short stories and the fix-up novel

Today I’m going to talk a bit about literary history and the business of self-publishing. Specifically, short stories, marketing funnels, fix-up novels, and Kindle Unlimited. Feel free to skip if the topic doesn’t interest you, or to ask questions if it does.

For the past three years, I’ve written a bonus short story to go along with each new novel, and I’ve then given those short stories away for free to subscribers of my new-release newsletter via Smashwords coupon code. This has worked out really well, though I’ve never been sure what to do with the short stories after the coupon expires. They just sort of sit there, and maybe sell 2-3 copies a month, but that’s it. Which is a good thing, but I write the short stories to help promote my books, and it would be useful if the short stories would help promote my books long after the last subscriber has opened the newsletter.

The problem is that the basic idea of book marketing is that you create a marketing “funnel” to draw readers to the books – making the first book in the series free, running occasional sales, and so on. The difficulty is that after the newsletter, the short stories don’t really fit into the funnel anywhere, and it’s hard to sell fiction without a marketing funnel.

I also had to decide what to do about Kindle Unlimited. Books in Kindle Unlimited have to be exclusive to Amazon, and I didn’t want to pull all my books from the other retailers. That said, Kindle Unlimited is also a big market, and I wanted to tap it. I wrote BLADE OF THE GHOSTS with the intention of giving it away for free to newsletter subscribers when CLOAK GAMES: REBEL FIST comes out and then putting it on KU early in 2016, but writing short novels just to put on Kindle Unlimited is a strategy I don’t have time to pursue in the long run. (Though BLADE OF THE GHOSTS did well enough that I might do another short prequel GHOSTS novel in 2016.)

Then I remembered something I had read about years ago – the “fix-up” novel.

A fix-up novel is a novel that originated as a chain of related short stories that were then fused together into a single book. A lot of writers have done that – Stephen King, Poul Anderson, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, Jack Vance, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and numerous others. I’ve done it, too – the first book of THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS was originally a string of short stories back in 2002.

I’ve written a lot of short stories, and they easily could combine into short novels which I could then put on Kindle Unlimited to extend my marketing funnel into KU. I could quickly make a fix-up novel out of the current THE GHOSTS and FROSTBORN short stories, and with a few more stories I could make another two out of the GHOST EXILE and the DEMONSOULED short stories. I could put these fix-up novels in Kindle Unlimited without removing any of my current novels from the other ebook retailers, essentially having my cake and eating it too. Over the long-term, I would write the bonus short stories with an eye towards eventually combining them into a short novel.

I think this would make for a worthwhile marketing experiment, so I will give it a try in 2016. After a few months I’ll report about the results.

-JM