take for granted and don’t delineate into thought and a list.
A goal of learning the business is a tough one, but critical. Just understanding general business and small business workings is a great start. Learning how to understand large corporation business will help you understand the thinking you are facing with New York, so watching a few movies about corporations might not hurt. Movies like Wall Street and Guardians at the Gate and the like. If you think big publishing is any different, folks, you will be hurt badly. Publishing is multi-billion dollar businesses.
Eric, get to conventions and writer’s conferences and attend any writing business panel. There are usually numbers of them. Then be careful on who you are listening to. Young writers with three or four novels don’t know crap about business. Listen to the longer term professional writers, and the older editors. (Ignore the young editors and ignore all agents. Young editors haven’t been around long enough to know how things work and agents have a different perspective that only suits their business, not yours.) Then keep the bull-sh#t meter in your mind on high and only allow in information that dings and makes logical business sense.
Also, there are three major workshop programs going on right now to help with business for genre writers. Patrick and Teresa Neilson-Haydon (spelling, sorry) are doing a great program that deals with business at times and they are very smart on business. Very smart. Kevin J. Anderson, Dave Wolverton, Eric Flint and a few others are doing a program called The SuperStars that talks a ton about business and all of them have been around a long time and know what they are doing. And Kris and I, for a short time more, are doing workshops that focus on business. For example, in February the Denise Little workshop will focus on both the craft of short fiction and business and has me, Kris, Denise, and John Helfers up front, all long-time professional writers and editors.
Very smart making business part of the goals for the year. Very smart.
I think my goal is going to be 300,000 words. I write TV scripts, short stories and novels, so the wordage will be split pretty evenly between those. Also learning more of the business, which I do at least once per week at the moment. I need to find a way to learn more about the TV and fiction businesses at once, because each keeps changing and I can’t quite keep up with even one of them at a time . . .
Somewhere in a comment you talked about short fiction, how selling for less than 4 cents per word would not make as much as an online version would over time. Did I understand what you said correctly? If that’s so, I plan to continue submitting to the pro sf/f magazines, and a select group of highly respected semi-pros. Whatever doesn’t get sold there will go online for .99 cents each.
Richard, that’s correct, but remember that even selling a story to a pro zine doesn’t mean the story is lost. Just means they paid you money to #1) wait to put it up and #2) promotion for your other work. Selling to a top magazine is not only worth the money, but the promotion factor for what you do have up. And then after a time, like a year in most cases, you get to put the story up anyway. Win-win.
Go, Dean, go!! You are always an inspiration!
My writing goals for this year are a little murky, but I am planning to hit the short stories and the novels harder this year, put 2009 and 2010 behind me.
I spent New Year’s Eve putting together my first CreateSpace work, a mini-collection and can’t wait to get my proof!
Also, I subscribed to Ellery Queen late last year and intend to focus my writing efforts toward a first sale there. And then I need to start writing those novels I proposed at the October workshop. 
I’m over 30 stories up electronically and 1 mini-collection now, too. Things are going well. Just short on time and hoping for the day when I can stop working a full-time day job and do more writing.
Seeya in February!
Dean, I just read your post on epublishing. Thanks so much for writing this. I’ve got a renewed excitement in publishing my short stories electronically. I have some technical questions based on your approach to formatting your books.
You wrote, “To get to the majority of these bookstores, you only have to put your story up on three places. Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon … Just take your manuscript in Word, format it to the Smashwords guidelines, do a cover in PowerPoint with one of your own photos, save it as a jpg file and you are ready. Takes a little learning and some frustration, but very possible and easy to do.”
I went to Smashwords and followed their guidelines, so I believe I have that down. What I’m curious about is how you prepare your manuscripts for Kindle (.mobi) and BarnesandNoble. Smashwords says that you can send your Word File through their “Meatgrinder” and they will create all the necessary electronic versions for Kindle and B&N, plus a half dozen others. I’ve read some horror stories that Smashwords either doesn’t format Word files to Kindle properly or the books never actually reach Kindle. Also, it seems like if I go through Smashwords to get to Kindle & B&N, I’ve got a middleman who has to get a cut.
If it’s possible, I would like to create my own .mobi files and B&N files and upload them directly. But I’m not sure how. You said that after writing a short story, it only takes you thirty minutes to format it an upload it. Can you go a little bit deeper into that process? Are you creating a Smashwords format and a Mobi format and uploading to those sites separately or just sending it all through the Meatgrinder?
Brian,
The word doc. file works fine on all three sites. Just take off the Smashwords copyright information and leave your normal copyright information on the story, save the story as (story)kindle.doc and upload it to Kindle. No need to do a mobi file. And also, same with pubit for B&N. Just save your Kindle .doc file as (story)pubit.doc and upload it there. No reason to go to any extra work unless you are really concerned about holding some special formatting inside your file. Then you’ll have to use html files or some such type to hold formatting. But for basic, clean stuff, which works best on electronic sites, just use simple .doc files.
But you have to have accounts on all three sites. Easy, just takes a few minutes to set up on each site.
Brian, I will go through some formatting in this series, but my attitude is the K.I.S.S. formula. As an old guy, if I can do it and do it quickly and it works for the most part, then I’m happy.
One thing that is frightening is that I used some other advice early on formatting and now need to go back and not only redo some really ugly early covers, but also reformat and get stories up with better formatting.
Also, Kindle and the other sites have worked on their conversion and got them working better as well. Another reason to go back to those early stories a year ago and get up new files. (grin) Ahhh, the learning just keeps on and on.
Dean, thanks for responding so quickly. This was extremely helpful and you cleared things up for me. I like your three-pronged approach to getting stories out to the market (Kindle, B&N, Smashwords).
It sounds like Amazon has made it even easier to publish for Kindle. I found their Kindle Direct Publishing page. https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin Their FAQ section is pretty easy to follow and they have a five-minute tutorial video that walks you through how to upload a book and cover art.
Now I get to study Barnes and Noble’s set up procedure. For anyone just starting out, here’s the link for Pubit for the Nook version http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/pubit_app/bn?t=pi_reg_home
As technology and the insustry of bookselling changes, we authors have to keep adapting. But now more than ever, it’s an exciting time to be a published author.
Again, Dean, thanks a million!
Hey Dean,
It would be great if you did a piece on formatting. Today I formatted my short story in MS Word according to Smashwords’ guidelines. The file converted beautifully in B&N’s Pubit! All the indents and itallics were just like I formatted. However, in Kindle that same Word doc was a complete mess. I lost all indents, line spacing, and itallics. And the margins were lost, the words filling the screen all the way to the edges. I’ve never read a Kindle before to know what it’s supposed to look like, but this screen with no margins was unpleasant to read.
In the beginning, did you have any issues getting Kindle to properly convert your Word file? I like the idea of uploading one formatted to file to Kindle, Pubit! and Smashwords, but when I’ve searched the Kindleboards for answers, I’ve come across all kinds of crazy, complicated ways of formatting Word specifically for Kindle. And still, I’ve yet to find a clear answer. Do you have a simple solution?
Brian
Brian, you are looking at their preview Kindle. Have someone with a Kindle look at it. Trust me, those previews on Pubit and Kindle are just screwy at times. (grin)
Wait until it gets launched and then have someone with a Kindle sample it and then make changes.
Okay, thanks. I’ll do that.