Laurie’s Comments (group member since Feb 02, 2017)

Laurie’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

Joshua -
Sounds like a great idea! There's an author on FB who is promoting a similar thing.. the concept of 'buy an indie title and review it'.
I'm one-half of an indie press, and most of our publications are short story anthologies. I see you have a short story category... is this something we could submit to, as an indie press, or is it specifically for individual authors only.

Anna Faversham wrote: "Good to hear your response, Laurie, and a better set of terms."

Please note.. these aren't just our terms... they are the terms of MANY small presses. You do need to make sure that stories are being edited, there are some who do nothing more than collect the stories and format them, good, bad or otherwise .. and you don't want to be a part of that.
We're just now getting close to breaking even, but we would have been embarrassed to offer no compensation at all.
I wish alasdairshaw lots of luck, but I don't think he/she is being fair to authors.

wow... I'm part of a small indie press (Smoking Pen Press)... we've done a few short story anthologies and are gearing up to do another. We don't charge for submissions, all stories go through at least one level of editing, we pay for a professional cover... Yet I would never expect an author to submit 'just for exposure', especially when the editor talks about how many copies he sells. We don't pay much, but we pay.. and we're not the only ones. I encourage anyone out there to look further, and seek out places that either pay or offer a couple of comp. copies.

Marie -

I've got stories in all three of the Read on the Run series of short stories. The first in the series - A Step Outside of Normal - is permanently $.99. A posting would be terrific!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07115FNG7/ref

Ingram spark also distributes to Book Depository. The main reason why we put our titles on Book Depository is because they deliver to almost anywhere in the world for free. This way, when we do a Goodreads giveaway, we don't have to exclude places like South Africa (lots of English speaking readers) because of the $25 shipping cost. The $9.99 paperback is still $9.99 on BookDepository with free shipping. If the giveaway winner is in the US, we ship using media mail. If the winner is outside the US and Canada, we order from Book Depository and ship.directly to the winner.

For the next few days, A Bit of a Twist (short story anthology) is on sale for $.99.. https://www.amazon.com/Bit-Twist-Read...

I recently attended Boskone....one of the author/panelists was Walter Jon Williams. In addition to attending a couple of panels he was on, I also went to his Kaffeeklatsch. WJW had been published and had an agent for many (?30?) years.. when his agent died, and he found himself doing a lot of things on his own. Among other things, he found himself holding a large number of reverted rights for books that had been print, only... and he is self-pub'ing those, as ebooks.
With regard to advertising, he said the only one he's found to be worth the investment, is BookBub.... and he's always recouped his ad cost.
Sadly, as I explore the BookBub site, I realize that I don't know whether he meant the special deals, or the actual ads that appear at the bottom of the emails that subscribers get from BookBub. But it's something to consider.