: Re: How to sell novel excerpts as short stories Occasionally I've seen novel excerpts published in short story venues. They're usually sections of a recent or forthcoming novel that also hold together

@Murray165

Vote Up Vote Down

With the increase in popularity of electronic book readers, there are more and more people choosing to self-publish their short stories as individual works, and then combining them to sell as a complete collection. The most common practice I have seen is to sell short stories at .99 and then combine five or more into a collection to sell at 2.99 or higher, depending on the number of stories. The idea is to use the indiviual stories as loss leaders in order to encourage people to take the plunge for the collection. Using Kindle as an example, you only get 35% royalties for the .99 stories, but you get 70% for anything that sells at 2.99 or up.

I personally am in the process of writing three separate suspense novellas of at least 20k words each which I will sell individually at .99, and then I will merge them together to sell as a collection for 2.99. Once I have finished them, I plan to do the same with three contemporary fantasy novellas.

I believe a lot of people are willing to buy a small story at 99 cents (look at the popularity of iTunes). If you have multiple titles out there then you'll find that if someone likes one of your stories they will go back and look for more, and conveniently enough, you'll have some waiting for them!

(0)

Login to post a comment!