Kristin Janz

Tag: Amazon

  • Mythic Orbits Vol. 2 available on Amazon

    If you’re interested in picking up Mythic Orbits Vol. 2, the new anthology that Donald and I have stories in, the Kindle version is available now on Amazon! (Paperback to follow in a few weeks.)

    Our stories are both reprints from Daily Science Fiction. Mine is “The Workshop at the End of the World”, and Donald’s is “Her Majesty’s Guardian”.

    For only $2.99, you get both those stories, and 9 others by different Christian authors, in convenient e-book form!

    The editor and publisher, Travis Perry, is one of the few people in the Christian speculative fiction world who publishes short stories, so of course because of what we’re doing with Mysterion, we hope to see him succeed (even though his approach to “Christian fiction” is a lot different from ours–we think there’s room for a lot of different ways of engaging with the Christian faith in one’s writing and publishing projects).

  • “Clear Skies in Pixieland” now available in Kindle edition

    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.

  • The Curious Case of the Shoemaker’s Daughter

    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.

  • What books cost

    Last Wednesday, Donald and I went to hear my friend Max Gladstone read from his new book Three Parts Dead, at the Harvard Book Store.  I bought a copy of the book so Max could sign it (and so I could read it, obviously).  I purchased the hardcover from the Harvard Book Store even though I would have preferred to buy the Kindle e-book.  I have too many books, and I don’t have shelf space for all of them in my apartment.  However, I was there, and I figured that the Harvard Book Store would be more likely to give Max the opportunity to do readings upon the release of future novels if they sold a lot of copies.

    I paid $24.99 plus 6.25% sales tax for the hardcover, for a total of $26.55.  Just out of curiosity, I checked the price on Amazon.  $11.99 for the Kindle.  $13.58 for the hardcover.  Even if I didn’t fall for Amazon’s “buy more stuff you don’t need to get free shipping” ploy, it would have been only another $3.99 for shipping, for a total of $17.57.

    The Harvard Book Store has the following on the bottom of the register receipt I received:

    How much money stays in your community when you spend $100?
    At a locally owned business: $68
    At a chain store: $43
    At Amazon: $0

    I do care about supporting local businesses (I buy most of my produce, at least late spring through fall, at a local farm.  I buy most of my meat from a Massachusetts farmer.).  I think independent bookstores are an asset to a community, in part because they can connect authors with readers, face-to-face, at events like Wednesday’s reading.  I have serious concerns about Amazon, from their blatant attempts to monopolize bookselling and publishing, to reports of unfair labor practices in their warehouses.  I don’t begrudge the Harvard Bookstore my $26.55.

    But I question whether guilting people into buying things they didn’t want (hardcover vs. e-book), at a 50% premium, is, in the long term, a sustainable business model.

  • “Looking-Glass Milk” now available in Kindle edition

    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.