In the last few months, as I’ve reworked my business plan, I’ve put a lot of thought into what I want to do with short stories. I’ve written about two dozen of them so far, and while I don’t expect to be known as a short story writer, I do expect that short stories will play an important role in my career, especially with the way that the publishing world is changing.
Objectives
Short stories are a great way for readers to try out new authors, without all the cost in time or money of a novel. It’s also a great way to build a hybrid career, as the professional short story markets have few of the hangups of publishing a longer work with a traditional publisher. It’s not extremely lucrative, though there is money to be made. More than that, it’s a way to gain cache and build your brand, especially if your stories get picked up by a major magazine or anthology in your genre.
So that’s my main objective with short stories: to use them to build my author brand and grow my readership. Self-publishing plays a role in that, but not nearly as much as the professional markets.
Writing
To get picked up by the professional markets, I need to have stories to submit to them, which means that I need to be prolific. Consequently, my goal from here on out is to write a new short story each month. That’s a pace I can maintain that doesn’t interfere too much with my other writing. It can be refreshing to take a WIP break from time to time, and short stories only take a few days at the most.
I know that Dean Wesley Smith says that you should never revise anything, and I’ve been following that advice until now with my short fiction. However, I do feel that it can strengthen my writing significantly to cut the word count by 10%, especially for short fiction where the strongest writing tends to be economical. So I’ll most likely do that to all my stories from now on.
Submitting
In general when submitting, it’s best to start with the top-tier markets and work your way down. This is the order in which I prioritize my submissions:
- SFWA qualifying markets
- Professional paying markets (6¢ per word or higher)
- Semi-pro paying markets (between 1¢ and 5¢ per word)
I’m not sure if I’m going to bother with token paying markets (less than 1¢ per word). Probably not for anything other than reprints. They don’t really put me any closer to my goals. Also, I’m not sure if I actually want to join SFWA, but I do want to qualify for it through my short story sales. Never join a club that would have you as a member, etc etc.
As for non-paying markets, I’ve decided not to submit to them after all. It’s been pointed out to me that giving something away for free after you’ve charged other people money for it is a dick move. Also, there aren’t really any non-paying markets that would bring me closer to my goals. All of the markets with serious cache also pay professional rates, at least in science fiction.
Self-publishing
Until now, I’ve self-published my short stories either immediately after their first sale, or after I’ve submitted all of the professional markets. My guiding philosophy has been that unless there’s a significant opportunity elsewhere, it’s better to self-publish something than to keep it on your hard drive.
However, self-publishing short stories doesn’t help me get much closer to my objectives. Certainly keeping a bunch of singles up for sale doesn’t help much, and it might actually hurt by cluttering up my book pages. They’re good for the occasional newsletter giveaway, or for first-in-series and other stuff, but that’s about it.
Dean Wesley Smith says to charge $2.99 for individual short stories in order to get the higher royalty rate, but I’ve tried that for the last couple of years and haven’t seen much benefit from it. Unless you’re known as a short story writer, I just don’t think short stories are good for making money. Because of that, and also because I’m going to be using them for giveaways and promotions, I plan to sell all of my short fiction (under 10k words) for a token 99¢.
Considering how it’s rude to give something away for free immediately after selling it, I plan to refrain from self-publishing until both the first-publication and reprint markets have been exhausted. That’s because I plan to make my short stories free when I first self-publish them, at least for the initial few weeks. Again, better to put something out for free and raise the price than it is to charge for it at first and make it free later.
When enough short stories have accumulated to put into a bundle, then I’ll unpublish all but the one or two best-rated or most popular singles, and put a link to the bundle in the back of those. In that way, the short story singles will help to sell the bundles, which make more money anyway, since I plan to charge $4.99 for them. This also helps to clean up the book pages, by replacing singles with bundles over time.
So that’s the plan. Submit until all professional and semi-pro markets have been exhausted, then self-publish as singles until there’s enough to put in a bundle. And hopefully sell a bunch of stories to the major markets.
