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In this episode, Mark shares ten tips on how authors can leverage their short fiction to earn more money as well as for various marketing activities.
This episode is sponsored by Findaway Voices. Mark Talks about the promotional pricing tools built in to their tools.
You can learn more about how you can get your work distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway.
Links of Interest:
- Findaway Voices
- Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income & Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction
- Ralan.con – (Short Fiction Market Resource)
- 8 Podcasts and Audio Projects Looking for Fiction
- Douglas Smith Article: Selling to Foreign Markets
- Douglas Smith’s Foreign Market List
- Douglas Smith’s Book: Playing the Short Game
- Active Reader (Digital Chapbook example)
- Snowman Shivers (Themed Collection – Free eBook)
- Episode 9 – Collaborative Publishing with Chuck Heintzelman of Bundlerabbit
- Episode 27 – Bundles, Curation, and Collaboration with Jamie Ferguson
- Bundlerabbit
- Books Gone Bad Bundle
- Amazing Monster Tales
- Collateral Damage (Short Story – Custom / Tie-in to Novel)
- Prospero’s Ghost (Free Short Story – Tie in to Anthology)
- NINC Conference
- Patreon for Stark Reflections
The music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Mark, that was a brilliant episode, and I have so many new ideas for how I can use my short works, including publishing an expanded version of a blog post series I did on “Audiobook Production for The Indy Author” (http://theindyauthor.com/audiobooks-part-1-maximize-your-reach/) as a low price standalone offering. Thank you so much for the ideas and inspiration! Matty Dalrymple
Thanks, Matty. Glad you enjoyed it; but even more glad that it sparked new ideas that you can adapt for your own use! 🙂
Nice breakdown Mark.
Why don’t you go back and write a 2nd book? Is it common to just write first books until one “sticks” with the audience and then continue after that?
I thought about the patreon subscriber route in terms of having short stories or serials for patreons. However, I found out two things. One, writing a serial for the first time is not trivial. Two, you need an audience in order for patreon to work. Patreon is not the best place to build an audience because discover-ability there is non-existent. Maybe Wattpad or something similar to build an audience first and then transfer to Patreon to get some money out of it?
Thanks, Chad. If you’re referring to Book 2 in my “Canadian Werewolf” series (or wants-to-be-a-series, LOL), I do have about 70% of that book written. I just ended up moving it to a back-burner while other book and writing projects came to the forefront. I’m certain, though, that it won’t take me the full ten years it took me to write A Canadian Werewolf in New York before I get back to it and finish it. Fingers crossed on that. I can be my own worse enemy.
I do like your idea of a serial – thanks for sharing. Yes, you do need an audience before something like that works. I have used Wattpad in that way. In fact, my novel EVASION was put there as a first draft after finished it during NaNoWriMo – it’s still my my popular book (still in its unedited form) on Wattpad and the feedback and comments from readers are what prompted me to make the eBook, print book, and audiobook. (Of course, book 2, like the Canadian Werewolf series, is still about half completed. Seems to be a pattern I fall into, isn’t it?
is there a visibility issue with Wattpad?
Hi Chad – not sure what you mean by “is there a visibility issue” – Wattpad has a gigantic community, there are ways of tagging your book/serial story with metadata for the right people to discover it. Of course, since Wattpad is a social media environment, it does require some investment of being part of a community.
Do you think it’d be useful for me to interview someone from Wattpad and asking some specific questions from my listeners? (I know a number of Wattpad peeps – they are right around the corner, and I know them quite well – heck, used to work with some of them) 🙂
Visibility is exactly what you figured out. Basically how do I get people to see my work. Either you have to pay for ads or you have to get some kind of word of mouth out. I think the tagging property of Wattpad would be very handy.
A wattpad q and a would probably be good. I know very little about that except that people in the past have leveraged them into great success on amazon.
Thanks–the idea of making a short story an audible on Findaway is very interesting. I have one 10,000-word sci-fi short story that I produced on Amazon, even having my digital artist create a special (great) cover for it–but so far it is just in eBook and has a book trailer video on my Amazon author page. Not sure I have funds just now for Findaway but it seems really worth checking out.