The Kindle Short Reads Experiment Part One

I am so happy to announce that I have finally published a young adult short story on Amazon! The title is “Waiting for the Baby,” and you can find it here.

As stated in my blog post many months ago, I want to share the details of this short story journey to help you figure out if publishing short stories on Amazon might be a worthwhile endeavor for you. Since I just published it this weekend and am declaring today (Monday, April 27) my official release day, I don’t have any sales data for you yet. However, here is the breakdown of time and money spent thus far:

 

*I spent approximately 40 hours writing, revising, formatting, and publishing this story. “Publishing” includes all of the random details you have to fill out on Amazon (like book description, price, etc.); I will give more information about that topic in a later post. I’m not sure how many hours I put into writing each of my two self-published novels, but I can assure you it was A LOT more than 40 hours.

*My husband Mike spent approximately five hours designing the cover. It is far easier to design a cover for a title that is only an eBook than it is to design a paperback cover because you don’t have to create the spine or the back of the book when it’s an eBook.

*We spent approximately $40 on Shutterstock photos for the cover.

*I paid $1.49 to buy a copy of my own story to double-check that everything looked okay once it was published.

*I have not spent any money on marketing yet.

 

I fully intended to publish this short story sooner and announced to my newsletter subscribers in December that the release date would be January 28. As stated in a Facebook post in February, I apologize to all of you that I did not publish this story on time. I have been struggling to get in the habit of a good writing schedule (and to balance that with adequate sleep) since the birth of my baby last summer and have also felt somewhat lacking in creativity since then. I am going to be much more careful in the future when selecting release dates for books.

Big props go to my husband who read an early draft of “Waiting for the Baby” and helped me re-shape the plot because I was having a hard time with it. One of the benefits of releasing the story in January would have been to have a few weeks of sales data from the time period prior to the stay-at-home orders that so many of us are now under due to COVID-19. It will be interesting to see how sales go, considering that more people are at home now and may have time to read but also may be unemployed and not have money to spend on books. I will share my initial sales data in an upcoming post.