So, I have a novella sent out. [Advice bleg …ish]

13.5K words, horror/fantasy, original piece, and I have pretty much run out of places where they’d pay more than fifty bucks for the blessed thing. Fifty bucks works out to .003 cents a word, by the way — no, my bad: it works out to .004 cents a word, if you round up. Completely different, that!

Seriously, what do I do with the damned thing? Because the problem with publishing it myself on Kindle is that there’s no money for editing and art, because all of the cash for 2022 is earmarked for TINSEL RAIN. I could try to edit it myself and skip the art, but… I dunno. It ain’t easy out here for a producer of short fiction*.

Suggestions welcome.

Moe Lane

*It’s hard to tell how well PICKMAN’S MODEL: A ROMANCE did, because of the Kickstarter. Presumably most of those people would have bought their own copy anyway, but who knows? I’m not complaining, though. I ended up breaking even, more or less. But I don’t think it’d be appropriate to do another Kickstarter for this particular project; I only did it for PICKMAN’S MODEL because I wanted to get paid for my first sale, dagnabbit. That doesn’t apply here.

#commissionearned

4 thoughts on “So, I have a novella sent out. [Advice bleg …ish]”

  1. If you were able to get art and editing, and post it on kindle, how soon would you expect it to pay for itself? What about if you didn’t really bother with the art, and skipped the “hire a professional” part of the editing process? What would the hidden costs (psychological and otherwise) be to going with the second choice?

    1. 1). Years. Budget $500/.35 per-book = 1,400 copies need to be sold.
      2). I start making money right away, because there’s no budget.
      3). The hidden cost would be to my credibility, since I’d be putting out an only mildly-edited product without compensatory art.

      1. On the matter of credibility… would labeling help? I know that there are a lot of people posting stuff to Amazon without the editors and actually making some money doing so. Posting it with clear indicators that hey – this is a raw form (without editors or art) seems like it would at least be a potential strategy for deflecting credibility loss.

        Barring that, you’re probably better off sitting on it. Possibly make the rough version available to your Patreons, have it in the drawer in case opportunity arises, and pull it out and dust it off later, once you have a year when you *can* afford it.

  2. One option is to put it in a box, and then dig it out when you do have money for editing. Alternatively, you can dig it out in a couple of months when it’s not so fresh in your own mind and edit it yourself.

    I have questions about the value of art in general.

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