How To Publish 52 Short Stories And 10 Collections Per Year

This is another terrific article by Dean Wesley Smith, this time on how to make your stories visible: The New World of Publishing: Helping Readers Find Your Work.

The Plan:

1. Pick a genre.

2. Write one short story a week.

3. Each short story should be around 5,000 words.

4. Brand each book.

5. Publish each short story as an ebook and charge $2.99.

6. Every 5 weeks bundle 5 stories together into a collection. Sell this collection as both an ebook and a POD book. Sell the ebook for $6.99 and the POD book for $12.99.

If you take DWS's advice at the end of the year you'll have 52 short stories and 10 collections.

Not bad!

How To Make A Living Writing Short Stories

Dean Wesley Smith writes that the key to selling books is threefold: Produce a professional looking book, brand each book and have many titles available for purchase.

Produce a professional looking book

There are hundreds of articles out there on what it means to produce a professional looking book and how you can do that so I won't cover it again here. (If you're looking for some help, here's an article on where to find cover artists.)

Make sure each book looks professional, has a good description, has appropriate keywords and has been slotted in the right category. 

Brand each book

A brand is the "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's product distinct from those of other sellers" (Wikipedia).

I'm not going to talk much about branding because there are oodles of great articles out there (for instance, Why Content Marketing is the New Branding).

Especially in this case, a picture really is worth a thousand words. Look at Dean Wesley Smith's Books. (Note: You might have to scroll down the page.) Notice how his name is laid out in the same way on each book; the same styling, the same font.

DWS writes that you want all your books, especially the ones in a series, to look similar. Also, make sure that the cover conveys a sense of the genre you're writing in. Think of the cover of your average romance book and contrast that with horror.

Have many titles available for purchase

That is, have many titles under the same name (/pen name) and genre available for purchase. If you write everything from romance to horror under the same name (/pen name) make sure that the books within each genre are branded distinctively.

How many books should one have for sale? DWS says: It depends. Between 10 and 50, give or take. (grin)

And remember, that's 10 to 50 books within the same genre written by the same author (/pen name).

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The above represents only a portion of his article, I recommend heading on over to DWS's blog and reading the whole thing.

Cheers!

Photo credit: "Happy Fourth of July 2013!" by JD Hancock under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

David Gaughran Shares His Sale Figures: Print Pays

Last year David Gaughran used to list how much he was making from the sales of his books, what he was doing in terms of promotion, where he was selling his books, and so on, but he hasn't done it in awhile and I missed it.

Perhaps it's voyeuristic, but when David had a great month I felt inspired and when he had a slow month it made me feel better about the slow months I've had, so for me it was a win-win.

In any case, I was very happy to see David is once again reporting his numbers. In his latest post he concentrates on paperback sales of his book, Let's Get Digital (love that title!). He writes:

I was really slow to see the potential in print, and it was probably the biggest mistake I made over the last year. ...

I had felt that the market for Let’s Get Digital would be largely, um, digital, and that whatever was left would be cannibalized by the PDF version being available as a free download from my blog.
I was wrong.

Paperback Growth

Here are my paperback sales for the last five months:

February: 6
March: 24
April: 20
May: 49
June: 67

Note: A Storm Hits Valparaiso was released in Feb, Let’s Get Digital in May

I’m pretty happy with that growth – especially because I’m averaging $5 in royalties per copy sold. Last month, paperbacks brought in $330 (profit) – which is about 25% of my current income, helping me break new ground. I cleared $1000 in May and easily topped that in June – largely on the back of stronger print numbers.

Most of those paperback sales came from Amazon US, and, following that, direct sales to indie bookstores (mostly in the UK).
- Making Money From Paperbacks

Let's think about that. In one month David's paperback sales from just one of his books earned him 25% of his current monthly income from writing. That's what I call significant!

CreateSpace
This is the second time in the last few days I've come across an author singing the praises of Amazon's CreateSpace. (What Jen Talty of Cool Gus Publishing thinks of Amazon's CreateSpace.)

David makes another excellent point and one I hadn't considered. Let's say you're selling your ebook for $2.99 on Amazon and are offering a print version through CreateSpace for $13.99. When a reader views the ebook version they'll see the $13.99 price crossed out, the Kindle Price of $2.99 highlighted, and the customer will be informed that, in buying your ebook, they will save $11.

Now that's good advertising!

I've just concentrated on a couple of the things David talks about in his article; it's well worth the read: Making Money From Paperbacks

Related reading:
- Jen Talty: Amazon's CreateSpace Vs LIghtning Source
- Kobo's Self-Publishing Portal: Report From A Beta Tester
- Mystery Writer Elizabeth S. Craig's Reasons For Self Publishing

Photo credit: The Guardian

Is 99 Cents Too Low For An Indie Ebook?

I used to think 99 cents was a good price for indie books. Sure, they're worth more than 99 cents but if you want to sell a lot of books then it seemed reasonable to price them affordably, and at 99 cents a lot of folks don't think twice before clicking the "download" button.

Things have changed.

Two things happened. First, Amazon changed its ranking algorithm to favor higher priced books and therefore 99 cent books no longer have the competitive edge they once did. Second, I think the novelty of being able to buy a book for 99 cents has worn off and consumers don't download 99 cent books as readily.

For years Dean Wesley Smith said an author should never price her novel at 99 cents. I now agree with him. Yesterday he posted a comment one of his readers had submitted and I've reproduced a small part of that, below. I think this is a fantastic analogy.

He [an pricing professional] would look at all the short stories and say ‘It takes 15 minutes to read? And it was fun? Okay. charge 5 bucks.” And when writers squawked in horror, he would say “Starbucks sells fancy coffees for $5 that take 15 minutes to drink. They sell millions every day. Did you enjoy the story as much as the coffee? Yes? Well, no problem.”

And the writers would come back with “but there was actual substance in the coffee… cream and coffee beans and sugar…” and the he would respond with “yeah, and if I really like the story, I can read it again. I can’t drink the coffee again. I can lend the story to my friends. I can’t say to my friends, ‘gee you should taste this coffee, it was really good, you can try it when I’m done with it.’

He would tell you that it is not good practice to set anything, no matter how ‘small’, at regular price at the very bottom of the price structure.

The bottom price should be reserved for sales exclusively, and used only in an integrated, strategic way to give you more sales traction and build your brand.

If people said “oh, well I’m new, and I don’t have name recognition so I have to sell cheap to make sales” he’d say, no. Set the price you want to regularly sell at. From that price have sales, or other promotions that give an incentive to the consumer to try your new stuff. You’re telling the consumer that you know they are taking a bit of a risk on a new, unknown quantity, so a price break makes it more appealing. Once they’ve tried your stuff, then they know if the regular price is worth it to them.

You are always educating the consumer as to what your product is worth. The regular price will come to be perceived as its true value. You don’t want to set that too low. You steal from the consumer the thrill of getting a deal, you steal from yourself the flexibility to build and expand your brand appropriately.

Read the rest over at Dean's blog: The New World of Publishing: Book Pricing from Another Perspective.

Related reading:
-The Vandal's 10 Ways To Promote Your Book
- 7 Tips On How To Launch A Book Without Losing Your Mind
- 5 Book Review Blogs