GET PUBLISHED!!! Our schedule and how we do things

By now you've probably seen our ads offering percentage pay for writers submitting short stories to be published in our collections, and if you're reading this, they've at least piqued your interest.

If that's the case it means that you've considered writing professionally. Ask any writer though, and they'll tell you if you can do anything else, you should. The reason for that is how impossibly difficult it can seem to break out, and the borderline insane dedication it requires to make that happen.

86% of all books fail and 95% of all fiction writers never make any money. Even those who do happen to procure an advance from a publishing house only do so after showing how they'll use that money to advertise. Advances are NOT your money, and often must be paid back.

There's nothing more crushing to your dream than putting your soul into 60-100,000 words and years of your life into a manuscript, actually getting it published, only to end up spending more money advertising it than you make back in sales. And yet, that's exactly what what happens to the majority of us.

Does that mean you should pack it in and give up? NEVER!
It just means you have to change your approach.

It's a proven fact that people don't buy your books, they buy your name. Even Stephen King had a hard time selling under the name Richard Bachman until people found out Bachman was Stephen King. You have to get people to know who you are BEFORE your novel hits the stands. King sold short stories to magazines.

Take a moment to think about what's popular out there right now. AMC and HBO have HUGE hits and followings with shows like The Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and so on. FX has American Horror Story and Sons of Anarchy; Showtime Shameless....

Comic book movies, while once taboo, are enormously successful to the point where it's become not only accepted, but mainstream. And what is a single episode of television or issue of Detective but a one-shot, short story that's part of a larger series using characters we love to create vast worlds?

Rather than pour everything you've got into the crap shoot that is novel writing, wouldn't it be more constructive to develop your characters and skill in small monthly installments, all while practicing your marketing techniques and building your fan base?

It's important to keep in mind that some of the giants in story telling made their mark in just this way. Charles Dickens is remembered for great novels, but those novels were originally printed as shorts in monthly publications, just as we're proposing to you now. Dickens was able to use fan feedback to change direction and mold his tales into something memorable.

The first modern detective story was "Murders in the Rue Morgue", a short story with two sequels that later became the basis for Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes tales themselves were short stories, as were the radio serials and comic strips that launched other iconic characters such as The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon. No Flash Gordon, no Star Wars.

What we're proposing here is a proven method that allows you to freely try new techniques while simultaneously getting new fans through cross promotion, and using the feedback from those fans to help your characters and worlds grow.

You don't even have to write a full story to pull it off, Pulp Fiction was a bunch of disjointed, bad ass scenes. Let's face it, if you can't put down one bad ass scene a month then you probably shouldn't be doing this, should you?

Now that we've gotten the pitch out of the way, let me explain how it all works. Throughout this post you'll have seen several sample covers with an example of the type of tales that we're looking for for each. These are the books we're looking to produce in the coming eighteen months, though we're always open to suggestions. The purpose of the themes is to focus your creative energy.

We publish the book for Kindle and set the price at $0.99, of which you get 2% per sale for each of your stories that we select. Upon release, you market your work. Sell yourself. No one but yourself. Sell to your friends, go on podcasts and radio shows, practice all the techniques it takes to get the word out for when you DO drop that novel. While you're doing that, each author in the collection will be doing the same, bringing THEIR audience to YOUR work by doing nothing but selling themselves.

Payments come in $10 increments, meaning 500 copies would have to be sold for every ten bucks you get, but the money isn't the point, it's getting as many people to read your work as possible. You just have a chance to get some money out it. Due to the prohibitive costs, we wait until 5,000 copies of the eBook are sold before going to the print version, which will be available to contributors at cost.

Now, before you scoff at that 2%, here's the part that makes it enticing for you. The average royalty for a novel is 6%. At $7 per book that's $0.42 per sale. Even at the low end, 60,000 words for a novel, that equates to 20 entries our way, which comes to $0.40 for the same amount of work, except that you'll have been marketing your work for 20 months, with a number of other authors SELLING FOR YOU, in the time it would take to put that novel out.

And it doesn't stop there. This is the best part. Once you've written 10 stories or bad ass scenes of your own we release an "annual" comprised of just your work using stories you've already written and set the price at $2.99, of which you get 40%, or $1.20 per sale. Hell, hold back scenes that connect the dots so fans HAVE to buy the annual if they want the whole story.

We create multiple streams of income, multiple avenues for finding new fans, all while providing quality entertainment to those fans at a low, low price. And all you have to do is the minimum amount of what you SHOULD be doing if you want to write for a living. Build up your fans and bounce so we can help bring along more talent. It's a win-win for everyone involved.

All it takes is one short story a month.

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