Short stories 18th January 2011.

I seem to have spent a good part of the last three weeks watching sales figures and rankings. Not from any need for anxiety, January has proved to be an excellent month for sales and we’re only just over half-way.

I’ve been trying to get a handle on what has been selling and why in the e-book world, looking back over our historical sales, as well as recent, and digging back into information from previous publishers and as many other sources as I can find.

It’s like a sea of statistics, if not an ocean and there is a large amount of conflicting advice out there. When we started out eighteen months ago, there was a perceived wisdom that in terms of e-books short stories sell better than novels, but you make more money on the novel sales. This was in part due to the extreme influence Fictionwise and its royalty mechanism had on the overall market.

Fictionwise’s influence has dramatically declined, to the point we’re not yet on there,(it’s in hand, but nothing yet) and we’re not particularly hurting from our absence from that site.
Indeed four of our other retailers rank higher than them in terms of web site traffic – unheard of a mere two years ago.

So, for the first few months of our existence, the short stories sold well, and the novels kind of dribbled out. Then, during the first half of 2010 we found the short stories weren’t selling and novel sales took off, particularly in the third quarter.

In the fourth quarter, the short stories started selling again and several of the novels were still selling.

This month so far, it’s short stories that are making the sales again. Some of my own short stories have really taken off in the last three and a half months. Indeed, in volume terms a short story I wrote for a competition (it didn’t get anywhere) and then lengthened for release as an e-book is suddenly one of our best sellers (in volume terms) this month. It’s a lightweight “feel-good” romantic piece, under a pen name that has no other track record, just the two short stories. Even my alternative history series is moving where it languished in the doldrums for more than a year.

So is there a point to this rambling?

Yes, it’s a simple point – it can take time, but sometimes short stories do sell. You never get rich on the back of them, but boy, does it feel nice and it gets your name out there.

Anyone feel like pulling out some short stories that are gathering dust and going nowhere? Go on, be a devil, submit them – you never know.