A Little Experiment

Hey everyone! Mary here, just back from Awesome Con and already packing for Origins (oof, back-to-back cons are always rough for me...). My brain isn't in the right place to write anything thoughtful, so I'm just gonna tell y'all about a little con experiment I've been trying.

At this point in my writing life, I've been in quite a few anthologies. As I wrote about previously, I like to use these anthos as a low-commitment way to experiment with new genres. I've also gotten to a point where it's no longer feasible to tote all these anthologies around to conventions, mostly because, sadly, not every Mary has a bottomless carpetbag. 

So back in January, after exhibiting at MAGFest, I got the idea to reprint some of my older stories, whose rights had reverted, as standalone baby books. I'd previously printed a short story of mine, "The Adventure of the Silicon Beeches," as a baby book because the anthology it was meant to be a part of never came together, and I'd noticed it tended to randomly sell itself at cons. As in, I'd have it on the table, but I wouldn't really pitch it, and some people would scoop it up anyway because it seemed fun and low commitment (I was originally selling it for $5 a pop; I've since had to bump that up thanks to inflation).

I originally wanted to print these stories literally as pamphlets, hoping to keep 'em cheap, but all the printing companies I looked at required minimum orders of a few hundred for the per-unit cost to make sense. I only wanted to print, like, 20 of each at a time, so back to Amazon KDP it was.

I did the covers and formatting myself, thanks to Canva and Microsoft Word (it helped that I already had a template from "Silicon Beeches), so the total cost of producing these baby books was maybe $2 each for the stock art on the covers. Chucked 'em onto Amazon and voila! "The False Nightingale," "The Last Gunslinger," "The Messenger," and "Haven," all originally published in themed anthologies (Magic at Midnight, Thrilling Adventure Yarns, Keep Faith, and Pangaea III) now stand by themselves.

Okay, so there was a middle step before voila. I disclosed on the copyright pages that these stories had originally been parts of anthologies, and either because of that or because of some algorithm, the Mighty 'Zon requested paperwork proving that the rights had been reverted. I suppose that's kinda encouraging? Make sure y'all have contracts, folks!

I took said baby books, each between 50-100 pages long, to Awesome Con and stuck 'em on the end of the table. Again, I didn't really pitch them, just said "here are short reads for if you're looking for something quick." And they did surprisingly well! The con overall was pretty much a dud for sales (might've been the placement of my table, since there wasn't even much foot traffic), but the "littles," as I've taken to calling them (thanks to Paige Daniels, who's reprinting some of her short stories as well), over performed considering I didn't even know how to talk about them other than "here, they're short." People tended to just pick them up, read the back, and buy them if it appealed to them, no hemming and hawing with the usual "do I have enough space for this" or "but I've spent so much money already."

So I guess the conclusion I can draw is that little, cheap, low commitment short stories lend themselves well to impulse buys. And it's a nice way to add more options to the table in a year where I've fallen way behind on my novels...