My Theories About Series and Self-Publishing

An exiled soldier tries to wait out a winter in a fort beleaguered by fox-spirits and winter demons.

Happy New Year, one and all! I thought I’d start the New Year talking about what I’m working on at the moment, putting individual stories up on Amazon and Smashwords. Between publications and backlog, I’ve got about 200 to play with, so it’s a pretty big task, given that I’d like to have almost all of them up by the end of the month. But if I consider that some are flash, which I’ll put up individually on QuarterReads and release in a compendium, it becomes less daunting.

I’m getting faster at the process as I go, and I’m also refining it, which unfortunately means I need to go back over some of the earlier releases, just to make them all look the same as far as prettiness and completeness goes.

Would it be better to space releasing the stories out over the course of a year? Probably. But I’d like to get this all set up and done so I can move onto other things. I have enough stories that will be added over the course of the year as I write them or their rights become available that there will be plenty of additions as is.

What I’ve done with the stories is split them up into series. This is an easy enough task because I’ve got plenty of clusters of stories where characters or locations repeat, as with Twicefar Station, which is the backdrop for “Amid the Words of War,” “Kallakak’s Cousins,” and “On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go.” It’s also the same world as “TimeSnip,” whose main character appears in “On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go.”

Why I’m doing this:

This allows me to provide readers who like a particular story with a way to find similar ones. If they read “Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart,” for instance, and want to find other steampunk stories by me, they can look at the others in the Altered America series.
This lets me play with KDP in a meaningful way. If I make the first book Kindle only for at least the first year, I can use the Kindle Select promotional tools and get readers to sample a story by giving it to them free.

Here’s what I’ve got sorted of the series so far, with a description of each.

Altered America (steampunk)

Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart

Rappacini’s Crow

Closer Than You Think (near future SF)

All the Pretty Little Mermaids

Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable

Zeppelin Follies

English Muffin, Devotion on the Side

Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars

Therapy Buddha

Farther Than Tomorrow (slipstream & space opera)

Bus Ride to Mars

Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain

Grandmother

Elsewhen, Within, Elsewhen

Superlives (superheroes)

Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut

Acquainted with the Night

Tales of Tabat (secondary world fantasy)

Narrative of a Beast’s Life

How Dogs Came to the New Continent

Events at Fort Plentitude

Sugar

Love, Resurrected

In the Lesser Southern Isles

Twicefar Station (far future SF)

Kallakak’s Cousins

On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go

Amid the Words of War

I Come From the Dark Universe

Villa Encantada (urban fantasy/horror)

Eagle-haunted Lake Sammammish

Villa Encantada

Crowned with Antlers Comes the King

Women of Zalanthas (secondary world fantasy)

Aquila’s Ring

Mirabai the Twice-lived

Karaluvian Fale

The World Beside Us (urban fantasy/horror)

Jaco Tours

Magnificent Pigs

Heart in a Box

Can You Hear the Moon?

Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane

So far, after approximately a month of getting stuff up there, I’m seeing some small sales, but also a tiny uptick in my collections that could be due to something else entirely. (Self-publishing is such a mysterious process!) So over the course of the year, I’ll be tracking the results.