For my capstone honors college project, I elected to merge both my major and minor together. I’m a photography major with a creative writing minor, and for my photography I have a special interest in book cover design and photomanipulation.
Therefore, I decided to create a project consisting of ten short stories, each approximately 1000 words long, which would each be illustrated with a book cover. The title of the project, 1000 Words, comes from the phrase, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.”
While I will be creating a print, photobook version of all ten stories as the completion point, I realized I needed some sort of motivation to write, edit, and illustrate each individual short story.
Enter self-publishing.
I’ve long had an interest in self-publishing, but I also want to try the traditional route, and intend to start off trying traditional for my novels. Now, with the advent of ebooks, I want to try selling the short stories as a side project. Part of this is because I will be using my own first printing rights for the project, and the other part is to help me get a feel for the process and book cover design in order to aid future clients.
So I decided that I will create an e-version of each short story, and self-publish them as I complete them through Smashwords and Kindle. I’ll start off using Smashwords so that I can learn the formatting, then create a Kindle version afterwards.
I am currently planning to price each one at .99 cents, then once all of them are written, compile them into the final anthology called 1000 Words. I have not yet decided on its price, though I’m considering $2.99 and $3.99 at this point in time.
I honestly don’t expect to make any money off of this, especially since I have little in the way of marketing planned. I do intend to announce on my facebook page when I release a story, but seeing as how I have few followers on the business page, I’m not sure how effective that will be.
Also, I am hoping to offer a promotion of a couple day free downloading period (or give coupons to those who ask) for friends or people who might be interested in reviewing the short stories. I have considered leaving one story free once I get multiple stories uploaded.
In the meantime, my first short story slated to be published (hopefully by the end of this week), is “Snow Witch.” A young witch ventures outside of her town for the first time in hopes of transferring her brother’s illness to a willing creature.
I’m in the process of reviewing the short story (which I posted in AW’s Share Your Work forums) and I’m also currently editing the book cover to make it the best I can. 🙂
Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts. I’m hoping that sharing the process will be helpful to multiple people. 🙂
Stephanie Flint - Author and Artist 