Kristin Janz

I just released my story “Clear Skies in Pixieland”, originally published earlier this year in the first issue of Nine, as a Kindle e-book for $1.29.  I’ve been charging 99 cents for the other individual short stories, but this one’s longer.  I noticed that someone already bought a copy, even though it’s been up less than a week–thank you, whoever you are!

Here’s a description, lifted from the Amazon page (I wrote it myself, so I’m allowed to do that):

It didn’t take Chris long to learn the dark side of his summer job: trapping pixies, fairies and other small creatures in a magical forest for sale to wealthy collectors.  He’d have quit if he didn’t need the money.  Now, after a disastrous expedition, only Chris can rescue the man who hired him.  But does his boss deserve to be rescued?  And how can Chris ever pay the terrible price the pixies have demanded?

I enjoy writing fiction more than I enjoy writing promotional blurbs.

Unfortunately, the editors of Nine decided to stop publishing the magazine after the 3rd issue.  I was sad to hear this, but I’m glad that they gave it a try and helped some great stories find a good home.

About a year ago, I started making my previously published short stories available on Amazon as individual Kindle e-books.  I’ve already written about my reasons for trying to get my stories published in magazines before self-publishing them, and I still feel the same way.  But, after a story has been published in a print or online magazine, it doesn’t always remain easy for readers to find.  I wanted to ensure that anyone looking for a particular story of mine would be able to purchase and read it for a minimum of effort.

I haven’t done much to promote these stories beyond occasionally mentioning them on my blog or in my newsletter.  I didn’t even design (or pay someone else to design) covers, instead allowing Amazon to display them with their generic green and black placeholder image.  I felt that the time I would have to spend learning how to design covers would be better spent writing, and that I was unlikely to recoup what it would cost to pay someone else to do them (probably $10 per cover, according to various sources including Dean Wesley Smith’s blog post on traditional vs. self-publishing of short fiction (some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t)).

Sales are about what I expected.  I have 6 stories available, selling at 99 cents each (this page has a list of all my published stories, and shows which are available in Kindle editions).  Most have sold around 5 copies.  Amazon pays 35% royalties for 99 cent books, so that’s around $1.75 that I’ve made on each one.  Better than nothing, but since I was paid anywhere from $15 to $500 per story by the magazines that originally published them, I’m not about to switch to exclusive self-publishing for my short fiction anytime soon.

One story is an outlier.  For some reason, “The Shoemaker’s Daughter”, which I published on Amazon on October 30th, has sold 50 copies in just under 2 months, and is still selling 5-10 copies a week.  I don’t know why.  I haven’t seen any reviews of it, and I’ve done practically nothing to promote it.  I mentioned it on a Canadian writers’ mailing list to which I belong, and in my newsletter (which has something like 30 subscribers), but only after it had started selling well.  This is the first time I’ve mentioned it on my blog.  I’m happy that it’s sold so much better than expected, and grateful to everyone who’s purchased a copy.  But I can’t explain it.

Except.  If you look more closely at the Amazon page for “The Shoemaker’s Daughter”, you’ll see that “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” a novel called The Shoemaker’s Wife, written by Adriana Trigiani and published by HarperCollins.  The Kindle version is, as I write this, #563 on the Kindle bestsellers list (“The Shoemaker’s Daughter” is #80,528, but the rankings are widely variable from hour to hour, even minute to minute, once you get this far down the list).

Is that the answer?  My short story is selling moderately well (for a short story by an unknown author) because it happens to have a similar title to that of the latest novel from a bestselling author?  Do people go to Amazon planning to buy Trigiani’s book, start typing the title into the Search field, and one of the other titles that comes up is mine, and they decide to give it a chance because, hey, it’s only 99 cents?  If that’s what’s happening, most if not all of these people seem to also be buying The Shoemaker’s Wife, so I can’t feel too badly about it.  I only hope they realize when purchasing it that my story has absolutely nothing to do with Trigiani’s novel (which I’d never heard of before trying to figure out why my story was selling, since it’s not in one of the genres I follow).

I don’t plan to start picking titles like “Harry Potted” or “Fifty Shades of Blue”.  It’s nice that some new readers might have decided to buy one of my stories (assuming my hypothesis is correct), and I hope they enjoy it.  (If you read and liked “The Shoemaker’s Daughter”, “The Year of the Bear”, also available on Kindle, is set in the same secondary world, so you might like that one too.)

But … I guess I should work on getting all my old stories up on Kindle, once the rights have reverted to me.  Just in case.

My science fiction story “Looking-Glass Milk” is now available to read on your Kindle or Kindle app.  This originally came out in 2009 from Scribblers & Ink Spillers as part of the Crystal Codices collection, but it’s out of print now, and I thought I’d re-issue it.

The goal right now is to make sure that people are able to read all my published stories.  I probably won’t re-issue stories that are still available to read for free on the internet, since I want to encourage you to visit e-zines that have supported me by buying my fiction.  But for stories that came out in print, in magazines that are difficult and/or expensive to obtain, re-publishing old stories with Amazon seemed like a good way to make them more readily available.

I’ve occasionally had friends ask why I don’t just publish my own stories once I’ve written them, instead of looking for magazines to publish them for me.  Self-publishing is easier than ever, whether you want to publish in electronic format only, or produce an attractive, professional-looking paper book.

I have self-published a couple of things.  For a while, I had one of my short stories posted on this website.  And I just self-published my story “Woman Moving to the Country” in Kindle format.  But these were both stories that I first had traditionally published in magazines, where I submitted the story to the editor, and the editor decided to pay me for the right to include that story.  So far, I haven’t self-published any new, never-before-seen stories.  Why not?

It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with doing so, or that I might not do so at some point in the future.  Publishing is changing all the time, and maybe in a few more years it won’t make sense to do anything except self-publish.  But here are some of the reasons why, right now, I’ve chosen to pursue traditional publishing first (i.e., I try to get someone else to publish my stories for me), and only self-publish stories that have already come out.

1.  I’d rather be writing.  It’s a lot of work to publish stories and convince other people to read them.  Writing is a lot of work, too.  But it’s work I enjoy more than designing covers, formatting manuscripts for publication, learning how to use new software to design covers and format manuscripts for publication, marketing, etc.  Why spend my time doing all that instead of writing, or spend my own money hiring people to do it, when some publisher is willing to do it for me free of charge, and maybe even send me a check?

2.  Better distribution.  If I were famous, I might be able to publish my own stories independently and have hundreds or even thousands of people rush to pay me for them, thus earning more money than I would through a traditional publisher.  But I’m not famous.  If I self-publish a story, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone who doesn’t already know me is going to buy it.  If I self-publish a story for free (i.e., post it on my website for anyone to read), it is possible that friends might forward the link to other friends, who might then read it.  However, I suspect that I’m going to get more people to read my stories by having them published in magazines, and some of those people might not even know me.  I’ll probably earn more money, too.

3.  Less chance of embarassing myself.  Some of my stories have been floating around for years now, garnering rejection after rejection.  If no one else wants to publish my stories, shouldn’t I go ahead and publish them myself?  Maybe.  On the other hand, if a particular story’s getting no love from editors, maybe there’s a good reason for that.  Maybe it just isn’t very good, and five years from now I’d regret plastering it all over the internet for everyone to read.  Getting a story published in a magazine signals to potential readers that at least one other person besides the author’s mom* thought the story wasn’t crap.

4.  Joining the conversation.  There are a lot of magazines out there, print or electronic, publishing short fiction.  Some don’t pay much, or at all.  Some aren’t widely read.  But when I’m looking for magazines to submit stories to, I’m also discovering magazines that print other stories I might enjoy.  When my stories are published, I make a point of reading all the other stories in that issue, and I have to think that I’m not the only writer who does this.  I like to read as much as I like to write (perhaps more), and pursuing traditional publication, trying to stay abreast of what’s being published where, gives me the opportunity to discover new favorite authors, and see what they’re up to.

So, those are some of my reasons.  I can’t promise not to change my mind about self-publishing at some point in the future.  For instance, longer stories are harder to place with magazines, and I seem to be writing a lot of long stories lately (if not quite novel-length).  I may decide to publish some of these myself, rather than allow them to languish forever in the files of my desktop.  But for right now, I absolutely prefer traditional publishing.

*  Not even my mom likes all my stories.