Short story strategy: a self-publishing diary

I've posted before about my experiment in self-publishing, but wanted to wait until the first six months were up before reaching conclusions. That time is now up, so I wanted to share a few thoughts.

In a nutshell: I'm a freelance editor working primarily with self-publishing authors. I wanted to diversify into self-publishing my own writing to see if this could be another source of income. (I guess I also had the irrational hope that if my fiction sold, it would prove that I really can write after all.) I published anonymously so that (a) sales would only come from strangers, not from friends or family, and (b) I wouldn't have to reveal my writing kinks to my mother.

I have a specific strategy designed to prioritise income rather than sales. I write romance short stories of around 5000 words priced at $2.99, then when a series is complete I set the first short story to permafree and bundle everything at $9.99. This pricing goes down with some readers about as well as you'd expect but the royalty situation is undeniable: you have to bring in six times more readers for a 99-cent story at a 35% royalty rate than for a $2.99 short story at 70%. My long-term theory is that many short stories will sell a few copies each through many different retailers, adding up to reasonable overall sales.

My goal for the first six months was just to break even on expenses.

OK, the results.

Over the last six months I've sold 800 copies at $2.99 to $9.99. Profit after expenses was around $2000.

I've sold small numbers at Sony, Kobo, Smashwords, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Amazon India, Amazon Canada, Amazon Germany and Amazon UK. The two big (sort of) sellers were Amazon US and All Romance Ebooks. To my surprise, All Romance Ebooks significantly and consistently outperformed Amazon US, with sales being three or even four times greater.

I now have 25 titles available, from individual short stories to bundles. I spend about one day a week writing, editing and publishing. I publish a new short story most weeks.

The good:

• I did break even.
• I don't do any promotion and nobody knows my pen name, so sales are purely from readers stumbling over my work and liking it.
• Expenses are minimal. My cover artist makes a series template and I run off a cover for each story from that template. This gives me flexibility as well.
• It hasn't cut into my editing time.

The bad:

• Sales have plateaued over the last two or three months. I'm hoping that sales will pick up after Christmas.
• I haven't cracked Amazon US. Sales are not consistently rising.
• Royalties are slow to arrive, especially from smaller retailers with payment thresholds. I'm still waiting to be paid for some sales from June.
• Mailing list signups do not convert directly into sales. Around 30 people signed up to be notified of new releases, but they don't always buy.
• I'm not at all confident that these results justify self-publishing any of my novels. I don't think the audience is there and I'm not sure the quality of writing is there.

Overall, I'm happy with sales and plan to continue with my short story a week, and we'll see what Christmas brings.

And that's about it.

Thanks, everybody.

Yes, this is basically the Dean Wesley Smith model. I got to thinking about it because of a fascinating Kindleboards thread by someone who published 100 titles in a year following this model and built a very successful following. She's obviously a lot more productive than I am.

J Tanner, thanks for your promotion advice. I like the thought of offering a freebie for mailing list signups. I do have a mailing list and a website set up, so you're right that that is a kind of promotion. I don't feel terribly comfortable with going out hunting for readers, so I don't do ads and giveaways and blog tours and cover reveals and whatever, but if a reader comes looking for my new releases, I want to be able to hook them up.

Price points ...

merrihiatt said:

The $2.99 price point seems high to me for 5,000 words. Then again, I'm cheap! Thanks for reporting on your journey.

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MartinD said:

I don't think you're cheap. I think $2.99 is fairly pricey for a 5,000 word story but perhaps the All Romance crowd is used to higher prices.

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elindsen said:

I agree. I would never pay $2.99 for 5k. That seems kind of on the rip off scale. But, if it's working, go for it.

How many shorts/series are in the $9.99? Again, for me to pay that, there would have to be at least 500k. I could be wrong, but the NYC pubs charge $7.99 for a full novel, some of which are really long. $9.99 is close to POD pricing.

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Buying each instalment of these series separately could easily cost $20-$30, so I think the $9.99 bundle price doesn't look so painful in that context.

In all honesty, I'm inclined to agree with you - this is a high price point (although I think "ripoff" was a little harsh...) and I don't personally buy short stories at this price. But there is a readership that does, and it's my job to find those people. The readership that doesn't is not my target market. I have no confidence in my own work and would value it at less than nothing given half the chance, so I'm trying to keep my personal feelings out of pricing. This is business and a product is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

MartinD said:

As J. Tanner says, Dean Wesley Smith advocates this approach but DWS isn't selling a lot of stories (if you go by Amazon ranking).

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I don't think Amazon ranking of individual stories is the best way to assess the success of the Dean Wesley Smith method. This is a profit strategy rather than a sales strategy. The aim is not for any one story to sell in high numbers at Amazon US, but for many stories to sell in low numbers across many retailers, bringing in an overall income. So if your lowest-selling story is only shifting one copy a month, but the overall catalogue is bringing in $x (insert your own figure!) a month, the method is successful. Also factor in that when the bundle is released, sales of the individual short stories in that bundle drop because the bundle is a more economical way of buying the series. I certainly have stories that sell in very low numbers, but the overall catalogue currently turns over about $500-600 a month (where it has plateaued - trying to push it higher - puff puff!) so the success of the whole doesn't correlate with the Amazon ranking of the one. If the goal is high sales for a single title, it would be better to write full-length novels at 99 cents. But that is not such a good profit strategy.

J. Tanner said:

If your novels are also romance, and also series, I think you maybe underestimating their potential. It's hard to draw firm conclusions but readers amenable to short fiction seems to be a tiny portion of the market--the same system with novels can jump at least an order of magnitude (granted, as does the time investment) and if it's further linked into the short fiction can drive them up further.

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I have to confess that I'm an SFF writer at heart - I write urban and epic fantasies. I can't imagine any crossover from readers of my short stories. Also, a lot of people know about my novels, so I don't want them linked to my anonymous romance pen name. (I'd publish the novels anonymously too if I could, but unfortunately...) I was trying to use the short stories to assess whether I'm secretly a super awesome writer but sadly I don't think that's in evidence. Although I do like your suggestion that novels sell orders of magnitude more than short stories.

Just a few more thoughts.

Juliet Rich said:

Thanks for sharing this. I was thinking that in order to publish a short story as an ebook, I should be making small collections of at least 3. It's good to know you've had success publishing them separately.

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This is very genre-specific, so I'm not sure if the same applies outside the erotic romance genre. Would be interested in your findings if you do try it.

Juliet Rich said:

Is your cover template something you just fill in the title each time, or do you do other things like change the color? I have some ability with GIMP, but I'm not an artist or a designer, so this idea is definitely appealing to me for a series.

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My cover artist supplies me with a PSD file with the only editable elements being the book title and the book number. Everything else is flattened (not sure if this is the technical term...) so that I can't accidentally break anything. It took me a few hours to figure out how to use Photoshop but now it only takes me a few minutes to alter the book title and book number, then run off a 1600x2400 JPG for Kindle, Smashwords and D2D, plus a 200x300 JPG for All Romance Ebooks.

I do have the occasional hiccup, like when some kind of font effect made the text weird at 200x300, and I had to untick all the font effects until I found the culprit. But I've never had a problem I can't fix with a little googling.

My cover artist charges $90 per series template, which I think is really reasonable.

J. Tanner said:

I'm not sure you can judge your super-awesomeness quotient quite yet but presumably people who get the first of the series like it enough to work their way through more at a premium price given your sales. That makes you a pretty entertaining storyteller at worst. Nothing to sneeze at there.

When it comes down to it, more than pricing or genre I think the key element is series. When people stumble on something they like, they want more of it. So have something available for your ideal readers when they find you. That simple.

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Thanks for the advice, J. I have no idea what I'm doing, so it's good to hear from somebody who does.

Batspan said:

Have you managed to keep this from your mother? You don't have to answer that.

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I have thus far maintained my anonymity. I write silently like a ninja.

Just signed off on the mockup for my next cover template. I get a certain satisfaction from paying my cover artist from my royalty account. It makes me feel like my writing business is its own self-sufficient little ecosystem.

My current estimate is that I should hit the big 1000 sales in early January, so put the champagne on ice.

Barring fresh numbers from late-reporting retailers, I'm closing out 2013 on 920 sales at $2.99+. December came in pretty much the same as October and November.

I wonder if I've reached my level and this is as far as I'll go as a writer. I wonder if these are all the books I'll ever sell. I wonder what the reviews that I don't read say. I wonder if any of these books are even remotely readable.

I'm going to give it another year to see if I can make a go of this. Let's aim for 40 new releases - that allows a few weeks off. Current numbers suggest a reasonable expectation of around 2000 sales for 2014, and let's say we call it success beyond our wildest dreams at 4000.

OK, that's me done for 2013.

Thanks, everybody! Typically, now that I've got the champagne chilling, sales are slowing a bit, but I should definitely hit the big 1000 some time in January.

I won't complain too much because the average royalty for my January sales so far is a staggering $6.32 per sale. Yikes. Ladies and gentlemen, the power of the $9.99 bundle.

Just working on tonight's release, which will be my 29th.

Pushingfordream said:

Hey how long in word count is this book?

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You messaged me about this earlier and I referred you back to the thread, but in case you didn't get my reply :

Parametric said:

I write romance short stories of around 5000 words...

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Well, I just got hit by the sales train. 40 sales in the last 36 hours. And that is the power of having my new release sit on the front page of All Romance Ebooks all weekend.

I also got a super cute email from a very excited reader about how much she liked the new story. So I'm happy.

CHAMPAGNE!

7 months, 1000 sales.