Self-Publishing “1000 Words” – The Carrier

An update on my “1000 Words” project.

For Snow Witch, once the free trial wore off, there were no more downloads of this story (except the one I bought as a gift for my fiance). As such, I’m currently looking at two possibilities: see if sales increase once other short stories are available for free, or make it free as well, and only make the actual, final anthology cost money. (I’m thinking $2.99 sounds like a decent price). Right now I’m waiting to hear back from Amazon/Kindle as to whether there is a way to make it free on Kindle, or if I should simply remove the story so I can make it free on Smashwords.

Either way, I plan to hold off on publishing any of the other short stories on Kindle until the full anthology is complete.

This is largely due to time. It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized that our final project is due on April 27th, the last day of regular classes before finals. Figure in two weeks for printing shipping a book, and that means I need to have completed the book by April 14th… a week from now. On the bright side, I guess I could do expedited shipping.

While I originally planned to do a large photobook version of “1000 Words” to showcase the completed book covers and stories, I’m starting to think that working with just the trade paperback version might be the best option.

Today I self-published the short story, The Carrier on Smashwords. Formatting was much smoother after having already done the formatting for Snow Witch. The one downside to running out of time to complete these stories, however, is not having as much time to find a proofreader. As such, I did extra proof reading of the story myself, and did it over a span of several weeks.

Once all the stories are completed, I do hope to find another proofreader for the whole anthology, or to look over it again myself, to try to catch anything I missed during this initial phase.

The benefit to going ahead and publishing it, though, is that it gives me the feeling that I must move on to the next story, regardless of if there might be more tweaks to be made. But if I were doing this for future projects, especially if it were a novel, I’d definitely want to find beta readers before it went live.

At the time of typing, The Carrier has had nine downloads, and no reviews (neither has Snow Witch). I just hope it is enjoyable. 🙂

Anyways, the statistics of the project is as follows:

2 Stories completed.

5 Stories written but not edited.

3 Stories still need to be written.

4 Book Covers completed.

2 Book Covers near completion.

4 Book Covers still need to be designed.

Snow Witch: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/139780

The Carrier: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/149719