Author for Life - A Reminder

So, my 9-year-old daughter and I found some ancient history the other day. A stack of my old works. These range from when I was 10-years-old through 14-years-old. That’s early to mid 80’s folks. Some are close to disintegrating, but she has begun to read them - carefully. It’s kind of awesome listening to your kid read something you wrote.

Just as I was doubting myself, as I do, we pulled out the old briefcase from its storage place under her bed. It has travelled with me for many years from house to house, left wholly untouched. I've had it since I was a young man. It was in this worn leather briefcase we found many of my old sketches and - Holy S*%t - books! We excitedly pulled them out of the briefcase and I reviewed the dates. These weren't antiques by any stretch, but they were up to 37-years-old! Vintage? LOL. Maybe just to me.

This treasure chest of old books from my childhood instilled a sense of wonder in my daughter and nostalgia in me. But not just glassy-eyed nostalgia for the past, but rather hope for the future. My future. That I've been writing stories and physically creating books since I was ten offers tangible proof that I was meant to do this. Have I met my 10,000 hours doing what I love yet? God, I hope so!

Upon further investigation into the magical briefcase, aside from the books, we realize I have literally dozens of comic books with multiple superheroes and villains running through advanced storylines I created from age 12 to 17. I also wrote screenplays for my brothers and our friends, many of which were realized through my father's video camera and friend's surprising editing abilities. To say I've been creative my whole life is a truth I often forget during my 9-5 day job.  Perhaps my daughter will enjoy the comics as well. She loves graphic novels...

My Grandfather too was a writer, hopeful to emerge from his management role in an utterly unrelated industry. He was a playwright mostly. I'm told community theatres and churches worked with my grandfather to produce his plays. How fitting my books sat in his briefcase all these years. I think I'll look for his scripts next. Maybe they're in the briefcase...

Short Stories and Their Relevance in Today's Market

So I've been asking a few writing and publishing groups on LinkedIn about their opinion of the short story.  I wanted to research this subject before committing to a published anthology of my own shorts and flash fiction. This post will cover a few things my research has unearthed, and from it you can draw your own conclusions on the short story's relevance.

There was a time when newspapers published serials. The greats like Charles Dickens and Poe were fond of these. Money was to be made as well! Then magazines became the popular medium to carry the short story. Buying shorts to include into a genre specific magazine was a major draw for readers.
Both have seemingly lost their punch. But the short story lives on.

Websites like Wattpad carry millions of short stories and serials from authors hoping to be discovered. No one is getting paid for these, but paying sites do still exist. Besides, writing short stories are meant to bring in an audience rather than make you money right?

Wrong. The short story is an art form. It won the Nobel Prize last year for literature. It's not playing second fiddle to novels, and never has. In fact the short has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts recently. Even the film industry has been picking up shorts because a 500 page and up novel is much more difficult to write into a script than a 20-80 page story.

Fan fiction is a great way to enter the short story market too. I wrote a short concerning a character in my trilogy, The Judas Syndrome, which told the story as seen through her eyes after book three had ended. I wrote it in just twelve pages.

The problem with selling your short stories one by one via Amazon and Smashwords is that many self-published authors are selling their novels for $0.99, and the majority of readers look for deals. Multiple consumer studies in 2013 and 2014 confirmed that readers won't spend the money for a short versus a full-length. So your short story, though every bit as good, if not better than a novel, only offers 20 to 80 pages of literary bliss while the novel is 200 and up.

The fix? Put your shorts and flash fiction into a collection. An anthology. Find the stories that share a common theme or genre and sell them as a package deal. Now you're attracting the larger audience to your works.

My own collection will be available very soon, and will be found in both paperback and ebook formats, entitled: Waning Metaphorically. Follow this blog or find me on Facebook and Twitter, Goodreads, linkedIn and Google+