• Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Fiction Branding… Part 11

    Short Fiction and Discoverability… I said clearly in the last part of this series that short stories, standing alone, do not lead to major discoverability in the calculation of 20 to 50. Wow, I really wish they did. However I left the impression that short fiction does not help in general discoverability and that is so, so far wrong as to be funny. Short fiction is a major source of discoverability, just not in the 20 books to 50 thousand thinking. Let me start off with one major thing here that I will talk about later. NEVER PAY FOR PROMOTION OF ANY KIND. You could make that a hard and…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Making A Living With Short Fiction 2018

    Back By Popular Demand… Actually, I am bringing this forward from May 2016 and it is mostly unchanged. I will put in BOLD ALL-CAP ITALICS when I have changed something. ———— Can You Make a Living Writing Only Short Fiction? Every year or so I look at this topic once again, do the math, see if anything has changed over the last couple of years. And now, here in May 2016, things have changed some, but in my opinion it would still be possible to make a decent living writing only short fiction. Why do I like this topic? Actually, because I love short fiction, meaning any story under around…

  • On Writing,  publishing

    The New World of Publishing: Helping Readers Find Your Work

    This is the third article in a series. In the first article, I suggested that writers should just stop begging at the doors of traditional novel publishers. I was talking about novels and only novels.  In the second article I talked about how a person could make a living writing only short fiction. So now I’m going to go on here for a minute about the value of doing short fiction in this new world. And the incredible value of selling your short fiction to some traditional publishers. It seems to me that everyone out there in blog land yells about visibility. This article is about helping your writing be…

  • On Writing,  publishing

    The New World of Publishing: Making a Living with Your Short Fiction Updated 2013

    Way back, over three years ago now, I did a post in my Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing series called “Myth: You Can’t Make Money Writing Fiction.” And then I wrote the basis of this post about one year ago right now. And things have changed so much, I wanted to update this now, and then I will follow this with another short fiction post on a slightly different area of short fiction. But in this post, I want to go after a saying that used to be almost 100% true before four years ago. “You can’t make a living writing only short fiction.” Not so true anymore. Why…