I've mentioned before, years and years ago I had the idea that writers should be able to sell directly to their readers. After all, we write these stories, we print them, and we always hand them out to a small handful of people for their feedback. For free. So what's the stop us from doing that with everything? We write it, we print it, we distribute it directly to readers. Hopefully for a fee because while free is nice for the reader, the mortgage company isn't so fond of it. And back when I was having these thoughts, I'd already had several years experience publishing my own DIY chapbooks, so I knew it would be nothing at all to publish my short stories as standalone single-story chapbooks. I even had the pricing worked out, $0.10/printed chapbook page. I mean, it basically cost me nothing to make a chapbook, so anything I made would be profit. But you're not gonna build an empire on handmade chapbooks.
And now in 2012, the technology and the business end of things have both caught up enough that this actually IS a feasible idea AND is becoming more acceptable as a business practice within the writing community. Thanks to CreateSpace.com, authors can print their own stand-alone short story chapbooks. The cost isn't quite as flexible as I'd like to see it, but that's understandable; CS has costs, too. But we can still price them pretty low.
So over the past few weeks I've been experimenting with this idea and have taken the first six ebooks on my ebook page and made them into chapbooks. That's five stand-alone stories (with free bonus back-up stories) for $4.99 each , plus the collected edition, FIVE FATES, for $5.99. And they look AWESOME:
The trim size of each is 5X8, with an average page count of about 30 pages. Laid out, they look like this:
The back of "The Son of Man", which you can get FREE for your Kindle at Amazon.com
(http://www.amazon.com/The-Son-of-Man-eb ... 36&sr=1-12).
The whole collection, next to a Coke can for reference.
The bundle:
I love these things and am psyched for the possibilities they offer.
Naturally, every book is available for purchase on the ebook page at my site (http://www.cdennismoore.com/page11.php). I'm looking forward to doing more of these and will post them here when I have them available for purchase.
