CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Over the last, few days, I’ve been reviewing my pricing, and I decided to make a few changes: In preparation for bundling my existing chapter books into collections, I have repriced all individual chapter book titles from $3.99 to $2.99 U.S. This will allow existing readers to choose whether or not they want to buy individual titles, or wait the two years for the first bundle of any series to come out. It will also give new readers a way to catch up, more easily, on an existing series. Collections will be priced at $4.99, and will contain a minimum of 4 individual chapter book titles. I also repriced all my novels to $5.99 U.S., and all collections and anthologies to $4.99. And, finally, all pre-orders will be priced at $2.99 until the day of their release, when they will be repriced to their usual sales price, whatever it may be. This means that A Planet’s Ransom is currently priced at $2.99, but will go back up to $4.99 on, or shortly after January 13th (U.S. EST). And th...

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 ...

Why Anthologies? There are two main reasons I decided on writing and compiling stories for anthologies. The first is that I have a number of short stories that I’ve written over the years. They need a home. The second is that not all of my writing is in one genre or one style, so an anthology is a good way to establish the fact I write a range of genres in the readers’ minds—at least for related genres. Science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction for example, but probably not romance. That’s a whole different animal in my mind, and a slightly different set of readers. Thoughts on Pricing and Selling Short Stories in Anthologies. At first I thought of packaging each short story individually and selling it for $0.99c, but I worried about the quality debate, as many readers are wary of work below a certain price range. Initially, I considered packaging the stories individually and then bundling them at a later date and selling them at $2.50, but that seemed destined to ann...