Short stories: one at a time or as a collection?

I'd do both. Ninety-nine cents each and then combine them into a collection for another price (to receive the 70% royalty it will need to be priced at $2.99 or more). Once you have the works formatted, it takes only a bit more time to bundle them all together in one collection, and vice versa. No matter how you do it, the work will need to be formatted, so I say format it once, use it in as many ways as you can.

Do both. Price individuals at .99 and the collection at 2.99-4.99 depending on how many stories are in the collection.

Keep your expenses low. Short stories and collections in general don't typically sell so great. It's lunch money for most.

This is what I'm doing. I have a short story up and a novella. I focus on promoting my novella but I think eventually I'll see the short stories (I'm hoping to put up a few more) will see a bit of trickle-down. Hopefully.

I have only done five short stories as singles, (I also have two individual novella's up) so I couldn't really say how collections do. Honestly, the stories I have up differ from each other to the point I don't see them working as a collection. I would price a collection slightly under the cost of all the stories individually, that way buying them in a bundle at a higher price is a deal and should promote sales. But that's all theory on my part, I haven't tested it yet...

I've yet to buy a single short story at 99-cents. Maybe if it was written by one of my favorite authors but, even then, it seems pricey.

On the other hand, I have bought collections of short stories for $2.99 but they contained multiple short stories.

I e-self-published a short story back in February, mainly to learn the steps involved. At $0.99, it's sold 9 whole copies. I'm getting ready to eSP another one in January, and have another couple in the early planning stages. I suspect that once I get six or seven of them individually published, I'll offer them as a collection.

NDG

I've yet to buy a single short story at 99-cents. Maybe if it was written by one of my favorite authors but, even then, it seems pricey.

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Not trying to start a fight but I have to disagree here. What else can you buy for .99? A soda, a candy bar, maybe a little snack pack of chips or crackers. My consumption of any of the above mentioned items takes less time and provides less enjoyment than a single well-written short story. I agree, .99 for a poorly written short story would leave me feeling cheated, but so did the .99 candybar that didn't have any caramel in it...

uscgbyron said:

Not trying to start a fight but I have to disagree here. What else can you buy for .99? A soda, a candy bar,

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...any of a number of novels on the exact same platform as the short stories. A collection of short stories on the exact same platform as the single short story. Several different iterations of the complete Brothers Grimm. All sort of stuff.

I SPed four shorts/novellas and priced them at 0.99 before publishing an 8-story collection (both ebook at 5.99 and print at 14.95). I didn't expect the shorts to sell many copies and I didn't wasn't disappointed. But having them out there lets me do some creative things with promoting and offers multiple options for readers. Through Kindle Prime, I can now promote the shorts for 5 days each for free, offering readers a chance to read my work and decide if they want to shell out for the collection.

The only caveat is that it takes just as long to make a cover for a short as for a longer work (even longer for print), but anyone visiting my website or author page will see that I have several books published. I think that helps a reader have confidence that I'm a writer who's serious about my craft.

I talk a little more about my strategy here:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=232161

JWNelson said:

...is it better to submit one-at-a-time or as a collection? And, offer them for free (one-at-a-time or collection) or ninety-nine cents? Thanks for any advice!

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I don't know which is better, but I do know that the download appetite has been vastly greater for my free short story, with its crummy cover, than it has been for the 99-cent ones, and the download appetite for the 99-cent stories has been greater than for the $2.99 short story collection (of which two, yes, an impressive two, have sold, spiffy cover and all).

How many words do you think each short story should have to be sold for $0.99? 5,000 words or less?

The short story I eSP-ed was only 1850 words, if I remember correctly. Two reviewers thought it was kind of short to be called a short story. The one I just finished, which I'll eSP next month, is about 2300 words.

Would you not make more money one at a time for .99 than for a collection? Also, any time something is for free, people will take it first. So the question is, do you want to just build a reader base or do you want to make a little money as you build? Depends on what you want.

Silver-Midnight said:

How many words do you think each short story should have to be sold for $0.99? 5,000 words or less?

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There is no hard and fast rule as this often depends on genre, your brand and other subjective factors. I write spec fic, particularly horror, and my rule of thumb is generall ~99 cents per 10,000 words. I have three ~10K shorts up for $0.99 each and a novella of ~20K words up for $1.99 (actually, Flawless is free here until 12/28). My ~88K word collection is strategically priced at $5.99, to offer readers a bargain relative to my shorts (two of which are included in the collection) and as a discount if they choose to buy the shorts first.

Hope this helps.

@ Kriven, that is fair enough. However, I think we're talking cross purposes here. My point was that a short story is more than capable of holding the intrinsic value of $.99.

Saul Tanpepper said:

There is no hard and fast rule as this often depends on genre, your brand and other subjective factors. I write spec fic, particularly horror, and my rule of thumb is generall ~99 cents per 10,000 words. I have three ~10K shorts up for $0.99 each and a novella of ~20K words up for $1.99 (actually, Flawless is free here until 12/28). My ~88K word collection is strategically priced at $5.99, to offer readers a bargain relative to my shorts (two of which are included in the collection) and as a discount if they choose to buy the shorts first.

Hope this helps.

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Thank you.

I don't think I'd ever buy a short story (in my mind, a piece in the realm of 3-5K words) for 99 cents. Thus, I've put out a bundle of three short stories for that price, and have also put up a novella (over 20K words) for the same price. I've seen people (and have friends who have done it) price single stories for that price, and they do sell from time to time, but I can't imagine that many people outside of your direct circle of influence would pay that unless you were a household name. Just my two cents...

JW, $.99 cents is the lowest price you can set for an e-book published through Amazon KDP.

I charge 99 cents for a short story because that's what e-publishers charge for a short story. I charge 2.99 for a novella (>20K) because that's what every epub that I know of charges for a novella.

I'm nobody from nowhere, and my trade published short (4K words) sells 5-10 copies a month. One of my self-pubbed shorts (7K) sells two a month. My latest short (3800 words), for which I have done no promotion, has only been up for a week but sold twenty copies across all the stores where it's available.

When I say no promotion, I mean it. I haven't gotten around to changing my sig here, or tweeting it, or anything. (I didn't catch a stupid mistake and I wanted to fix it before I exposed it to the AW crowd. Then things got busy at work.)

In other words - I think it's pure luck and you might as well put up all your shorts for 99 cents. Some money is better than no money. But I can see why people might not bother.

The math: You get 35 (35% royalty) cents for your one dollar story on Amazon. You get 2.10 (70%) for your three dollar story/collection.

Yes, you have to sell six short stories priced at 99 cents to make the same money you make on one sale of a collection.

Why bother? Why not? 99 cents is an impulse buy. Someone who's never heard of me might be willing to try a short story if they can do it cheaply. I have to do the formatting anyway for the collection I'm planning. Might as well have the shorts out there earning me a little pocket change while I'm writing the rest of the stories.

Side note: The fact that entire novels are also available for 99 cents is really not relevant - I mean, I don't go to a nice restaurant and say, "OMG, 12 bucks for what is basically a burger!? Screw you, I'm going to McDonald's and buying three burgers AND fries!!"

I'm not saying I'm a gourmet restaurant, but I am certainly a nice little sidewalk cafe with cute curtains.

astonwest said:

I don't think I'd ever buy a short story (in my mind, a piece in the realm of 3-5K words) for 99 cents. Thus, I've put out a bundle of three short stories for that price, and have also put up a novella (over 20K words) for the same price. I've seen people (and have friends who have done it) price single stories for that price, and they do sell from time to time, but I can't imagine that many people outside of your direct circle of influence would pay that unless you were a household name. Just my two cents...

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There are certainly people like you. But there are people who have no problem paying 99 cents for a 3-5K word story. And then there are people who aren't going to buy short stories at all, and they're probably the most common judging by novel sales vs short story and collection sales even at varying prices. But the "bet" you are placing as that with 1/3 of the product space (your 1 collection/cover/blurb/metadata vs uploading 3x as much of that stuff by uploading separate stories) you can lure in 3x as many readers based on pricing that falls into the impulse buy range anyway. I'm not sure that's a good bet. I think the wisest course is all the stories individually at 99 cents and then a collection of however much content you feel brings enough value to the ~$3-5 price range to be a bargain in comparison.