Hi all.
I have recently written a couple of short stories. And am unsure what to do with them.
I have self-published a novella, however, I am wondering people's thoughts on published short stories. I would list for free as they are just over 2000 words.
Also, magazine submissions. Has anyone any experience with this?
Advice greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Hi Joanne, I'm new to here so you are the first person I have written to. I found the short story magazine Scribble a good place to start. Park publications will tell you if they want to use your work. Otherwise, why don't you send stories to competitions, on line or in writing magazines?
It is not easy to get fiction into women's magazines these days.
Hi Joanne,
I wrote and published 8 novels and 8 short stories since 2010. After receiving 54 rejection letters from traditional agents and publishers, I changed my strategy. I don't see much incentive to go the traditional routes, so I self-publish via Smashwords.com and Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Here's what's worked for me:
Smashwords.com--I publish each short and novel as its own "ebook." All shorts are priced at FREE for retail and libraries.. I like to use the shorts to build my fan base and expose readers to my novels. At the tail end of each short And novel, I insert the first 20% of one of my novels. My novels are all retail priced at US$2.99 (library price is FREE). I have 2 compilations, one is a mix of a few shorts and two novels and it is priced, and I donate its royalties to Hogar de Vida--a foster home in Costa Rica. My second contains 3 of my Halloween shorts, and it contains other writers' shorts as well.
Amazon--All 8 novels are in KDP. I do NOT believe in KDP Select for many reasons, but I put all 8 of my short stories into an anthology and am selling it on Amazon KDP Select for US$2.99 as an experiment.
Wattpad, FanStory, your own blog site & website, etc are great ways to promote your stories, but unless you're an A-List author, you may as well give them away for free for the exposure.
Smashwords is a good place to start because there aren't any up-front fees or costs as they only get paid a slight commission off of each sale of each copy of your story (watch out for vanity publishers--they make most of their revenue off of selling services to authors instead of coming from sales of books). Smashwords has many downstream retailers that it pushes titles to including Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Diesel, and several others.
I've only succeeded with publishing one novel via Amazon's print-on-demand subsidiary called CreateSpace. CreateSpace's tech support sucks, and they make it stupidly difficult to create or import covers.
Both Smashwords and Amazon sell to the world. Having siad that, you might want to look into countries such as India and even China where many folks read English. Inida is full of vanity publishers, but Matru Bharti seems eager to work with foreign writers.
If you're interested in supporting humanitarian efforts such as improve the world's ability to read, then check out WorldReader. All 16 of my titles are there. WorldReader donates Kindles & other means to children, schools, and communities throughout Africa and Asia, and authors donate our stories, all in an effort improve global literacy and expose readers to other lifestyles.
That's about everything I learned over the last 6 years. Hope it helps. Feel free to write me directly if you want to discuss any of this further.
Wishing you all the success that life has to offer,
LC
l.c_cooper@hotmail.com
I would only advice you not to rush things.Think your story through once again,and see if you can expand it.New ideas might come late.I hope I am talking sense.