Inside a writer’s mind: bidding war

The Pen Name Dilemma

An Experiment With A Pen Name

About six months ago, I decided to do an experiment using a pen name. I published something under a fictitious identity just to see if it would sell. I deliberately picked a name that sounded like it belonged in the horror genre, but I did nothing else to promote my new book except price it at the minimum on Amazon. I was curious to see what would happen. Would it sell any copies?

I hoped for a couple of sales in the first week because it was a new title – but that was all I expected it to sell. After all, how would it sell if nobody knew about it? Nearly everyone says authors need to promote their work hard on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to get their work NOTICED.

I was sure it would sell nothing without promotion – but I was wrong.

My new title sold 15 copies in the first week in the US. That was not bad compared with some of the titles I sell under my own name. 15 copies is more than one title has sold since it was published in 2011. It was enough sales to get it listed in the Top 100 in the horror category on Amazon. Appearing there helped it sell more copies. The ball was rolling.

Of course, based on my past experience, I expected the book to sell fewer copies in the following weeks until it eventually disappeared from the Top 100 and then vanished into obscurity – but sales did not fall. They increased month by month. A couple of positive reviews appeared – boosting sales higher. More copies sold. It continued selling steadily.

In December my pen name’s book remains in the Top 100 Kindle horror books. In the US his book currently ranks far higher than one under my own name in the same category. And in the UK his book was exactly one rank higher than mine the last time I checked, which felt weird. They were side-by-side on the same Amazon page, with his outselling mine. I could not believe it. He is more successful at selling his horror stories, though he does nothing at all to promote them. Only the name has changed.

My experiment proved to me a good pen name really does make a difference.

I won’t jinx my experiment by revealing my pen name – but I will tell you I now have a dilemma. I have some new horror stories ready for publishing – but I don’t know what to do with them. Which name should I use?

If you would like to take part in a poll that will effect my decision, or tell me about your own experience of using a pen name, you can use the space below. Thanks for taking part!

Ten Good Reasons For Using A Pen name

Ten Good Reasons For Using A Pen Name

1) Your real name is Max Steel – but you write romances.
2) Your real name is Beatrice P. Feathersoft – but you write extreme slasher fiction.
3) Your real name is a swearword in seventy languages.
4) You don’t want your mum finding out you write erotica.
5) You don’t want your spouse finding out you write about them behind their back – under the category “psychological horror”.
6) You don’t want everyone in the pub knowing you like writing science fiction and fantasy because they’ll called you “Sheldon” and mock you forever.
7) You don’t want everyone reading your new horror story believing you are a psycho.
8) You want to win a prestigious literary prize for your serious literary novel – but you also like writing about fairies and witches.
9) You write about fairies and witches – but don’t want anyone to know you also write serious literary fiction.
10) You published a novel under your real name and now get daily death threats.

I tried using a pen name – to find out what happened please click on this.

Inside a writer’s mind #63

Ten Things You Can Do With Short Stories

Short stories are strange little things.  They are easy to write – but not so easy to sell.  Unlike novels, which require a lot of time to finish, a short story can be written in a few hours and ready to submit within a week – but what do you do with them then?

Ten Things You Can Do With Short Stories

1. Submit them to professional paying magazines.  There are many paying markets out there for short stories, but this is a tough market.  It is a crowded field because so many people write short stories thinking they are easier to sell than novels, which is not necessary true.  Most high-circulation magazines use established writers to fill their editions, leaving only a few places per year for other writers.  Every magazine paying professional rates will receive hundreds of submissions per week.  Many editors keep stories for years before publishing them – so they are not desperate for submissions.  A buyer’s market.  Worth doing if you can afford the postage.  Difficulty rating 5/5.  Value 5/5.

2. Turn them into novels. A short story can be used as an outline for a novel if you think the story can be extended without losing its focus.  Difficulty rating 4/5.  Value 4/5.

3. Sell them yourself as ebooks.  Upload them to Amazon or Smashwords or another epublisher.  Do make the word count VERY clear to readers, though.  Anything under 10,000 words for 99 cents might make readers feel ripped off if you don’t state the length. Permanently free short stories are a good way of reaching readers, though the glut of free material available makes this harder and harder, since readers will no longer download something just because it is free.  Difficulty rating 1/5.  Value 2/5.

4. Collect enough material for a single-author collection/anthology.  A better way to give readers value for money than the single story.  Worth doing for stories you have already sold, providing you still have the digital copyright. Difficulty rating 2/5.  Value 4/5.

5. Use them as free samples of your writing on your blog/website.  This is easier to do than creating a free ebook. Warning: this might effect your chances of selling the short story later because publishers might consider your work as a reprint once published on-line. Difficulty rating 1/5.  Value 1-5/5 depending on the traffic generated.

6. Submit them to competitions.  Often easier to win than you might think!  Watch out for bogus competitions.  They often don’t have a real-world address or name the judges.  Make sure a competition has been established for some years.  Also make sure the requirements of the competition are fully satisfied.  Some entry fees are ridiculously high – often as higher than the prize money – so be careful.  Make sure the prize is worth winning!  Difficulty rating 3/5.  Value 5/5.

7. Submit them to anthologies.  It is a great way to have readers discover your short story if your story is included with the works of more established writers.  These are good paying markets, too – as long as the editor and publisher are trustworthy.  Watch out for people wanting to publish your material for free or paying royalties paid from the profits.  Some anthologies are more open to the works of newcomers than some magazines, with better rates.  Difficulty rating 4/5.  Value 5/5.

8. Stick them in a drawer and forget about them.  Not recommended!  Get them OUT THERE!  Difficulty rating 0/5.  Value 0/5.

9. Write them to learn how to be concise.  Short stories are an excellent tool for improving your writing craft. Flash fiction is even better.  If you can write a real story in a hundred words, writing a longer one is simple.  A short story forces you to cut anything unnecessary.  Difficulty rating 2/5.  Value 5/5.

10. Write them as a break from longer works.  Sometimes writing a short story can be cathartic, a way of resting your mind from doing something much more ambitious in length.  For a small investment in time, you can produce something without needing to commit yourself for months or years.  After it is done, you will feel ready to continue the longer project.  Difficulty rating 2/5. Value 5/5. 

Difficulty rating: 0 = no challenge / 5 = very hard

Value: 0 = no value / 5 = very valuable

One more thing you can do: keep writing them!

How To Format A Kindle Document?

How To Format A Kindle Document – A Quick Guide For Writers Like Me

A TOC is a Table of Contents – but I did not know that the first time I tried making a Kindle document. I didn’t know anything about it except for the information provided by Amazon at the KDP website. Amazon want you to produce professional Kindle books – but finding the information on their website is not as straight forward as reading a simple guide that explains everything in chronological order.

Instead, the information is all over the place – like treasure scattered in a dragon’s cave – requiring a lot of effort to work out how to find it. I made many mistakes learning how to make a Kindle document because the information I needed was not easily found.

Ten Things I wish I’d Known Before My First Attempt At Making A Kindle Book

1) Everything is much harder than it looks.
2) Your word processor is your greatest enemy.
3) You will have to learn a little bit of hypertext language.
4) Don’t publish anything unless you’ve checked it out on Preview – thoroughly.
5) Inserting a cover image into a document is harder than Quantum Mechanics.
6) Creating a Table of Contents is only easy if someone nice tells you how to do it in a simple step-by-step way.
7) Always check a document looks okay in an eReader before uploading it because it will always have something wrong with it.
8) Never use tabs.
9) Indenting paragraphs properly is so difficult nobody does it.
10) Everything Amazon tells you only works in Word.

The first time I tried publishing with KDP, I made an awful mess of the formatting. I use LibreOffice instead of Word because I’m on a tight budget. It is an excellent free word processor – but it does have some quirks that made things a little complicated. My document looked great in my word processor, but it transformed into gibberish after Kindle processing. It had no paragraph indentations because I used tabs to indent, the line-spacing was random, the font style was unreadable, my cover image did not appear inside the document, there was no Table of Contents, and the text justification was unjustifiable.

To get around those problems, I had to ask many people in the KDP community forum questions. I also had to search for the information in the various threads. I discovered most formatting questions had already been answered a thousand times because so many writers find using KDP not as simple as expected. The answers are usually simple – after you have them explained in normal English.

How To Format For Kindle in Normal English

Write your document without worrying about the format. (Worry about that once I have your final draft ready to upload.) You can format as you go – but it is often easier to fix afterwards.

When you have your final draft completed, save a copy of your work before doing anything to it. Work on the copy so don’t make any irreversible errors.
Start the formatting by pressing “Control” and “A” to grab the entire contents of your document.

Format the entire document to your own style preferences – text size, justification, font, line-spacing – but remember that it should have a line spacing of one and use a readable font such as Times New Roman. (This is not important for the Kindle document as the user will choose the font – but it will effect the “look inside” feature.)

Use the ruler function to make tab indentations. This will effect the entire document – including the first line of each paragraph – but that can be fixed later. (0.75cm is often used.)

Make a new folder for your document called “Kindle Book Title”

Save the document inside this folder in as a .htm file – not a .doc or .odt or whatever format your word processor usually uses. (This will strip out any complex formatting unique to your word processor, which is why it was not worth doing that in the first place.)

Open the new file booktitle.htm

Change the format of text in chapter headings. A font size above 20 won’t work – so keep chapter titles to that maximum size. Also insert bookmarks entitled “chapter 1” etc. (These will be useful later when creating the Table of Contents.) Add bookmarks called “TOC” for the Table of Contents and “Start” for the beginning of the story.
If you want the first paragraph of a chapter to have different indentation, like in a real book, go through the document looking for them. Use “backspace” to remove the first tab or apply a style with no text indentation. There are problems with doing that in LibreOffice – so I will come back to that later.

Justify paragraphs requiring “centre” now.

Save the document. (And make a copy in case the next bit goes wrong.)

Now add your Table of Contents after the title page.

Insert hyperlinks to the bookmarks you already created. These hyperlinks are inside the document, connected to the chapters. (I didn’t know you could do that until someone told me.)

To add a cover inside – insert a jpg file at the beginning of your document using the “insert file” menu. Ideal size is 1200 pixels by 1600 pixels, the size Amazon recommends.

Make sure this picture has no wrap. Also make sure it is centred and anchored to the page. Insert a page break after it.

Save the file again. This will save a copy of the .jpg under another name in the same folder as your document. If this does not appear, something has gone wrong. You could have inserted the picture into your document the wrong way via the “insert picture” instead of “insert file”.

This next part is the bit that is scary for people like me afraid of hypertext language. Skip it if you can find an easier way of making your first paragraphs have zero indentation or don’t care about it. Open a text editor such as Word Pad that displays your document without any formatting. You’ll see your document looks like a foreign language – but don’t panic. Look for any lines that have the following in them STYLE=”margin and STYLE=”text-ident: because these are the lines that change how your Kindle document appears. The Kindle doesn’t save paragraph information if the text-indentation is zero – so I have to fix that by using the search and replace function. By searching for STYLE=”margin and replacing it with STYLE=”text-indent: -0.0cm; margin the entire document will then have no indentations for the first paragraphs of each chapter, just like in a normal book.

Save the document in its original .htm format.

Breathe a sigh of relief.

Have some coffee and a break.

Treat yourself to some biscuits.

Now all (ALL?) you have to do it create a zip folder containing your document folder. Click on your folder and zip it. That zip can be uploaded to Amazon and you will hopefully have a nice Kindle book.

It does seems like a lot of effort for something supposedly simple, doesn’t it?

Inside A Writer’s Mind – The Review Process