I’m working on a collection of my own short stories. I want to price it at $10, making the standard word count ceiling 50-60K. Currently running the logistics of this, I’m trying to settle on length, number of content, etc, and need some feedback.
For you, as a reader/customer, based on the price of $10 (or a $5 ebook):
What’s an acceptable word count to you?
How many stories do you feel is acceptable?
What is a reasonable ratio of new stories to old (previously printed/posted) stories?
1: For ten dollars, a work that takes me between two and seven hours to read would be nice (I read briskly, though it’s different for everyone). I know that doesn’t exactly give you a word count to deal with but I’m focused more on the experience than on the count.
2: 2-3. A good stopping point is always nice.
3: If I can pirate your old stories off of your account I won’t bother buying it. Otherwise I don’t mind reprints as long as I don’t own the old content. Given that you’re probably not a super popular Justin Bieber of the writing world that everybody has on their shelf, I wouldn’t see it as a big problem to reprint old works because I’d still see it as fresh.
Hope that helps.
If you have enough stories worthy of inclusion, I’d say go ahead and include as many as you can fit within the pricing point.
Number of stories doesn’t much matter, as long as each one is as long as it needs to be.
I would probably buy it if at least half the content was new, previously unpublished content, at least if it fits my particular interests. If any are sequels/continuations of previous stories of yours that I liked, that would be a particularly strong selling point for me. If a story appeared before in other anthologies that I’ve bought, it would feel like I was paying for it twice. And admittedly I’m less likely to buy it if all of it is available online.
If the stories have previously been published in an anthology, I’m happy to see an entire book of reprints, with maybe one or two new and exclusive works.
Same with stories published online, actually; if I like them enough, I’ll want a portable copy.
In a $5 ebook I’d like to see maybe ten or a dozen stories, and I’d be more bothered by number of stories than overall word count.
Good examples of single-author anthologies are Kyell Gold’s ‘Gold Standard’ and Watts Martin’s ‘Why Coyotes Howl’. Most of Martin’s stories are available for free online, but I liked them enough to buy the book anyway.
For a $5 ebook, I’d also say about 9-12 stories or somewhere around 50-60K. I don’t mind most of them being reprints, because few people buy all the anthologies anyway, and like Huskyteer, even if they’ve been posted online that’s not the same to me as having a convenient, nicely formatted copy for my Kindle (or having a print copy for my bookshelf). I’d suggest including about 2-4 new stories.
1. What’s an acceptable word count to you?
$10 print book, $5 ebook feels shortish to me in length/value ratio.
2. How many stories do you feel is acceptable?
As many as needed to fit the word count. Probably at least over five.
3. What is a reasonable ratio of new stories to old (previously printed/posted) stories?
Pretty much any. New stories will make it more appealing, but if you have previously printed stories from big name people, that too will keep it interesting and make it marketable.
(Stealing Voice’s post setup because I can)
1. What’s an acceptable word count to you?
Probably somewhere between 10k-25/30k words, but as a lot of other said, would really be more of a number of stories thing rather than word count.
2. How many stories do you feel is acceptable?
Five - ten seems appropriate, depending on the desired word count.
3. What is a reasonable ratio of new stories to old (previously printed/posted) stories?
For me, personally, it would have to be at least 60/40 (new/old). Unless you’re an author who I am absolutely dying to read (which there are only one or two that fit that description for me right now) I wouldn’t want to pay for a lot I’ve already read. Stories from anthologies are borderline, because as has been said, a lot of stories in anthologies get missed/not read. ‘Old’ in the sense of my post would refer to ones posted for free online.
This is a really useful thread. I’m working on organizing some of my stories into anthologies, and this was a really helpful resource for figuring out how I should go about dividing them up. So, thanks, Rechan, for starting it, and thanks to everyone else for offering your insights!
Here’s another question: should you write a short intro for each story, or is that boring and pretentious?
I don’t believe it is pretentious, but at the same time I can’t really think of any occasion where it would really be necessary. Short stories should be self-contained and not really need any sort of external explanation of introduction. In my opinion at least.
I find intros distracting, because I want to start the story, not get the behind-the-scenes stuff before I read it.
If I was going to give that “This is why I wrote this/my thoughts on it”, it’d come after the story is over. The only reason I personally can see having an intro is sort of a warning ‘Hey all these other stories are really nice, but this one is dark and unpleasant’.
I’ve enjoyed collections where the author has a section for story notes at the end – I know Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have done that in collections I’ve read. There aren’t necessarily notes on every story, though, and I remember the notes ranging from a couple sentences to a few paragraphs long. I’m not crazy about intros, either, for the same reasons Rechan listed above, but having a behind-the-scenes look afterward is nice. I never got around to doing that for Six Impossible Things, but plan to for my longer collection.
I do, but the intro is usually an explanation of who/what inspired the story or a funny anecdote involving it (the story behind the story, I suppose). I am admittedly borrowing the concept from Isaac Asimov.
My novels are priced in part by length, with the proviso that my percentage at Amazon takes a large jump at $2.99, So I tend to bump up to that mark a little early sometimes, especially for what I think are my better books.
For 85-100k words, I charge $2,99
For 50-85k words, it’s $1.99
For under 50k, it’s either .99 or free.
For an entire seven-book series that costs more to buy in pieces, it’s $9.99-- I make about the same as if the reader bought the books individually due to price structuring factors. Oddly, to this day more people buy it in pieces and pay more. Largely I suspect this is because it’s so hard to click on a $9.99 price tag in this economy.
The true value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it, and in our world full of piracy and free internet fiction, stories by unknown authors like me frankly aren’t worth much. OTOH, this formula has sold well over thirty thousand of my books.
I don’t really have a control over the price. If a book is published by one of the Fandom’s publishers, it’s sold at either $20 or $10 and the e-version is half the print price.
For 50-85k words, it's $1.99
Just FYI, this study says that $1.99 is a poor-selling price.
Though if the percentage that Amazon gets jumps above $2.99, I support selling and buying e-books at that price.
Then again, I’ve been boycotting Amazon since my first visit to their website.
I am almost certainly premature in announcing this, since editing “The Furry Future” for January publication is taking up all of my time at present, but Teiran of FurPlanet Productions and I have briefly discussed what kind of anthology to publish next. We have tentatively agreed upon an anthology of reprints from within furry fandom. Up to now, we have been asking for all-original stories, or reprinting furry stories from the s-f magazines of the last century since most furry readers today are not familiar with them. This new anthology, probably for Anthrocon 2015, would be of short stories by furry community writers that have been published before but that most furry readers are unlikely to be familiar with. Mostly old stories that are out of print; and stories published outside furry markets that most furry fans don’t know about.
So you might not want to be in too much hurry to publish a reprint collection of your own stories. If a story has just been reprinted in another book and is currently available elsewhere, we won’t want it for this 2015 FurPlanet anthology.
By the way, the difference between an anthology and a collection is that an anthology is a book of stories by different authors, while a collection is a book of stories by the same author.
Well, he was talking about a combination of both old and new and sending out feelers for how best to mix it.
Either way, this thread has been incredibly informative and got my own gears shifting. It won’t be a project to tackle for quite some time though, hopefully after finishing a few other things.