CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Last week, we looked at the business return of writing short stories and publishing or selling them - but we only looked at it in terms of pure monetary earnings for time spent, and there are other business benefits that can be calculated, depending on why you chose to write the short story in the first place, since we can create with additional purposes to telling a good tale. We can, for instance, write for a specific market. An anthology opportunity might come up, where we get to work with other authors to produce a collection, either writing to a specific theme, or in a specific world or setting. Many of these anthologies won't pay a professional rate, and definitely won't be guaranteed an equivalent monetary return for time. You need to first decide if that's an acceptable trade, but you need to make that decision based on a number of other, both positive and negative, factors: the opportunity to be part of the anthology - since these don't come up all that of...

I’m looked at what I’d written and put together, and I re-thought my decision not to publish any of the anthology stories separately. For a long time I tossed up between publishing all or some of them separately at 99c (for pieces up to 5,000 words), $1.49 (for pieces between 5,000-10,000 words) and $1.99 (for pieces between 10,000 and 15,000 words), or just leaving them available as part of an anthology. I worried about how that might affect my readers, but, in the end, I decided to make it clear in the blurbs and on the covers of individual pieces that they could be found in an anthology and that the anthology only sold for $2.99. This way readers should be able to find the cheaper alternative. I also decided that the individual stories would all have a similar style of cover and lay-out of content to the anthologies so the link between each was easier to notice. I started out by designing the covers myself, but will go for professional covers as I can afford it. I’ve chosen the ...