Blog - 15/10/12

Hey! So despite what I said last time I actually went on to finish the first paragraph short story competition entry. I finished the first draft of the full version and it came out at over eight thousand words. Saving the improvements for later I went about chopping the story down to meet the competition deadline’s three thousand words. I still don’t know how I did it, but I’m happy with the end result and it’s been entered now for judging. The results will be announced in February next year so I can guarantee you’ll have some new material to read, whether it be successful or not. So wish me luck! If you believe in that kind of thing...

I have decided on a path for my writing in terms of the short stories. My plan is to write the full version and then create a shorter competition version to send off for entry, but this you already know. The next step will be to await the results, as you can guess. Bu then my plan is to wait six months after the competition version of the story has been posted on my site before making the full version available as a purchasable PDF file. It won’t cost much, something like 50p each, but it would be nice to have tangible evidence that people want to read my writing. The idea is that hopefully the competition version that is free to read on my site will whet the appetite for the full story. In terms of practicality I’ll set up a Paypal purchasing thing and then send the PDF in an email. I’m aware that e-readers such as the Kindle support PDFs even if they’re not e-reader specific and I’ll make every effort ensure that the PDFs are correctly adapted for the best quality (even if I don’t yet have one myself, I plan to nag a friend) and obviously you don’t need an e-reader to read a PDF!

Now for an idea I’m going to throw about. For the full version of the stories I’d like to have a picture on the first page to act as a cover image. Sadly I’m not the most artistic person myself. What I’m proposing is some type of competition with a paid speculative prize. My plan is to open the floor to artists to design the cover image themselves, based on the competition version of the story available on the site. I’ll give them five months to make their entry and choose my favourite to use as the official cover image for the story. No entry fees, but the one I choose will be entirely my decision so be aware I might not see the entries with perfect artistic vision. What I will try and arrange is that the winner will get a cut of any profit I make on the story. Pure speculation, but my first idea is that the artist would get 5% for every 100% I make, up to a maximum point where the artist would make no more from the sales.

For example, if I were to charge 50p for the story: I sell 20 copies, earning a total of £10. I would keep £9.50 and the artist would earn 50p. I would pay the artist 50p via Paypal, up to the point their total earnings reaches £100. Maybe I pay every time the artist makes, for example, £1, up to the point £100 is reached, and then any sales I get after that I would pay the artist nothing. In the current example I would have to sell 4000 copies before their total payment is reached, which for a little known writer is unlikely, so it’d be a nice little earner on the side for the winning artist. In retrospect that sounds a little stingy, so maybe closer to 15%. I don’t know, it’s all speculation but what are people’s thoughts on the idea? As an artist would you be interested? Let me know. Of course it’d also help us both in that if the artist wants to make their money it wouldn’t hurt for them to promote the story... hehe. Maybe I could put all the other entries up in a gallery on my Facebook page too?

In other news I’ve been working on a spur of the moment Flash Fiction, the best way I’ve found for this tight format so far. I know I said I’d talk about TfTT but I’m out of space, and the current piece that I’ve been writing has gone way over what I expected, so no surprises there! Seriously it’d be great to have feedback on the proposed PDFs and artist competition idea so get at me in the comments or tweet me! Until next time, buh-bye!

 

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