Reprint Sells Better Than Original For Short Story eBooks

eBook Reader On Dead Tree BooksAfter selling short story ebooks for over a year-and-a-half, I can say that reprint content (i.e., published manuscripts) sells better than original content (i.e., unpublished manuscripts). This may surprise some writers. Although the ebook publishing revolution is the great equalizer for content, some content are more equal than other content (to paraphrase George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”). Knowing the difference can increase ebook sales.

Depending on the content, I include one of the following two lines in the description and on the title page for the ebook.

For reprint content: “This 1,029-word short story was first published in The MacGuffin (Fall 2009).”

For original content: “This 1,155-word short story is being published for the first time.”

Readers looking for something new to read—especially from a writer they haven’t read before—would buy the reprint ebook because an editor thought the original manuscript was good enough for their publication. (Assuming that the editor wasn’t an utter moron, which I have encountered a few during my snail mail submission days.) Most publication credits can be independently verified on the Internet or at the local library, if the reader wants to go one step further before buying. Reprint content inspires trust, whereas original content requires a leap of faith, from the reader.

My goal as a short story writer is to publish my manuscripts elsewhere first. After the exclusive period is over (i.e., 90 days for web publication to 365 days for print publication), I can re-publish my short story as a reprint ebook. My goal as an ebook publisher is to fill the pipeline with reprint content as much as possible and use original content to fill out the publication calendar (two ebooks per month). Reprint content takes very little time to turn into an ebook. If I can get enough reprint content into the pipeline, I’ll have enough free time to write and publish an original novel ebook.

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The 500-Word Blog Post

Blog  Puzzle PiecesWhen I decided to get back into blogging on a regular basis for my personal blog and this writing blog, I also decided to limit myself to 500 words or less per each blog posting. Having written numerous 500-word flash stories, this was a comfortable length that represented 15 minutes to two hours of work. Like any good flash story, you need a solid beginning, middle and ending to make a blog post work at that length.

When I surveyed the 300 postings from the two blogs to start compiling them into free ebooks (starting with ASVW Volume 1), the shortest blog post was 29 words (i.e., an introduction to a video) and the longest blog post was 3,000+ words (i.e., a book review with a half-dozen books).  The average length between the two extremes may be 500 words or less. I have enough material to release ten 15,000-word ebooks over the next year. If I continue to blog at a regular pace, I’ll have enough material to publish two free blog compilation ebooks each year.

Writing a 500-word blog post isn’t a piece of cake. If I can’t shoehorn an idea into 500-words in less than two hours, I need to turn it into a 3,000-word essay ebook or split it into multiple blog posts. That’s what I did for the Kickstarter blog posts—see Part 1 and Part 2. That was ugly since I had to stay within the 500-words I wrote. (Quoted text from other sources don’t count towards the limit.) For the blog compilation ebook, I will rewrite the two  blog posts into one seamless article.

If everything goes smoothly (and nothing ever does in my life), I can knock out a week worth of blog posts—2,000 words—on a weekend afternoon.

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A Slightly Different Kind Of Demoness

Succubus DrawingI seldom get reviews for my short story and essay ebooks. When I got a head’s up a few weeks ago that TeraS of Succubus.net was reviewing my recent short story ebook, “Some Bad Decisions,” where a serial killer finds himself rolling in a world of hurt with a “succubus” prostitute, I welcomed the full-length review even though I was skewered with a pitchfork for taking some obvious shortcuts with the succubus character.

More telling to me personally is that I just found it hard to care to know or see anything more about Jane when the story was finished with. She just wasn’t a Succubus that I could like in any shape, way or form. It’s rare for me to say that, but in this case it’s true. She was a means to an end, a direction in the story, a way to tie up loose ends in more than one way.

Guilty as charged. Plain Jane as a succubus—or, more precisely, a sexy demoness—tied up quite a few loose ends. Until I read the review, I haven’t given any serious thought about what the succubus should be beyond being the deadly prostitute who takes revenge against a serial killer stalking the Las Vegas strip. I wrote a straight forward horror short story with a huge dollop of sex added, which is something I personally don’t like reading from other horror writers.

As a short story writer, I always danced around the sex scenes because most publications didn’t go there. “The Unfaithful Camera” was my most “sexually explicit” short story to date, where a little boy comes home from school to find his father and older sister doing the “bouncy bounce” in bed. That’s all, folks.

Writing a sexually-explicit short story for an erotica horror anthology on a short deadline was a special challenge. The first submission was rejected as being too short and a revision was requested. For the second submission, I doubled the length of the story by playing the characters against each other and sharpen their personality quirks. The short story was accepted without a peep from the editor about how I handled the sexuality of the succubus character. Then again, that was the general complaint about the anthology: too much horror, too little erotica.

I find myself wondering what Jane was really like… this image of her was formed, as I said, to ensnare Claude and I have to wonder if she isn’t more than just a being of terror as she was here. There is a hint of connections with the Vegas underworld in the story and I find myself wondering about that aspect of her, and where it would take her story in the future should the author continue the story from here.

I’m thinking about moving Plain Jane the Succubus out of the horror genre into the urban fantasy genre for a novella, novel and/or series. The short story will be rewritten as the first chapter from Plain Jane’s point of view as she eliminates a serial killer that she later discovers to be the wrong guy as the planted evidence was meant to implicate her. A homicide detective designates her as the Las Vegas ripper, the supernatural underworld turns against her, and the chase is on for her to find the real serial killer before something really bad happens to her.

I’m going to take my time developing the longer story. Urban fantasy is quite different than horror. I need to know more about the supernatural creatures that inhabit the Las Vegas underworld, which I know little about except for the Godfather movies. I’m more confident about writing sex scenes now that my second sexually explicit short story is available in print. Maybe I can nail down the erotica part this time.

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A Nonsensical Story About A Sleeveless Pineapple

Pineapple Has No Sleeves (New York State Education Department)

Pineapple Has No Sleeves (New York State Education Department)

You’re nonsensical writer if you sell a nonsensical short story to an educational testing board that turns it into a nonsensical multiple choice question for an eight grade English exam. Something that Daniel Pinkwater, a popular children book author, is finding out this week as the state commissioner for the New York State Department pulls the “Pineapple Has No Sleeves” story out of the standardized test.

The crux of the passage is that the pineapple challenges the hare to a race, and the other animals are convinced the pineapple must have a trick up its sleeve and will win. When the pineapple stands still, the animals eat it. The moral of the story: “Pineapples don’t have sleeves.”

One of the disputed questions asked, essentially, which was the wisest animal. Some students said that none of the animals seemed very bright, but that a likely answer was the owl, because it was the one that uttered the moral.

Others worried that the owl was a distraction, because owls are supposed to be wise, so it would be the wrong answer.

The other tough question was why the animals ate the pineapple. Students were torn between two of the four choices: they were annoyed or they were hungry; either one seemed to work.

As Daniel Pinkwater mentions on his website:

OK, here is the deal. There are these companies that make up tests and various reading materials, and sell them to state departments of education for vast sums of money. One of the things they do is purchase rights from authors to use excerpts from books. For these they pay the authors non-vast sums of money. Then they edit the passages according to….I have no idea what perceived requirements.

The moral of this story: kids are smarter than adults when it comes to critical thinking skills, especially when a sleeveless pineapple is involved.

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Should Kickstarter Fund Your Next Writing Project? (Part 2)

This is the second part of a two-part blog post. Read Part 1 – The Wrong Way.

THE RIGHT WAY

Should Kickstarter Fund Your Next Writing Project? (Part 2)

 

The second project is from the artist/writer team of All New Issues web comic who wants $4,000 USD to publish a print book.

This Kickstarter is to raise enough money to pay for a print run of a 140 page perfect bound book, collecting the first 200 strips of All New Issues. The funds we raise would cover the cost of the print job, Kickstarter and Amazon fees, and help cover the cost of any extra shipping for the incentives. Any additional funds that we receive will be used to help pay for travel costs for conventions this summer.

This is a tightly focused and more realistic project with all the ingredients for success available from the start.

  1. If you check out the archive page, the source material is ready for book form.
  2. An established audience wants to see a web comic book in either PDF or print format.
  3. The $4,000 USD price figure is typical for a printed web comic book.
  4. Additional funds beyond the minimum goal will go towards traveling on the summer convention circuit to meet fans and sell signed books.
  5. A short video introducing the project sponsors, the web comic and the goals for the project also helps.

 

The initial $4,000 USD minimum goal was met within the first week. The project sponsors upped the incentives for reaching the new $5,000 USD and $5,500 USD funding goals. With less than a few days to go before the project is funded, the $6,000 USD level may be within easy reach. The project sponsors will have a busy summer traveling the convention circuit as they reach out to fans and sell more books.

Updated 04/21/2012 — The All New Issues Kickstarter project completed their funding goal at $8,111 USD, doubling the initial amount they were seeking. The completed book will be available in early May 2012.

IS KICKSTARTER RIGHT FOR YOU?

If you have a realistic plan, a proven track record and an established audience, Kickstarter can be a useful tool for funding your project.

If not, don’t bother. Raising money is an important aspect of the creative business. If you’re not willing to treat this as a business with a hard-nosed attitude towards defining your goals, you have no business asking people to fund your project. Don’t waste everyone’s time by throwing your project out there and hoping for the best.

With my content producing business model (i.e., blog postings and short ebooks), I really don’t have a need for Kickstarter. I’m still in the audience building stage. If I have written and self-edited a novel trilogy within the next few years, but don’t have the funds to pay for the professional editing, cover art and ebook formatting, I might give Kickstarter a try.

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Should Kickstarter Fund Your Next Writing Project? (Part 1)

I came across two tweets last week about artists using Kickstarter to fund their projects. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a social media website for hosting creative projects, setting a minimum funding goal, and offering various incentive levels for people to make pledges. If the funding goal is reached or exceeded within 30 days, all the pledge backers will have their credit/debit cards charged to fund the project. If not, the project isn’t funded. This is a very clever mechanism for funding creative projects.

Kickstarter Logo

The two tweets promoting different set of artists demonstrated the wrong way and the right way for setting up a Kickerstarter project.

THE WRONG WAY

 

Should Kickstarter Fund Your Next Writing Project? (Part 1)

An unpublished writer wants to self-publish his unwritten epic fantasy novel for $20,000 USD.

[...] I will be working to create an epic fantasy. There will be warriors, wizards, possibly a damsel maybe a dragon or two, fights, and of course, mead. I’m planning to self-publish, which means that there will be many additional costs. Printing of the books (as I intend to have a limited print run), marketing, editors, more editors, the list goes on and on. That’s where Kickstarter and you come in. Your pledges will be used to fund all the minutiae involved in self publishing, like the purchase of ISBNs, having the formats converted to work with all the different readers, and other assorted minor costs. Also, these pledges will go to the larger costs as well, like the cost of editors and marketing. In all, these pledges take this self publishing dream from something that might be fun, but not truly profitable, to something that might make enough money on this first book  to allow me to move to writing as a full time job, once this book is published, instead of something I do when I have the time.

The rational for this project to seems absurd. Money for an unwritten novel from an unpublished writer without an outline and/or synopsis in hand? No, thank you.

Perhaps I’m biased from my own experience. I had 300 rejection slips before my first short story was accepted, another 100 rejection slips before my second short story was accepted, started publishing regularly in the genre anthology markets not long thereafter, and recently started publishing my own essay and short story  ebooks. That’s six years of hard work to develop my talent, learn the business and be somewhat successful. I’m still a few years away from quitting my tech support job to write full time.

What made this unpublished writer so special that he could solicit money to write full time?

Kickstarter allows you to send private messages to the project owner to ask questions. The lengthy reply that I got back to my question was that the bulk of the money would go towards editing and marketing as these are the two areas for why novels often failed to break out.

Having written a sprawling 700-page rough draft for my first novel (a postponed but not yet abandoned horror/urban fantasy/OMGWTF story), editing can be a daunting and relentless task. This is why most epic fantasy writers sometimes go for years between publishing books. You shouldn’t bother with professional editing until your manuscript had gone through two or three drafts and spit polished to the best of your ability.

You shouldn’t worry about marketing until you built up your author brand via social media to establish yourself—the writer—before an audience. No brand, no audience. No audience, no pledges. At the time of this writing, the project had no pledges and probably won’t be funded. If you’re careful in laying down the ground work before your publishing your novel, the marketing should take care of itself.

An epic fantasy novel ebook can be done for $2,000 USD to pay for the professional editing, cover art and ebook formatting.  I would recommend that the project owner write his novel and build up his brand in the meantime before coming back to Kickstarter with a focused plan to turn his novel into an ebook. If done right, the pledges will come in. And even at $2,000 USD, success will still be  a long shot.

UPDATE 04/13/2012: The project owner cancelled the project on the same day that this blog post appeared. This was purely coincidental. A wise choice considering that the project failed to attract any pledges after two weeks.

The Right Way  (Part 2)

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Are You In The Writing Profession Or The Writing Business?

There’s a story in “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki about Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, challenging a group of MBA students with a simple question, “What business am I in?”

Everyone laughed but didn’t answer him. He repeated the question. Finally, someone told him the obvious answer: the hamburger business.

Ray chuckled before announcing that he wasn’t in the hamburger business but the real estate business. Although his profession was selling hamburger franchises, his business was owning the real estate underneath those franchises. McDonald’s today owns more real estate than the Catholic Church, including the best street corners and thoroughfares in America.

The point that “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” made from this story was not to confuse your profession with your business. Your profession is something you do, your business is where you make your money. Most people don’t know the difference.

I thought my business was being a short story writer. I wrote short stories, sold them to the anthologies, and republish them as short story ebooks.

As ebook sales continued to outpace short story sales, I found myself spending more time on developing ebooks than I did writing short stories. This frustrated me. I started missing the “old days” — about six years ago — when I wrote short stories, dropped them in the mailbox and collected 300+ rejection slips before I sold my first short story. Since my ebook sales were dependent on my short stories and essays, I would never find the time to write a novel to earn bigger ebook sales. I saw a vicious circle forming in my life with no easy solution.

Are you in the writing profession or the writing business?

I started thinking hard about that question since the beginning of the year. The answer I came up with is that I’m in the writing profession — when I’m not consoling hurt computers and broken users as an anonymous Silicon Valley technician —  but I’m also in the content producing business. Writing is central to everything I do, it’s just not the only thing that I do.

Since I’m in between non-writing jobs at the moment, I’m in the process of revamping my family of websites. I spent the past three weeks updating my free open source software to get back into web programming, quadrupling web traffic and click throughs for advertising. The personal blog will be updated every week, this writing blog twice a month, and a new programming blog will be once a month. (The key for writing multiple blog posts is too keep them under 500 words each.) I’m still publishing a short story ebook and an essay ebook every month. Writing new short stories are on hold until I can revise the dozen short stories not in circulation or I haven’t spit polished for submission.

As everything falls into place over the next year or two, I should  make enough money from my business to ditch the non-writing job and start writing novels as my profession.

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Read An eBook Week 2012

In honor of “Read An eBook Week” for this year, the following ebook titles at Smashwords are available at 50% off or FREE!

If you enjoy reading any of my ebooks, please leave a kind review on Smashwords.

Updated 03/17/2012 — Last year for Read An eBook Week, I gave away 109 copies from seven free ebooks on Smashwords. This year I decided to have three free ebooks and three discounted ebooks. The results were similar. I gave away 34 copies of the free ebooks and, incidentally, had one discounted ebook sale that was bought at full price because the reader didn’t use the discount code. Like last year, no one left any reviews. Since I seldom get any sales through the Smashwords website, I would say this year was better than last year.

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Smashwords, PayPal & My Borderline Incest Short Story eBook

Noticed on Smashwords that PayPal is forcing the removal of erotica ebooks containing bestiality, incest and rape from the marketplace. Although I didn’t receive a notice to remove my short story ebook, “The Unfaithful Camera,” I did send off an email to the Smashwords support team to find out if I should remove it on my own.

This short story is about a little boy who comes home angry because his father didn’t pick him up from school, finds his father and 16-year-old sister doing the “bouncy-bounce” in bed, and uses the camera on his sister’s cellphone to send a video to his mother to prove that he wasn’t lying about what he saw in the past. While the theme of incest is prevalent in the story, the focus is on the little boy reacting to an unfair family situation. The description for the “bouncy-bounce” scene is mild and a little more explicit than the the incest stories in the Bible.

Among all my short story ebooks published to date, this is perhaps my most “controversial” ebook. Most readers don’t read it because of the implied incest theme in the ebook description. The few who have read it sympathized with the little boy’s family dilemma, which probably isn’t that uncommon these days. This is the only ebook I have  on Smashwords that has a rating (three stars, “cute short story”). Readers may soon no longer have a choice on whether or not to read my borderline incest short story ebook. If censorship in Corporate America taught us anything, the axe is wielded with a heavy hand that leaves nothing untouched.

Updated 03/04/2012 — My borderline incest short story ebook is staying on Smashwords for the time being since the incest content is “incidental” to the main storyline. This may change if PayPal decides to impose a broader ban against bestiality, incest and rape, forcing Smashwords and other ebook retailers to pull such ebooks from the virtual shelves. If a broader ban goes into effect, this short story will have to be removed, and, ironically, I might have to find a print publisher for a science fiction short story that I’m writing about a human police officer investigating sex trafficking on a feline-humaniod planet where sexual relationships between the two species is regarded as bestiality. At the moment, print publications have stronger First Amendment protections than ebook publications.

Updated 03/17/2012 — PayPal decided to get out of the business of censoring legal fiction for ebooks. Which means the fate of my borderline incest short story will be decided by the readers, not the credit card processing companies. For now. As writers, publishers and readers, this probably won’t be the last battle over ebook content.

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I’m NOT Joining Amazon’s KDP Select Program

Last week Amazon came out with the KDP Select program to entice authors in making their ebooks available through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to earn a percentage of the $500,000 pool for this month. Mark Coker pointed out on the Smashwords blog and Huffington Report why the KDP Select program is bad for indie authors. If you want to be in the KDP Select program, your ebook must be exclusive to Amazon and unavailable elsewhere at any other ebook retailer. This was soon followed by a spat of “I’m joining Amazon’s KDP Select Program” blog postings being announced on Twitter. For these writers, they are making boatloads of cash and don’t mind selling out to the devil.

Why I’m NOT joining Amazon’s KDP Select program?

Unlike most Amazon authors, I’m not making boatloads of cash. I get 80% of my ebook sales through Smashwords from third party sales (i.e., Apple, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Kobo, Sony, etc.). Throwing away 80% of my sales for an exclusive arrangement with Amazon without increasing sales to cover my losses doesn’t make good business sense.

I don’t know why my Amazon sales are pathetic in comparison to my awesome Smashwords sales. I doubt it’s because I’m “well established” on Smashwords. I started publishing my ebooks on both platforms last year and paid no special attention to either one. Amazon went south, Smashwords went north. Perhaps my short story ebooks for $0.99 have found a stronger audience among the non-Kindle crowd?

My sales numbers may change when I introduce my two essay ebooks this month, “Death At A Hells Angels Funeral: Driving Past The Memories” and “Experiencing The Death of Elvis: Another Childhood Tragedy.” (The theme for this month is Death, brought to you by the letter D, and don’t ask me why.) My first essay ebook, “The Cabbage Patch Doll Fight: A Christmas Shopping Tale,” has sold better than many of my short story ebooks.

My business plan for 2012 is to come out with one short story ebook and one essay ebook every month, and have at least 48 ebook titles on the market by the beginning of 2013. The market being both Amazon (Kindle readers) and Smashwords (non-Kindle readers). If I’m going to be an indie author and small business owner, I can’t let Amazon call the shots.

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