Kristin Janz

Tag: Kindle

  • 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).

  • “The Price of Healing” in Kzine

    My neolithic elf story “The Price of Healing” has just come out in Issue 17 of Kzine.  This one is set in the same world as “City of the Dying Sun”, “The Shoemaker’s Daughter”, “The Year of the Bear”, “Brother’s Keeper”, and “Twenty-Seven Images of Retribution”; but it takes place thousands of years before any of the others, in a milieu inspired by late prehistoric Egypt.  With elves!  (I don’t call them elves, because I’ve learned that it’s easier to get short stories published if you avoid using the e-word or mentioning their pointy ears.)

    Yes, I’m working on a novel set in this world.  No, it isn’t done yet.

    Kzine is a genre fiction magazine for the Kindle, although a paperback version is also available.  They publish science fiction, fantasy, horror, and crime fiction, so it’s great for people who prefer reading magazines where each story is different.  Some publications are aiming for a particular sub-genre or aesthetic, and while that can be really interesting if it happens to be a sub-genre you especially love, the downside is that all the stories can start to seem the same after a while (like reading a short fiction collection by one author with a distinctive style).  Kzine is trying to mix things up a bit and publish a lot of very different stories together all in one issue.  So if that sounds like something you’d enjoy, check them out!  The e-book is free if you’re a Kindle Unlimited member, $2.49 otherwise ($4.50 for the paperback).

  • “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.

  • “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.

  • “Woman Moving to the Country” now available for Kindles and Kindle apps

    I just published my literary fiction story “Woman Moving to the Country” on the Kindle platform.  This story originally came out about a year ago in Prairie Fire, a Canadian literary journal.  But Prairie Fire can be difficult to get your hands on outside of Canada, and since several issues of the journal have now come and gone, I figured it might be worthwhile to re-release the story.  If you have a Kindle or a device with the Kindle app, you can buy the story here for only 99 cents.  (You don’t need to buy a Kindle to read Kindle books; you can get a free Kindle app for pretty much any computer, tablet or smart phone here.)

    It doesn’t have a cover yet, because I figure that only people who know me personally are likely to buy it right now, and they probably won’t be swayed one way or the other by whether I invest a few hours teaching myself how to use Microsoft Publisher so I can cobble together a pretty cover image.  But I’ll try to add one eventually.  You know, for when I’m famous.

    This story contains no fantasy or science fiction content whatsoever.  Just so you aren’t disappointed when you get to the end and realize that there was not a single elf (not one!) appearing anywhere within the story.  (I am aware that for some, this is a plus, not a minus.  Haters!)