Short Stories and Organising your front/back matter

On publishing short stories

After two years and a bit of self-publishing, I now have a pretty substantial backlist available on online for purchase, currently something like 40 items (you know it’s a lot when you can’t immediately recall the exact number!). Only five of those are novels, of course, with almost twenty being short stories.

I love writing short stories. I am shamelessly (and poverty-inducingly) an artist first and a business-minded writer second, and short stories are where I do my experimenting. Some of you may have read some of them, but I have everything from diaries (The Tree) to second person instructive (?) (Three Two One), and lots more equally weird stuff still on the hard drive. It gives you a chance to try out a different writing style or write in a different genre without investing a whole lot of time. I can hammer out a 5,000 word short story in about three hours if I’ve got the plot ready in my mind. For every finished one though, there are 5 – 10 unfinished ones, everything from a couple of lines to several thousand words. They are in my writing scrap heap (A.K.A. the Unfinished Stories file), but if you’re like me and you run out of gas a lot of times, never, ever delete them. Remember, no writing is ever wasted, and you never know when you might come back to it.

But, I digress.

However, when you publish a short story, you have to think about it the same as any other product that you want to sell – what will make people most likely to buy this item?

Of course the basics are a nice cover, good clean formatting, editing and proofreading.

Short stories, however, won’t make a lot of money, particularly when you’re starting out. Mine are usually proper short – 2 – 6,000 words, because when I was submitting to magazines that was the ideal range. The closer to 2,000 words, the more likely you were – as an unknown – to be accepted.

Here’s the truth about the short stories I publish – I scrimp. I edit and format them myself, and I do the proofreading too. They’re 99% clean (in fact, I’d be happy to challenge anyone to find me a typo in one of my shorts – point it out via Facebook or my Mailing List email and I’ll send you a free ebook of Tube Riders: Exile), partly because I’ve been doing this a long time, most of my day job is correcting errors in English, and I trust myself over a short distance. If you’re in any doubt do a swap with someone or keep practicing until you trust yourself. Putting out error-strewn work is a really bad idea.

Recently, however, I did start getting new covers for a lot of my shorts. This is because the cover is basically the door – if it’s unattractive no one will knock, and once you get them knocking you’re good to go. Again, covers can cost a fortune, so I bought a job lot of premade ones from a site called goonwrite.com. I bought 10 for $225, which as the mathematically minded will notice, is $22.50 each. It’s pretty hard to get a decent stock photo for that price, and what I got was perfectly adequate covers. I’ve only ordered five so far, but you can see them on The Tree, Benny’s Harem, Castles Made of Sand, Once We Were Children, and Ms Ito’s Bird & Other Stories.

The majority of my short stories are designed either to be used as perma-free introductions to my other work, or are priced at $0.99 to tempt people to take a chance. At $0.99 I make roughly $0.35 profit, which is not a lot, and means I have to sell about 60 copies just to make the cost of the cover back. On a good month, I will sell two copies of a short story. It’s usually one or zero.

Here’s the thing, though. I’m not in this for six months, or a year, or five years, I’m in this until I die (or until I make so much money I can sit back on a beach drinking sangria for the rest of my life, haha). That’s hopefully a long time. Thinking long term is absolutely key in self-publishing, as it is in practically every other kind of business. Also, there is that wonderful little business term to consider – the upsell.

The Upsell

Here’s where I’m going to start talking about business stuff. If you’re going to get anywhere in self-publishing you have to LEARN LEARN LEARN, all the time.

It’s no good sitting in your ivory tower acting all high and mighty. You have to get down on the ground looking up at everyone standing taller than you and listen to how they did it. Then you can pick and chose your own method based on what you have learned.

I choose to publish in multiple genres. I chose to publish short stories which won’t make much money. These are my choices, but they come from learning how things work so that at least I know what I’m doing wrong. However, even with these choices, I still concentrate on the upsell.

I recently read a brilliant book called Write. Publish. Repeat. by two guys called Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant. I’m lucky enough to be in a multi-book anthology with Platt and his co-author David Wright, who also contributed to Write. Publish. Repeat. I strongly recommend anyone wanting to self-publish to read this book.

In it, they talk a lot about the upsell. Basically, you have a cheapo/free item which is designed to draw a reader in, after which ideally they will purchase a higher priced item. It’s simple economics. I offer Tube Riders for free, hoping that people will then purchase Exile and Revenge, or ideally the Trilogy Boxed Set, which is at the top of the chain. The boxed set is cheaper than the two individual sequels, but a sale of the boxed set over a sale of Exile guarantees a purchase of Revenge.

With the short stories, you need to have some kind of upsell. Admittedly, it’s more difficult unless they’re part of a series. What I have are collections of five genre-themed stories, and I offer a choice of two of these in the contact section of my back/front matter (which is what this blog was originally supposed to be talking about!). Wright/Truant talk a lot about tone of your contact info, and the importance of offering a choice of purchases over a purchase vs nothing.

Here’s an example of my contact matter for my short stories –

Contact

Did you enjoy this story? If so, please consider signing up for the Mailing List where you can get free stuff, special offers and discounts on new releases.

If you would like to read more stories like it, perhaps you would like to try one of my collections, such as Five Tales of Dystopia or Five Tales of Fantasy.

Also, you can chat to me on Facebook at Chris Ward (Fiction Writer) and follow progress on new books on my blog at A Million Miles from Anywhere

Thank you for reading!

Chris Ward

March 2014

I structure it in order of what I deem most important. First is the Mailing List sign up, because once they’re on that they get to hear first about all my new releases (and hopefully buy them). Second is the choice of two collections. This is from The Tree, which is a dystopian story. They get offered Five Tales of Dystopia first, and Five Tales of Fantasy second. After these I give them links to the more unimportant stuff, my Facebook and my blog. Everything is hyperlinked.

Having an upsell option on a short story to a product selling for $2.99 suddenly makes that $22.50 less of an investment. I still only sell a handful of collections a month, but again I’m thinking long term, plus I want as much material in place in the event that one or more of my books take off.

Front/back matter placement

So you’ve got your upsell info in place. Where do you put it? As always, I’m doing the failing so that you don’t have to. The door for a reader is the cover, but the second level of interest is the sample they can download on to their Kindle, generally 10%.

Until recently I had all my links and info at the front and back of everyone of my books. That included an author bio, a list of my other works, a copyright statement, and also the contact stuff. Then, the other day, I downloaded the sample for one of my short stories.

I didn’t actually get any of the story. All I got was the front matter. 10% of 2000 words is only 200, less than a page. It’s still enough to capture a reader’s attention if it’s good, but if all they get is a list of other works and an author bio, they’re not going to purchase anything.

It’s fine to have all that stuff at the front in a novel. Tube Riders is 160,000 words, so you get roughly five chapters in the sample. In a short story, however, it makes sense to put all that stuff at the back.

What I do now is have a simple Contents page like this –

Contents

(story name)

Contact

Also by Chris Ward

About the Author

Copyright

All the back matter is at the back, in reverse order of what I consider important. Straight after the story is the contact page, followed by my other stuff, a short bio if they’re really interested, and a copyright page (which is interesting to basically no one). The contents page is important particularly for other vendors (Apple requires one, even for short stories), but its so short it won’t take much away from the sample. If you’re just publishing to Kindle you could probably do without one. Most importantly, they’re now getting some of the story, and if they get some, they’re likely to want more, and if they like it they’ll be keen to click on the links they find at the back.

Hopefully you found this blog useful. If you did, sign up for my mailing list, go and buy all my books, or at least download Tube Riders, which is permafree. Then you can come back and tell me I’m awesome.

Until next time…

Chris Ward

May 15^th 2014

Nifty little tool for self-published writers

I found this interesting little website mentioned on a forum I frequent the other day. Basically, if you put the ASIN of your book into the search box it will give you a kind of floating spider web diagram showing which books are linked from your book's Also Bought list on Amazon and which books link to you.

If you put your cursor over your book it'll give you a bunch of orange lines. These go to the books from where your book can be found. There's also a box on the left in which you can rank the books in the spidergraph(?) related to your book in terms of things such as ranking and price.

For interest's sake, I put in my book Tube Riders. Just for clarification, I'm writing this on May 18th, and so far this month I've sold just two copies.

There are 84 connected books. Tube Riders ranks lowest in both ranking and popularity. It's second from the top in terms of diversity, whatever that means, and there are no orange arrows pointing inwards, which means a few books are visible from my book, but my book has no visibility from elsewhere.

However, when I put in my current bestseller, Five Tales of Horror, which is selling 2-3 copies a day and has sold nearly 200 since I released it in March, there are a lot of orange arrows pointing in as well as out, meaning it is being seen on a lot of Also Bought lists. From looking at Amazon I can see that many of those books are ranking pretty well, inside the top 5000 or so. Basically, my book is hanging on the coattails of these books, whereas my book Tube Riders isn't hanging anywhere, and the books its connected to are all other unknowns that aren't selling well either.

What does this tell me? In short, that I don't have much visibility. The obvious answer is to sell more books, something that's of course easier said than done. However the right kind of visibility is important. For example, getting on the Also Bought lists of a bunch of unknown books is pretty much a waste of time. This is what happens when you do free promos, because people download at random and free promos are increasingly becoming the playground of the desperate or not very good writer. Bargain books are the way forward, don't you know! Although if you look carefully, you'll often find a lot of my short stories on promo as I don't have a lot else to do with them...

Another thing I noticed from playing around with this site, is that none of my books are linking to each other. When I put in Dan Brown's new book, the biggest group of Also Boughts linking to and from his new book were all his other books. It's become kind of a sport among unknown writers to dump on Dan Brown's writing skills (for what it's worth I've read Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons and thought they were both pretty good, although the films were hit and miss), but he clearly has fans. People who bought his other books are all over his new book regardless of what the snobish non-selling indie community thinks of it. Looking at my own graphs proves that I don't really have fans, just people who see my books and pick them up because they're cheap or free or whatever. Hopefully when I put out the next book in the Tube Riders series I'll start to see a few more backwards and forwards arrows.

And talking of which, I'd better get back to editing it. So if you've got some books out, have a little play around with this tool. It's kind of interesting.

Chris Ward
18th May 2013

Submitting to Magazines - How and Why to do it

(Please note, this is another post originally posted on my writer's blog at A Million Miles from Anywhere. This will be it's new home)

During my self-publishing adventures I’ve come across a lot of people who are trying to get a slice of the ebook pie through publishing only novellas and short stories. While these can be just as difficult to write, the shorter form is often seen as being less of a time investment than full novels, simultaneously giving the author more visibility. They are also popular with people who don’t have the time to write regularly or for long periods, or who don’t enjoy spending two years on each novel.

A lot of people I’ve come across are publishing short stories and novellas on Amazon at a furious pace, but is it the only option? For every Wool (which was originally a novella) there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of short pieces selling a handful of copies a month or less.

Disillusioned? Maybe, but unlike novels, which are notoriously hard to sell, short fiction can be a lot easier to market, and although you might not become a superstar, there are still gains to be made.

Prior to self-publishing, I spent fourteen years submitting and occasionally selling stories to magazines. Just to prove it, here are a few of my publications –

The Substitute in Prenumbra Sports and Games Edition

Ms Ito’s Bird in Weird Tales 352

Ovid’s Legacy in Flagship (the pic on the front is from my story!)

Going Underground in Noctober 

Feeding the Gulls in Written Word (pretty salty about this one because I never got paid, but it was like $15, so whatever)

 My claim to fame!

Self-publishing a short story can occasionally be profitable, but more often than not it’ll sit there in cyberspace doing nothing. Also, you can never be quite sure whether it’ll take off or not. So much depends on the title and cover. For example, after my rights returned to me from Weird Tales (after a year, I think, although magazines will buy various rights from 6 months to 2 years), I published Ms Ito’s Bird on Amazon as an individual short story. In roughly ten months it’s sold … wait for it … ONE copy.

 

There it is about halfway down ... see it? And the third picture down

is from my story! :-)

When I sold it to Weird Tales I made roughly $160. At the time that was more than half of my entire revenue from eight years of trying to sell short stories. And that was just the money - nothing else I have ever achieved in writing EVER has given me the confidence in my work that that sale did. Conan the Barbarian was serialized in that magazine. Getting in Weird Tales is big time.

Getting back to the cold hard cash line, there’s money to be made from selling short stories if you’re good, but here’s a few common pitfalls to avoid.

Noob Mistake #1 – Posting your story publicly and then expecting to sell it later

I see a lot of authors posting works in progress on their blogs, Facebook pages, Goodreads, forums, etc. If you ever have plans of selling that story to a magazine, this is a really bad idea. You can get away with it on a private forum or in a crit circle that requires membership to access, but anywhere it’s available publicly through a search engine it counts as being published and therefore you’re relinquishing your first world publication rights, which is what magazines will buy. Pull it down before you submit it and make sure it's got no cyber footprint. If it can still be available online it is effectively worthless. You might be able to get $5 here or there as a reprint, but any chance of selling it to Fantasy & Science Fiction for $600 is gone right away.

And trust me, the big magazines will check. Google is a powerful thing. And they won’t just search by title (otherwise you could just change it) but by chunks of text.

Noob Mistake #2 – Ignoring the guidelines

“Send us clean sci-fi with no sex or violence towards animals.” So, you send them a horror involving a serial killer who likes to have sex with elephants, just in case they want to make an exception … nope. Here comes another rejection letter. Guidelines are there for a reason. Perhaps if you’re Stephen King you could get away with it, but otherwise forget it. Trust me on this, I’ve broken them all and regretted it. The exact same goes for deadlines. If a magazine gives you a date to submit by, or says on its guidelines page that its currently closed to submissions, then it means it. Don’t waste your time by submitting anyway.

Noob Mistake #3 – Submitting to more than one magazine at once

Check in the guidelines to see if a magazine is okay with “simultaneous submissions”. This means they’re happy for you to submit elsewhere at the same time. If they don’t like this (and the guidelines will say), then don’t do it anyway. Nothing could be more awkward than having two magazines accept your story and you having to tell one of them you’ve changed your mind because its been accepted elsewhere. This kind of thing doesn’t make you any friends. Particularly at the top magazines, a lot of the editors generally tend to know each other. Of course, if a magazine is okay with sim-subs, then go for it. Be courteous though and notify the other magazines if one accepts you.

Noob Mistake #4 – Responding to Rejections

Don’t do it. Ever. Whether it’s a form letter, an “I’d rather kill myself than read any more of your crap” type letter or a “wow this was awesome but not quite awesome enough” type, just don’t respond. The editor really doesn’t care what you think. Nine times out of ten you’ll get a form rejection, but if you get comments then read them, apply them if necessary, and move on. Don’t bother to thank the editor unless they write like a page of notes (unlikely). If they gave you comments then they probably gave them to twenty other writers, and if they have to open twenty “thanks for your comments, love, random unknown” emails every day they’ll quickly stop writing them and start sending form rejections instead.

If you get an acceptance, however, then of course you should respond.

Where to submit?

You could search in Google or Yahoo, but its far easier to just use a listing site. For the most part I write speculative fiction (fantasy/horror/sci-fi) so my primary resource is Ralan. Another good once, which includes mainstream magazines, is Duotrope Digest (although I notice you now how to pay a subscription - it was free back when I was using it). There might be others, but these are pretty much the only two I used.

Now, it’s just a matter of opinion, but for anyone planning a career in writing I personally think it’s a waste of time to submit to magazines offering only exposure/token or minimal pay, basically anything less than 3c/word. I spent years submitting to and being published by tiny little magazines, and I used to get really excited, even though only six people were every going to read it, the editor, me, and the four other writers included in the same issue. I had this grand idea that I would sell novels if I only got enough exposure in small press magazines.

There are a number of flaws in this plan:

1.      No one reads small press magazines except the editor, the included writers and (if you’re lucky) your family and friends.

2.      They’re not very prestigious.

3.      Most of them are run by other unknown writers so their judgment on what is good is negligible at best.

4.      They tend to fold/disappear without warning, sometimes shutting down the website completely, so that there’s no record of you ever having been published there.

5.      They don’t always pay you or send contributors copies, regardless of what they might promise. In short, they're incredibly unreliable.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Some small press magazines are well run, always respond personally and actually pay you. They're very much in the minority though, in my experience.

However getting into a pro/semi-pro magazine is a different. For starters, the money is actually decent if you’re prolific and sell frequently. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction pays 6 – 9c/word. On a 5000 word story that’s $450, which would pay my rent for a month, and they accept stories up to 25,000 words. At 5c/word that's $1250, also known as decent pay. Plus, people actually read big magazines and they have prestige. The year I was in Weird Tales it won a Hugo Award for best semi-pro magazine. In the genre fiction world that’s a big deal. I wasn’t even on the cover of the magazine I was published in but Ann Vandermeer, the editor at the time, sent me a photo of the trophy and a note of thanks for being in the magazine. That was almost as awesome as being published in it.

Getting in a small press magazine might count as a “publishing credit”, and for years I collected them with pride, but getting in a major magazine can make you famous.

How likely is it that you’ll be accepted?

That depends on how good you are and how well your fiction fits with what the editor wants. You need to write well. If you suck, you probably won’t sell anything, which is why I’d suggest only submitting your best stuff and keeping the rest for self-published anthologies, but to be honest, if you suck you won't sell anything if you self-publish either and would be better off spending your time practicing (see my previous post about how to sell ebooks). Also, with the big magazines they’re trying to make money. If you’re a bestselling writer they’re far more likely to accept you than if you’re an unknown. However, they all frequently publish new writers because part of what they’re about is finding new talent, but your work needs to be outstanding. For that reason it also helps to keep it shorter. If you’re an unknown its way easier to sell something of 2000 words than something of 10,000, because they can slot you neatly into the back third of the magazine while saving the bulk for big name writers. In general I keep my stories in the 2000 to 6000 range. In general, though, even if you’re good, expect a lot of rejection. My average overall was about 10 rejections per acceptance, but that was for small presses. For major magazines it was more like 150-1. Those odds might not be for everyone, you have to make the decision based on how good you think your stories are.

Also, it’s worth remembering that everything the magazine selects is the editor’s personal choice. You might have written an outstanding story but it wasn’t quite what the editor wanted, so you get a form rejection. Don’t give up. Have confidence in your work and submit it somewhere else.

Is submitting to magazines a good idea for you?

That depends on what kind of person you are. For starters, you need to patient. While some magazines will get back to you within a couple of days, others will take months. Even now I get the odd rejection letter/email show up and it’s been more than a year since I submitted anything. And even if it is accepted, it might be a year before it's published. That's just the way the industry works; its very different to being published by a traditional publisher. In general, the bigger the magazine the longer you'll wait for publication. However, the bigger the magazine, the less likely they'll fold suddenly. I had no less than three pro sales never show up because the magazine - usually some ambitious small press - folded before the first issue ever reached print. THAT is frustrating ...

Also, be aware of the costs. While most magazines now allow email submissions, a few of the big ones still require paper copies. This can get expensive if you submit a lot, so make sure you think you’ve got a real chance before doing it.

It helps if you have a lot of stories. Waiting on one story can be frustrating. At one point I had over 40 stories out for submission at the same time so they were all coming and going. Keep all the info in a spreadsheet. Unless a magazine says otherwise, give them about six months. If they don’t get back to you, check they received your submission and also check they haven’t folded. This was something I found frustrating with the small presses – I’d wait several months for a response, go to the website and find the magazine had shut down. Sometimes they don’t even say why, they just go inactive. This is why Ralan is such a good site – it regularly checks for inactivity and a site that isn’t responding is moved to the Dead Markets page.

So, to summarize (because I’ve prattled on for almost 2000 words on this …!), if you’re consistently producing high quality short stories you could consider it as an option. Be aware of what it takes, though. You’ll go through a lot of frustration, but there is money to be made and prestige to be gained if you’re successful. And if you do sell something, you'll get your rights back within a year or so anyway so you can still self-publish it in the future.

As always, comments/questions are welcome.

Chris Ward
May 16th 2013

(previously published April 5^th 2013)

Some things I think about when I revise

I'm currently two thirds of the way through the first revision of my next novel, Tube Riders: Exile. The first revision is generally the hardest, because that's where you come up against all the plot holes and stuff. While revising, I mostly concentrate on getting the writing tight as well as a smooth rhythm and the correct tone. However, while I do it I make a list of all the things I need to go back and look at later.

Of course, for those of you who've read Tube Riders, you'll know that it is a masterpiece of dystopian fiction :-). However, it had issues. Here are some of the issues I've made a note of during my revision of Exile, just so you can see that in first draft form my books are a long way from the wonderfully polished articles that are available for sale.

(of course all names have been edited out to avoid spoilers)

Change the (character)'s weapon?

(name)/other characters regard (character) as “it” but from (character)'s POV they become “he”.

Check heaven/god/hell etc for capital usage

Where did (name)'s contact lenses go?

Where did (name)/(name)'s guns go between watching the (character) and coming out of the tunnel?

French police titles

God damn or goddamn

Try to edit out ‘for a moment/second’

(name)'s burn is on the right

(name)'s eyes are blue

Try to edit out ‘just a few metres’

(name) is a British (thing) so why does he need a French translation?

Check rapid/rabid

Some interesting stuff in there. Some of it is really basic typo stuff, like rapid/rabid. It's very easy to get words like these mixed up, which is where proofreaders come in. Another I always check for is scarring/scaring, and one my proofreader found was lopped/loped. Make a long list of these as you find them and find/replace to get rid of them.

Things like "French police titles" are a worldbuilding detail. Most of Exile is set in France, so I want it to be as authentic as possible. I have been there a number of times, but I know nothing about the French police (thank God) or military.

The notes about "blue eyes" and "burns" are consistency details. As a general rule I don't go into a great deal of death over character detail. Some writers do, but I find it incredibly boring and for the most part irrelevant. Same with clothing. However, when you do use it, you have to make sure it's the same throughout. If a character has a birthmark on the right side of their face, it better not be on the left five chapters later. Unless it's a fake one, of course ...

There are a couple of notes on overused phrases. For me these are usually time/distance - "For a moment", "a few metres away", etc. If you repeat them too often they become boring so I always try to edit some of them out.

The note about a French translation is a character inconsistency. For example, when you have French characters, there has to be a reason why they can speak in English. Of course they can learn, but why did they learn? You don't have to write it all out in detail, but it should be obvious or implied by the plot.

"God damn vs goddamn" and the note on capitalization of "heaven/hell" etc, is a style thing. I see both used, and the reason I've highlighted these notes are because they need to be consistent, one way or the other. You can vary them if used in speech by two or more different characters, but not if they're used in the general narrative. Pick one, stick to it.

The notes about guns and contact lenses are simple plot holes. In one chapter a character is holding a gun, then two chapters later the gun has disappeared. Where did it go? These are all things you need to pick up and fix. My books are full of things like this because I don't write a detailed outline, just a few notes on each chapter. However, within two or three revisions they're usually fixed.

Anyway, that's just a little insight into my writing process. And on that note, I'd better get back to it ...

Chris Ward

May 14th 2013