Shorty Story Publishing

[SDBmania]

Hi everyone!

I have a couple short stories, one was part of the amazon-shorts program and another one that I published as an audio book, but never published it as an e-book or otherwise. I was wondering if anyone has had any luck or experience with POD with short stories. I've been thinking about using Amazon's create-a-space to publish them, since its free and I have cover art already.

Do you think it's worth publishing short stories? Or should I just stick with my novels? Both my stories are about 11k words.

[Tienci]

Disclaimer: I'm a newbie to this section.
But I think for short stories, it might be worth it to print a collection--or at least more than one at your length; 3 or more in fact (but definitely 2 at a minimum).
This is for hard copies of course; I think it's perfectly fine to re-release a story as an ebook by itself.

[SDBmania]

That does sound like a good idea. Both of my shorts are comedies, so that should work well. I've been working on a story, which is intended to be a novel, but I could make it the third short story. However, the story I'm working on is a sci-fi thriller and I'm not sure I should include it since it's a different genera. I might be better off writing another comedy.

[merrihiatt]

I have several short stories available through CreateSpace. The Christmas short sold well, but the others only sold about ten copies in a year, or one copy a month in paperback. I had several requests for the shorts to be in paperback. Paying for expanded distribution to other sales channels is the same no matter if the book is short or long, but it takes a while to earn back that $25 with reasonably priced short stories.

[SDBmania]

Just wanted to thank you two for the advice.

I ended up publishing my two shorts together with create-a-space, in part because I wanted to try it out. I'm thinking of self-publishing my second novel with amazon. I'm looking forward to seeing what it looks like in print!

[Tienci]

Congrats and good luck with the next step!

[SDBmania]

Thanks Tienci.

We'll see how the launch goes.

[Nightmelody]

I'm doing a bundle of 3 15k novellas and an 8k short later this month for ebook and create space. I haven't considered printing them separately because I didn't think they would sell at all.

[SDBmania]

I agree, trying to publish a short story by itself in a physical book is probably a bad idea. It costs Amazon $2.15 to produce the book at about 100 pages or less and obviously more if it's over about 100 pages. I think if I were going to write more short stories, I'd do a larger collection. But for now, I'm going to focus on my novels.

I've already got a little bit more than 100 downloads of My Imperfect Life so far and this is the second day of my 5-day free promo. That's pretty good for me. I'm sure the downloads will slow down by a bunch once the promo is over. But, maybe I'll at least get some decent reviews

[aibrean]

Short stories as a collection makes sense in print. If you get too short and are charging for it, people aren't going to be as open to buying as they don't feel they are getting value. I wrote a 30k word novella (Out of Time in my sig) and sold it as an ebook for $.99 (decent flow of sales). The cost point is low so there is less risk to the end user. I don't know who would buy (this example is being sold on Smashwords) a 6500 word story for $3.

[Eriador117]

Short stories for print might not be such a good idea, unless it's a collection. Separate short stories on Kindle or Smashwords as ebooks can work well. I have two erotica short stories that are averaging around 10-15 copies a month each as ebooks. (One of them sold 45 copies on its first day of release.) Last week, one of of them was number 4 in the top 100 gay and fiction short stories on amazon uk I didn't know how to make a screenshot at the time, so I couldn't save it, which was a pity.

So I think ebook short stories can do well

Take care,
Annette