As I get done with deadlines and head back to a big push on the short story challenge, I’ve been doing a few short story collections. You can see the titles of the collections and covers down the right side of the page. There are a number now. But for you Poker Boy fans, I thought I would show you these two new Poker Boy collections.
Both are going up now on all the sites, but it might take a week or two to end up on Apple and Sony and others around the world. And over the next month both will be in trade paperback as well.
Both are $2.99 electronically and will be $7.99 trade paper. And all stories are available for 99 cents each on all electronic stores. 
The stories in Five From the Felt are:
– Fighting the Fuzzy Wuzzy
– Sighed the Snake
– Dead Even
– The Smoke that Didn’t Bark
– Shootout in the Okey-Doke Casino
Stories in The Women of the Felt are:
– Luck Be A Lady
– Pink Shoes and Hot Chocolate
– Nonexistent No More
– The Old Girlfriend of Doom
– Daddy is an Undertaker
Have I said lately how much fun I’m having with this new world? (Nifty covers, huh?)
Beautiful covers; great collections! Congratulations!!
Those are great covers. Reminds me that my need work. lol.
Jack, my early covers all need work as well. Called learning. (grin) When I was putting these collections together, I ended up redoing six of the ten story covers, reloaded them in zip format on Kindle to hold formatting better, and so on. So instead of only taking a few hours to do these collections, with fixing all the old covers and old files it took me almost ten hours total. Annoying, but at least the covers are fixed and the files fixed for those ten stories now. Want to see one of the new covers, scroll down on the left side to “The Old Girlfriend of Doom” story. That had an awful cover on it when I first put it up (but I thought it was good at the time). I like the new one. (grin) Fits the story completely.
Yes, nifty covers and congrats!
The covers are BEAUTIFUL and *easy* to discern at thumbnail size. Did you have help with these? If so, any hope for a link??
Congratulations, -Steve
Excellent covers and certainly a head above what I would have expected. While I particularly like the “Petty girl” cover for Five From the Felt, the cover for The Women of the Felt will probably be more attractive when viewed on the shelf. One could only wish that there were five women on the cover to match the 5 stories, but that is picking nits.
Where did you get those pictures?
Awesome covers, Dean. Did you do them yourself?
Thanks for the nice comments on the covers, everyone. Appreciated. And yup, I did them myself. After doing a couple hundred covers now, I’m getting better and settling in pretty well with the look of different types of books we want WMG Publishing to have. And I found the art on Dreamstime.com. I also get art off of IStockPhoto and a number of other sites. I don’t mind paying $4.00 to $8.00 for cover art and of course, as required, give the cover artist credit in the book.
Thanks again for the nice comments. I have the wrap-around cover done for The Women of the Felt and it looks spiffy as well. It should be up in trade paper within the month.
Thanks for the link, didn’t know about dreamtime. With these covers in your portfolio, you can easily hire yourself out as designer day labor. Just say’in,,, LOL
SL… LOL… Kris and I have another 700 plus books to do for WMG Publishing before we even begin to get through our backlist, let alone the new stuff we are writing all the time. It will be many, many years before I could ever hire out to do any cover but a WMG Publishing cover. (grin)
Dean, any backlash from readers about single short stories in e-book format?
The reason I asked is because I’d considered doing several short stories as individual e-books. I made one of the stories available and was immediately bombarded with a half dozen e-mails and one negative review, all complaining about “how dare I try to sell a short story for 99 cents when there are novels out there selling for as much.” So I cowered and backed off, though I left the one short story up (and this month have sold 129 copies so far on Amazon).
So … I’ve been rethinking again, and considering doing more shorts, at least between novels.
Ty, the standard price for short stories alone is becoming 99 cents. 99 cent novels are discounted novels.
The thinking is this: A short story is like a single song in music, which also sells for 99 cents. An Album sells for a lot more, as do novels. Five story collections I like at $2.99 since if a reader bought the stories alone, they would pay $4.95 for all five, so that’s a nice discount to 60 cents each or so.
Standard pricing for novels tends to run from $4.99 to $12.99 electronic, with a few being higher. (This is, of course, not counting the minor number of people on the Kindle Boards who ignore the multi-billion dollar regular publishing business in favor of going into the smaller discount publishing business. I personally like the $3.99 and $4.99 prices, since they are under $5.00 and impulse buy range. But no traditional publishers lower their prices to $3.99 and only a few times to $4.99. Most traditional publishers, who do the vast majority of all electronic books, hold their prices from $5.99 and up, depending.
I’ve done a number of pricing articles already, one in Think Like a Publisher series just recently.
Holy crap, Ty, I just saw your number. 129 short story sales of one story in one month on Kindle at 99 cents. Holy crap. That’s stunning. I tend to figure that a short story will sell five copies average each month across ALL SITES AROUND THE WORLD. And that’s enough to make me great money every year.
129 x 35 cents x 12 months = $541 per year for one short story. If I end up with the 100 stories done in this challenge and they all sold that much, I would make $54,100.00 per year. Year after year. Holy crap, that’s fantastic sale number. I hope you realize that.
Really nice work, Dean! The Poker Boy covers are swell, but I’m also strangely drawn to the eerie green ghost stories image.
Dean, yes, I realize the sales number for that particular short story are quite good. The kicker is that that story is a prequel to one of my better-selling fantasy trilogies, so I’m guessing that’s why it sells so well.
For a more down-to-earth number, my three collections of horror short stories (5 to 7 stories per collection) are selling between 15 and 30 copies each per month, with prices all over the place but always in the 99 cents to $2.99 range. I tend to play around with the prices with those collections, jumping up and down depending upon my mood.
It sounds to me like you’re suggesting I go ahead and write more short stories.
Ty, I would sure say so with those numbers.
Maybe I’m dense but, as a 30 resident of Sin City and a professional gambler I just don’t see the relationship with those great covers and the grinding, boring and frustrating game of poker.
Gotta tell ya – in all those 30 years I NEVER saw a single woman looking that good in any poker room!!!!!
Dale, blackjack is deadly dull and boring. Poker, not so much. (grin) And oh yeah, I’ve seen them. Bunches of times. I had a beauty of a woman sit down beside me in a poker tournament here on the coast about 15 years back. Turns out she was an actress and wanted to learn how to play since she had retired here during the summers. She won a lot of money before people caught on that she also lived in Vegas in the winter. (grin) And yes, she really was an actress. And a stunning poker player.
I don’t know, I’ve bought a shitload of traditionally published books for under $4 — but, they’re all backlist, and the price was usually a temporary discount.
I don’t think anybody is “ignoring” traditional publishing when they reject the $14.99 ebooks, but yes, the 6.99 and 7.99 paperbacks are a proper cognate to ebooks.
But we also have to remember that we are luring back the used book buyer. $4-5 is a nice price for that audience.
Camille, I didn’t mean to imply that readers were ignoring the $14.99 e-books. They are not, and many books at that price hit bestseller lists.
I am saying, and let me be clear here, even though I am sure I have in the past: Selling a novel for 99 cents is just stupid business. Is that clear enough??? And that is my opinion.
If you want a good bottle of wine (like a good book), you don’t search for it in the dollar store.
Dean, you don’t have to defend your stance on the 99 cent novel. I was just pointing out that the people who are discounting are not as completely out of touch as it seems. Somewhat out of touch, yes. But they do have a point that the top of the “going price” for ebooks is ridiculous.
They just happen to be going for its ridiculous opposite.
One thing that confuses the issue, though, is that we are not just writers and publishers — with the advent of agency pricing, we’re also retailers. And that, I think, is where the trouble comes in. The difference between setting a discount price, and having a sale or promotion is harder for people to see.
Good point, Camille. “…ridiculous opposite.” Spot on.
And you are also right about the retailing aspects with the agency model. Especially since so many writers have never been in any sort of retail business. Very good point. Thanks.
I wanted to say thank you for mentioning those specific sites for the cover art. I have tried searching (my husband mocks me for my complete lack of skill in finding things on the net) and failed to find any sites that looked promising and my husband hasn’t found the time to help me out.