If you have seen my diary entries about how DriveThruRPG is fading as a storefront and how I wanted to experiment with DriveThruFiction, this post follows on from those.
A quick resume: The new DriveThruRPG website has been optimized for the biggest publishers. It makes discovery extremely difficult for smaller indie publishers, which has hit many small publishers. This could be an intentional change, it certainly looks like it, or an accidental consequence. Whatever the case, any publisher dependent on the website is struggling. This happened last year when we also had the cost of living crisis and the end of the student debt assistance. So, falling disposable income and the primary RPG storefront suppressing people’s sales have crushed many small publishers.
I was fortunate to have been trying to diversify my sales channels for the past three years, so drivethru diving is less of a problem.
What I was thinking was that if DriveThruRPG is optimized for just the top 15 publishers, AND they intend to roll this same user interface out across all their storefronts, then if I could become a top15 publisher in one of the smaller sites, I should then become elevated when the new site rolls out.
The first experiment was to hammer public domain classics with Grammarly to remove as much of the out-dated language as possible. Grammarly has a tool for measuring readability, clarity, and delivery. Once Grammarly has done its thing, I then listen to the manuscript using the Read Aloud option, and I then manually edit where the language is still obscure, or where Grammarly has simply got it horribly wrong, and where there is language that was acceptable at the time of writing but not today. Once all of that is done I re-lay out the book for publication and upload them to DriveThruFiction, Amazon, and Lulu (for global distribution).
I did that for seven titles, and I frequently appeared in the top 15 publishers. Running a deal of the day on DriveThruFiction is fast and cheap. Each time I did that, I also jumped back into the top 15 publishers.
I know that I could:
- Release more titles, and each new title would promote sales of existing titles, AND the more titles I have, the more titles are available to be bought.
- Focus new titles into a single genre which would help be concentrate my exposure in a tighter space, which will increase sales.
- Produce a new book every two weeks without impacting my regular writing
- Have the resources to run a deal of the day every week, which would also become easier to do with a more extensive catalog of titles to pick from.
So, regarding literary translations of public domain classics, I now have a plan. The flaw in the plan is that I have made exactly zero sales of these titles on Amazon. This is not a problem, as the project was about trying to become top 15 on DriveThruFiction.
Flash Fiction
The classics were one experiment. I cannot make solo roleplaying supplements forever because there are not enough games with open licenses and big enough audiences to keep writing books for, and the solo RPG niche is already well served.
It was interesting that the classics do not sell on Amazon. So, logically, what does sell on Amazon is new fiction. The chances of me deciding to bash out a novel in a couple of weeks is close to zero. The two-week cycle is important for Amazon. Their algorithm is set up to judge a title’s popularity over a two-week period. If you get a new release spike and then tail off to zero, then you are likely to disappear into obscurity. If on the other hand you release something new toward the end of that two-week period and that drives a few sales of your previous title, and then repeat two weeks later and drives a few sales of the last two titles, and so on, what Amazon sees is a new release spike and then ongoing regular sales. They want to promote books that sell, so you will be promoted above those titles that don’t get those small bumps in sales.
So that is the problem to solve. How to get titles that can be turned around fast enough to hit that schedule without it taking over my life.
I still want to write for solo games; I have a Patreon where people can request rules and tools for the games that they play. We have a croft (a small Scottish farm), and that takes up time. I am working with a mentor to learn beekeeping, and next spring, I want to start my own apiary. Between the bees, our dogs, the horses, and a small craft wool sheep flock, the next project needs to be time-efficient and fit into my lifestyle.
The solution to this puzzle appears to be flash fiction, or more accurately, a flash fiction collection.
Flash fiction sells in two formats. Other people collect and publish collections, where one can submit pieces and hope they are accepted. This is good in that it will give an indication of how ones writing is improving if to start with everything gets rejected, which is what I would expect, but as the writing improves then some should get accepted. This then gets you exposure to the publisher’s audience, rather than your own fledgling following. You can literally get going with this, having just written 500 words. Write something and then start sending it out to anyone you can find who publishes collections of flash fiction.
One could also find collections of flash fiction, see what genres they focus on, and write to fit the audience. The biggest barrier is that the curators of these collections are being inundated by low-quality AI stories. You will have to cut through quite a large noise-to-signal ratio.
The second way to sell flash fiction is to write enough to build your own collections. My initial research suggests that one needs around 50 pages of content to call it a collection, and you can sell that for $0.99 as a kindle book, epub, or PDF.
This table shows some of the best-selling sci-fi/cyberpunk flash fiction titles, how many pages they are, the selling price, and the earnings per page (by simple division). The goal here was to get a snapshot of what a flash fiction collection looks like.
My conclusion was that 50+ pages of content was about the minimum that customers are looking for. I think I can do that. What would that be, 30-ish stories?
Most people can write 500 words a day. It may take a while to form the habit, but most people will be able to do that. I can typically output 2500 to 3000 of finished edited words in a day. The writing isn’t the hard bit. The difficult bit will be coming up with the concept of the story, the characters, the scenes, and making it into a decent story.
I am not a fiction writer, yet. That is going to be a whole new skillset to develop.
What I need to aim for is something like 300 words per page, times 50 pages, or about 15k words of finished text. Write the books in 5 days, plus layout and publishing. That is the final destination.
What I will do first is start to write pieces of fiction, and start to stockpile them. That means that there is no pressure or deadline. If I can get several books worth of flash fiction written, and at the same time start to improve my fiction writing and story craft, when it comes to the layout and publishing I can pick a mix of stories that will give a greater variety for the reader.
In my head, which is where everything is easy, I would like to put out six such collections over a twelve week period, and then evaluate how that has translated into continuing organic sales that are not driven by my own marketing.
It could well be that my classics are the right solution for DriveThruFiction and Lulu, and original fiction for Amazon. We will see.
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