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Saturday, April 03, 2004

More on that digital content

Old Post: I told you I was working on a means to sell my short stories online below.

Doc Rampage kindly tested the system for me, and it looks like it works. Drop by the Doc's blog, by the way. He has an excellent post on The Passion and the Muslim world. As for Amazon, it's changed what it charges for the transactions, so I'll have to think about the pricing again. $1.25 was precisely calculated to give me $1 after Amazon took its cut; based on this, I had worked out a whole pricing scheme based on length. Of course, this is a moot point until I have some actual stories ready to sell, and then I should worry more about how much people might be willing to pay for them than how to round it to nice even amounts added to my banking account.

Tonight, I was writing Chapter 20 of The War of the Elementals (of which Fire was Part I, so think of it as Chapter 20 of Fire). This explains why I'm up at 3 AM. I like how it's turning out, but it's getting rather long for a single chapter, so I could end up splitting it. I've considered publishing the chapters serially (and selling them individually), but I tried that idea with Fire and eventually gave up. After I finished Chapter 5, I went over a year without putting anything up, then published 12 chapters, and a revised version of the first five, at once. I hadn't been writing any slower, I just felt that the section I was working on needed to be written as one piece to make it consistent and readable. Afterwards I was working on my thesis, and I didn't write much fiction during that academic year, but I wrote two short stories afterwards. One of them came out pretty well, and I may send it around a couple of print magazines to see if it can get published. The other one grew to be much longer than I intended, so I couldn't send it to any magazines without seriously gutting it. However, this very length might make it a good candidate to publish here. The problem is I'm still not sure of how well the story reads, and I won't be sure until it's been through a couple of revisions. If I'm happy with it then, I may make it the first story I officially sell over the Internet. If I'm not, I may post it for free. Then again, if I'm really unhappy with it, I'll bury it and you'll never hear from it again. Just as soon as I'm finished with Chapter 20 (or Chapters 20 and 21), I'll get to work on it.

Update: I really should know better than to post at 3 AM. There was nothing gramatically wrong with this post, but stylistically it was choppy and disjointed. Hopefully it reads better now.

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