life after KDP ;-)

It depends. You can't submit it to magazines which are only interested in stories which are unpublished but others might consider it.

Have you thought about the reasons WHY it didn't sell?

What's the price?
Is it in the right sub genre?
What tags has it got?
Is it easy for the reader to find?
Does it have a good cover?
Does it have a good description?

I would have a look at those things and see if you can find the reasons why it didn't sell, rather than just write it off.

I've had success promoting one of my two KDP books as "free to Prime members." Have gotten quite a few borrows, although who knows how much $$ that will translate into. But perhaps that's a promotion route you can go, since you're locked in for 90 days. I don't think you can do anything else with it for that period once you put it into KDP.

goldmund said:

What a cruel price to pay for some innocent daydreams.

If nobody bought it, I cannot see what harm would such an aborted self-pub make to the publisher, but law is law, isn't it.

KDP seems to work like a magical catch leprosy button.

Click to expand...

It's the price you pay for not doing your research properly, I'm afraid.

But it isn't the law: much depends on the preferences of the publications you submit your work to. If you didn't make a single sale then you could send it out as unpublished but if it's still listed in the Kindle shop (print books remain on Amazon even after they go out of print, but e-books might be different) you could get found out. It's up to you to decide if that risk is worth taking: I wouldn't do it, though.

And don't forget, you can always write something else.

shaldna said:

Have you thought about the reasons WHY it didn't sell?

What's the price?
Is it in the right sub genre?
What tags has it got?
Is it easy for the reader to find?
Does it have a good cover?
Does it have a good description?

I would have a look at those things and see if you can find the reasons why it didn't sell, rather than just write it off.

Click to expand...

This. Self-promo can help in some cases, but a lack of it is not necessarily the cause of poor sales.

Also, how long was it for sale? "Normal" is months to ramp up sales.

And further also, it's just one story. We'll assume that means short story. Typical sales are 0-5 copies of a short story per month, and some are 0 for many months straight so you tend to need a decent inventory of short stories available.

Putting up a single short story and expecting more is undue expectations on the part of the writer/publisher.

The same can be said of the more traditional short story publication. It's like writing one story, and sending it to one venue and expecting it to sell. That's not a reasonable expectation.

The typical writer will need to write dozens of stories and make multiple submissions of each before getting a sale. (My ratio is actually above average for a nobody, selling about 1 in 10 but that means 100+ rejections for the 10+ published stories factoring in a few acceptances that never saw print. Many authors collect 100 rejections before they sell anything.)

So the traditional method of selling short stories isn't typically any easier or faster than self-publishing.

Wow, that's a long aside.

Publication does not equal sales. So it's been "published". However, you'd probably never have an issue with sort of forgetting it ever happened first because odds are the story won't sell traditionally anyway and further if you get lucky and sell it odds are the publisher will never find out it was previously published if there were no sales and no remaining trace that it was ever previously available (like copies sent to review sites, etc.) But I wouldn't recommend trying to sneak it through the system. I'd write another story and submit that to traditional publishers and republish the current one on KDP (if you're still satisfied that the story itself and the packaging--cover, blurb, etc--are good.)

I think both covers are actually quite nice. Since you took them down it's not possible to take a quick look at the rest of the presentation.

I agree about selling to magazines first for short fiction. I'm primarily using KDP to reprint stories I've previously sold (though I'm going to experiment otherwise this year.)

I'm not sure either genre currently does all that well overall with short fiction on KDP. There's some literary activity but erotica, romance, thrillers, and SF/Fantasy seem to be where the numbers are in short fiction for now and as mentioned before, the numbers aren't generally that great there.

Good luck with it. Sometimes you just don't know. From the mouth of a Coen bros. character: "Accept the mystery."

If no one bought it, then I wouldn't even mention the Kindle publishing.
In a sense, it was never published and you're dealing with your own rights, not a battle over some other publisher's rights.
I honestly cannot believe that any editor would care in your case.

J. Tanner said:

I agree about selling to magazines first for short fiction. I'm primarily using KDP to reprint stories I've previously sold (though I'm going to experiment otherwise this year.). "

Click to expand...

This is what I have done as well. I put up two short stories that were previously published, one in a literary journal and the other both online and in a print anthology. I don't promote them other than links on my website. I've only sold about 30 copies since the end of October, but that's good enough for me since they have already been published.

happywritermom said:

This is what I have done as well. I put up two short stories that were previously published, one in a literary journal and the other both online and in a print anthology. I don't promote them other than links on my website. I've only sold about 30 copies since the end of October, but that's good enough for me since they have already been published.

Click to expand...

Well done. You're ahead of me in about the same time period with about the same amount of (non) promotion. Sounds like yours are both literary fiction. (Mine are predominantly contemporary dark fantasy/horror.)

If this concerns you about it being previously published, why not go back into the story and change it some. It would be the same story true, but it would not be the same story you had on KDP.

your second cover actually looks really interesting and it might have been a book I'd consider reading (I don't have a kindle... just a nook).

I don't think you can put a book up and expect it to sell, you have to promote, promote, promote... like if I had seen that book somewhere (the tag line intregued me) then I would have probably bought it (if it was 1.99 or less).

I don't know what I'd do about the previously published thing. That's rough

Regarding your covers, unascribed quotes are a turn-off to me.

Check American book covers; you don't see them much. You'll instead see a reviewer's name under a blurb, or the text will be clearly a tagline. One or the other. Having quotes without attributing them to any writer portends some bad things. It looks a little "tricky."

I would get those quotation marks outta there.

I really like your second cover, otherwise. The first is a little too "elementary photoshop."

Re the rest of what your posts address, my understanding is that it a fiction writer's catalog that sells, not his individual work, unless it is exceptional novel. A short story or two doesn't fit into either criteria -- it doesn't have the impact and authoritative declaration of a writer's talent that an exceptional novel does, and it's not enough yet to comprise a catalog.

Sounds to me like you're in the building stages, and it will be a while before you could be expected to be in the "reaping the rewards" stage. No matter how good those short stories were.