Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I’ve sold a few short stories on Smashwords. I’m thrilled.

Back in February 2011, I declared that I was posting my short stories on Smashwords. To date, I have sold about $65 worth of stories. I am pleasantly surprised.

The key to selling as many stories as I have is the Smashwords Premium publishing program. To go into that, you have to format your entries in a specific manner and get an ISBN. Neither of these steps is difficult. There are templates that I copied to submit the proper MS Word format. Obtaining an ISBN is also easy through the Smashwords site.

Being a premium publisher means that the stories are available through Apple, Barnes and Noble, and others. About 90% of my sales have come through these non-Smashwords channels.

Note – I did not pay Smashwords a penny up front. Smashwords takes a little money from each of my 99-cent sales. Neither of us are becoming rich.

Also note – I wrote these short stories in 2008 as an exercise to see if I could write a short story every week for the year. I did. Hence, this $65 comes from something I did with no intention of making a penny.

I have a  few goals:

(1) Have a Hollywood producer discover one of my stories, make it into a movie, and I get a million dollars in royalties from the blockbuster.

(2) Sell a hundred thousand short stories every year ($60,000 or so in royalties) for the rest of my life.

(3) Have fun writing short story fiction.

I have already achieved goal number (3). The other two are a bit lofty, but a guy can dream.

For now,

I have started again writing short stories. I’m not on a one-per-week schedule. Some weeks I write three or four stories and other I am too busy with other things to write any.