Drumroll: The Zombies of Hobbiton: Martian Love Story, an 85-page novella, is now available on Amazon.
At nearly 25,000 words, The Zombies of Hobbiton falls squarely into novella territory. This is another way of saying it’s completely unsalable.
Big book publishers wouldn’t touch a story of that length. Even the shortest genres, category romance and such, is expected to crack 60,000 words or so. A sci-fi or horror novel had better run at least 75K. I suppose it’s possible a traditional publisher would sell a few novellas bundled together, or one inserted among an anthology, but frankly, to sell a story of that length, a story that may well take up 20-25% of the anthology’s total page count, you either have to be extremely good or already well-established.
The same rule of thumb applies over at the genre magazines. Duotrope.com. Duotrope lists 200 paying horror markets and 227 paying sci-fi markets (there is some overlap here). Of these, two pro-paying magazines (that is, markets that pay at least $0.05/word) accept novellas up to 25K words: Fantasy & Science Fiction, at 25K, and Analog, at an impressive 40K. If you place a 25K story at one of these markets, you’ll do pretty well for yourself: F&SF would shell out $1500 for your story (a little more if you’re established), and Analog would pay $1250 ($1500 if you’re a big name). F&SF buys first North American and foreign serial rights with an option on anthology rights. I’m not sure what Analog asks for, but it’s probably similar, meaning you’d still have a bunch of rights left to sell on down the road.
However, F&SF receives somewhere in the ballpark of 2500+ submissions a year while Analog probably sees around 1000+. These are conservative extrapolations; I expect they receive closer to twice that many.
So if you exhaust both those options, you can turn to lower-paying genre markets. Crossed Genres is a pretty nice little zine, and while they hypothetically accept novellas, they’re currently closed to such submissions. Orb Speculative Fiction takes novellas up to 25K words. If you’re a resident of Australia or New Zealand. If accepted, you’ll be paid $50. (Note: I’m very aware of the difficulties in paying authors high rates for their work, and am not criticizing Orb for their pay rates. Just exploring the novella market.) The Red Penny Papers is an interesting-looking zine that wants gothic, pulpy speculative fiction. They’ll serialize works of up to 25K words, paying $0.005/word (i.e. 10K = $50), capping at $100. (Same disclaimer re: rates applies. I like small markets. Simply making a point.) GigaNotoSaurus, a market specifically for longer stories, takes novellas up to 25K and pays $100, and is newish but pretty well-respected.
In total, I see three other SF/F/H magazine markets that will run novellas, paying $25-40 apiece. Anthologies of various pay rates come and go and will sometimes take long stories.
From there, small presses are a fairly viable medium for novellas. A lot of them sell ebooks, but I’m aware of several that will sell actual print novellas. Small press novella markets still aren’t plentiful–I see 10-12 on Duotrope, and strongly suspect there are significantly more out there–but they exist. Most offer a token advance and royalties. Small presses aren’t normally capable of making you rich, but I have met a couple authors who make a living through them.
So maybe my characterization of novellas as a bastard-length medium that’s utterly unsalable is a little hyperbolic. In truth, you’ve got three options:
1) Try to sell them to a magazine. Between all genres, Duotrope shows seven pro-paying markets for works of 25K words or more, with another ~15 paying at lower rates
2) Sell through a small press. This has the usual small press pros and cons: a stamp of legitimacy, formatting and distribution, and possibly a bigger platform than you can provide yourself vs. splitting revenues. (My experience with small presses is limited, but I’ve enjoyed it)
3) Self-publish through Amazon, B&N, etc.
Given that there is no real traditional route available, 2) is the default option if you want a press backing you. Writing this piece has put them on my radar to explore if/when I write my next novella.
When it comes to 1) and 3), they aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. While some magazines may want permanent e-rights that could conflict with your ability to resell your novella through Amazon etc., many don’t, and some of the ones that do are usually willing to take a story offline after 6-12 months. If I thought I had a chance in hell of placing The Zombies of Hobbiton at Analog or F&SF (I think it’s too slapsticky for them, though I could be wrong), I might have tried them first.
But when I look at media to sell novellas through, I see limited options with serious tradeoffs. Some self-publishing advocates would argue this is no more than a microcosm of all current traditional publishing routes–but if nothing else, it’s even worse for novellas, because you simply have almost nothing to lose. From where I sit, the best path is to publish them yourself and see where it leads.
Uh oh!
A few weeks back, I contacted the amazing M.S. Corley about putting together a piece of cover art for The Roar of the Spheres. Yesterday, I got the results:
I am in love with this. Being more verbal than visual, I hadn’t really thought much about what The Roar of the Spheres‘ cover should look like until Mr. Corley asked me for a few ideas and descriptions. His finished product? Isn’t particularly like any of the ideas I sent him.
It’s much, much better.
Why isn’t this book selling? First, let’s rule out a few variables.
1) The writing blows goats.
As mentioned, I’ve already sold most of these stories somewhere. You know how hard it is to sell a single story, anywhere? Even to a market that pays the princely sum of $10? It’s pretty fucking hard! Even those markets reject 90-99% of the stories they see. They get a lot of material and only buy the stuff they really like. That doesn’t mean what they buy is the awesomest thing since dinosaurs fighting with shotguns, but it does imply a baseline quality. Either the writing or the story or both were enough to hook an editor who reads scores of stories a month. I’m not gonna get all “Kneel before Zod” here, but I’d put the writing in When We Were Mutants & Other Stories up against the average self-pubbed Kindle title no worries.
2) The packaging (title, description, cover art, etc.) is the blowful part.
The price is $1.99. That’s right in line with this market. Still, I’m dropping it to $0.99 to see if that changes anything.
Whatever else you might think of the book, you gotta admit that’s a sweet title.
I’ve written several hundred movie reviews in the last three years. I know how to write a hook. The description may not sell ice to a wampa, but it’s fine.
The cover art’s more subjective–it’s definitely not your run-of-the-mill “photograph of a hot chick with some huge sans serif text pasted over it”–but I happen to think it’s pretty damn cool. It’s eye-catching. It’s nontraditional, and maybe that’s turning people off, but I feel like it’s a great representation of the work.
3) I’m not a very talented whore.
I haven’t done a ton of self-promotion. This is true. But the places I’ve promoted it have been the right places. Result: nothing. I should send it out to some review blogs and see what happens there. I’m getting the impression recommendations from trusted sources are a big factor in selling unknown works. That, uh, may not be news to anyone.
Here’s some variables that might make a difference.
1) It’s a short story collection.
Konrath, and nearly all the self-pubbed authors I’ve seen, sell novels. Maybe people hate reading short stories. Maybe short stories threw sand in their faces as children. Maybe, for some reason, customers aren’t interested in buying them when there’s all these actual novels available just a click away. I could address that by listing a previous novel of mine and seeing how that does, but I’m kind of busy with this detailed dissection of a niche subject right now.
2) I’ve only got the one work available.
Konrath writes about success coming from “shelf space,” or having a number of different titles for readers to find, get engaged by, and scoop up the rest of your work. I think this is a really strong point, actually. Single-title self-pubbers may find it much more difficult than people with 3+ books online.
3) My fiction career doesn’t have much of a platform.
I suspect this might be the biggest fly in the ointment of selling your work to strangers. Thing is, if you’ve already got a decent chunk of readers, they’re not really strangers anymore. They’ll pick up your book on your recommendation. Suckers. These suckers, in turn, will recommend it to their friends and communities. Hooray! Sales!
I’ve actually got the opportunity to increase my platform here by a ways, which I intend to do just as soon as I’ve beaten The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess again. Hyrule’s in danger, people.
Conclusions, Week One
Caveat: these are preliminary conclusions based on an initial week of data. That’s very little info, really. At this point, Shit Is Subject To Change.
I’m honestly not disappointed in these results. My expectations were low–people can’t shut up about ebooks these days, and I wanted to see for myself what it’s like to actually try to sell one.
However, it seems to me that ebooks do not, despite all buzz to the contrary, sell themselves. To achieve sales, you need either a preexisting readership or to do a lot of self-promotion. Again, this really isn’t news, but I mean you need that just to sell a copy. So far I could sell more books through bagpiping in the subway than by listing them on Kindle.
My initial suspicion is the amount of time you need to spend self-promoting is not going to be worth it. For authors seeking a career, that time is, in almost all cases, better spent writing, or at least pitching your writing to agents and editors. Because until you reach critical mass, you will have to keep pumping your own work All. The. Time. Self-promotion is a hydratic beast with an empty belly. It demands constant nourishment or it will eat you instead.
Well, possibly not, at least about the eating you part. Again, my opinions could change if the data does. But for now–and Konrath says this himself, to his credit, though possibly he should say it more often–the self-epubbing route is not a game-changer for those of us who aren’t already established. In fact, so far it resembles the bulk of my fiction career: a bushel of effort for a withered cherry of financial gain.
Well, maybe not. But you gotta have a catchy title to draw them in.
Joe Konrath, who writes novels under the name J.A. Konrath, is the leading light of self-publishing electronically. His ebooks are on pace to make him more than $100,000 this year. On Kindle alone. He’s done so well Amazon is publishing his next work. He blogs with great transparency about his sales and methods. Lest there be any confusion about what’s to follow, let the record state I think he’s a cool guy, and that it’s wildly awesome he’s been able to seize such a successful independent career.
I, like dozens, possibly thousands of others, was inspired to follow his lead. Last week, I uploaded a collection of my short stories to the Kindle store. I see it as a very low-risk, high-reward venture: I’ve already sold six of the eight stories here. The seventh was previously self-published as part of a charity event. The eight and titular story’s a strong one, but none of the major markets I submitted it to picked it up.
I probably could have sold that story to a smaller market, so my lost opportunity cost was $10-50. It took a few hours to format the text properly, and several hours more to cajole my sexy talented girlfriend into finishing the cover art. That’s it. I’m still seeking the normal route to publication for my sci-fi novel, The Roar of the Spheres.
You know how many copies of WWWM&OS I’ve sold so far to people I don’t know personally? Zero. None. As our friends south of the border would say, absolutamente nothing!!!
Yet I didn’t just post it and move on, like a fire-and-forget missile made out of words about wizards. I introduced When We Were Mutants & Other Stories on kindleboards.com and did some light interaction. I introduced it in the proper section of the Amazon boards. I mentioned it here, and linked to it from the sidebar. Results: nothing.
Not quite the outcome I was expecting after reading up on Konrath’s blog.
Let’s be clear–I wasn’t expecting to be able to fund a wardrobe of gold top hats and sable-fur tighty-grayies off this, either. I would have been happy with $10 a month. Seriously. I hoped to repeat this with other collections down the road and build a small but steady income stream to supplement the other ways I make money, e.g. dancing on the sidewalk for nickels.
One week is not enough data to draw any strong conclusions over. It’s just another production of Small Sample Size Theatre. But so far, my experiment is showing me it’s not as easy as the self-epublishing all-stars make it out to be. I’ll plunge into analysis in my next post.
The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Trilogy
Dante Galand is young. Penniless. Alone. But devoted to learning the dark magic of his world. His quest will take him from the city gutters to a foreign...
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