Self-Publishing Short Stories

Maryn, we are not putting down the entire genre. We are talking about a certain subset of pornographic fiction (which is being marketed as erotica on Amazon) where one story is pretty much interchangeable with another, where there is little character development, and it is pretty much just literary pornography, and you can definitely find loads and loads of written pornography for free. None of this is making any comments on the erotica genre in general.

I mean if you're a steady reader of the self-published erotic short fiction best sellers on Amazon and disagree that they're more porn than literary erotica, that's great. You could give us a better idea of the market.

To the OP:

I recently self-published a collection of stories, however, it is difficult for me to say if it is a route worth taking.

For me, it's been an amazing experience. I have never published anything before, and holding a copy of a book in my hands is one of the most incredible feelings. If only for that moment, it was worth the effort.

From a profit standpoint, I've sold 4 digital copies at $2.99 and have given away 25 during promotional days that Amazon KDP provides. This was all with no marketing at all. I plan to push my title a bit more in the future, but for now, I'm just waiting to see what happens. It doesn't seem like it is a dead genre, and with some heavy marketing, you could definitely rank high in a sub-section or two.

I will say, that the book took me roughly 80 hours of writing and editing (a small collection of flash-fiction); but easily took double that to format, design the cover, tweak and learn a few new inDesign techniques. Formatting was an extreme learning curve. If you plan to hire someone--or if you have experience--the process would be much smoother.

I'm a huge fan of Sedaris, Saunders, B.J. Novak's new book, etc., so I am a bit biased about the style; but I can certainly help with the specifics of the publishing process.

Best of luck!

beachbum21k said:

How long are the stories on average? 3000? 10000?

Click to expand...

My stories are usually around 4K on average (some higher, some lower). When I put three of them in a single collection, they collectively always end up over the 10K mark.

I have stand-alone short stories, most around 3.5k words (so smack in the middle of "short story" territory), for $0.99 each. I have a few freebies, which are essentially intros to series, none of which are free on Amazon. The penname with 3 related short stories, first one free, actually gets me a few dollars per month + gets a bump when I release something new under that penname.

I had a bundle of a novelette + 2 related shorts that didn't sell at all…then I broke it up into parts (also still making the full bundle available), and now am selling some.

However, even when I didn't have freebies, Amazon moved fewer short stories than other vendors. My best vendor tends to vary, from month to month. So far, B&N's doing best for me this month. Some months it's Apple, or Google, or DTF.

Amazon's often my best when I have a new novel out, but I get more bulk "one of each"-type buys at once from B&N.

I've had one complaint on pricing, but the complaint also contained incorrect information about the story length. I also am intentionally avoiding "cheap" prices on my for-sale titles, because I have plenty of stories available free on Wattpad. The stories available on Wattpad actually tend to sell more than other ones.

So far, so good

This has been a fascinating thread. I've learned a lot from everyone's postings.
I've made the first move to bundle my single shorts together, now it's time to price them properly.

If you have a website or blog, this is what I would do.

Give away your short story in the form of an eBook (PDF file)...

In exchange, they give you their email to receive the free copy...

And then you can build a list of people that MAY like your work.

Later on down the road, you can make an attempt to sell them your other work.