I Get Emails, and Critical Voice
In Today's Journal
* Quote of the Day
* I Get Emails
* The Writing
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
"Critical mind has one job in fiction: to keep you from writing fiction." Me, to a friend on the east coast when his novel kept shutting down.
I Get Emails
A writer—I'll call her Sylvia, which might or might not be her actual name—emailed to ask my opinion about using WooCommerce and selling through your own WordPress website vs. using Payhip, Shopify, etc.
Of course, every writer and indie publisher is different, but no matter which way you choose to set up your own storefront, I recommend you continue offering your work through the giants in the room—Amazon, Apple, B&N, Kobo, Hoopla, et al—and to distribute through both Amazon and D2D. Because why not?
So here's what I told Sylvia:
I've heard good things about WooCommerce (nothing I can specifically cite) over the years, but it was too much of a learning curve for me, so I've never used it.
Amazon (and Apple, B&N, Kobo, et al) are the giants in the room. So they're the "first tier."
I see the second tier as Payhip and other storefront places. (DWS recommends Shopify, but they have too many bells and whistles for me.)
Those second-tier places are still much larger and better known than my personal WordPress site(s), although they're smaller than the giants.
So all of that's why I use Payhip.
The third tier is your personal website.
Note that I also don't have a 'mailing list' other than you guys and the subscribers to the Stanbrough Writes and Your Morning Serial Substacks. Mea culpa. I'd rather be writing than grooming a mailing list.
Not that there's anything at all wrong with having a mailing list. I just wish I'd started that 10 years ago. You beginners out there, Don't Be Me.
Well, frankly, you could do a lot worse than being me as a writer, but don't be me as a marketer.
Anyway, you can also integrate MailerLite (and other major email newsletter delivery services) with Payhip and, I imagine, with Shopify just as you can with WooCommerce.
Selling on your own WordPress site via WooCommerce, you still have the problem of driving traffic to your relatively tiny (in impact) site so readers can find your store.
On the up side, if you sell through your own WordPress site, nobody else gets a cut of your royalties (other that whatever the fees are for WooCommerce).
On a related topic, Sylvia didn't mention collections. (She has since alleviated my concern in that area, but I'll rattle on anyway.)
In the hierarchy of sales, individual short stories are the least sellers.
Here's the hierarchy of sales:
Novels/novellas in series
Omnibus collections of novels/novellas
One-off novels/novellas
Short story collections
Individual short stories
Like Sylvia, I also price my individual short stories at $2.99 to get Amazon's stupid 70% royalty, but I do that primarily to make the 3.99 (5-story collection) or $7.99 (10-story collection) price seems more amenable to buyers.
More on Amazon's Stupid Requirements for a 70% Royalty
Occasionally I put together a long work (omnibus, etc.) that requires a higher price than $9.99. Yet to get the Amazon 70% royalty, I have to price it between $2.99 and $9.99.
So for those longer works, priced at say $19.99 everywhere else, for Amazon I have to split them into two or three books and charge $9.99 for each book.
Reeeedamndiculous. But I digress.
Re collections, back in the early days, every time I wrote 10 short stories I had 13 publications 'out there' with my name on the cover:
the 10 short stories
two 5-story collections
one 10-story collection
I still recommend doing that if you're just starting out, especially if you create your own covers. You'll learn a ton and your inventory will grow a little faster.
That's why today I have almost 300 individual short stories as well as 17 5-story collections and 12 10-story collections.
These days I don't bother ("bother"=cover design, promo doc, etc.) with publishing individual short stories other than on my free Stanbrough Writes Substack. (This is NOT a recommendation. Publishing individual shorts AND collections is the best way to go.)
I haven't published any collections in a long while, but I expect to compile and publish several collections over the course of the rest of this year and 2026. I have around 200 short stories just lying around collecting dust when they should be earning me royalties in collections.
I also asked Sylvia to keep me apprised of her progress if she goes with WooCommerce and sells from her own WordPress site. If it goes well, I also hope she'll write a guest post for TNDJ to let everyone know more about that option.
Tomorrow, I'll be back with Affinity help for visual learners.
The Writing
is going a lot better than it looks, finally. I should've easily added at least 3000 or even 4000 words to the novel yesterday.
But I stupidly let myself get sucked into a lengthy back and forth with a writer I care about because I refused to bow and scrape at the feet of another writer who, in his nonfiction books, relentlessly preaches the myths as if they're gospel.
Of course, by preaching the myths, he keeps other writers locked into them and sells even more nonfiction books that preach the myths. See the circle?
The real downside is that the guy I got into the discussion with actually tried WITD around a year ago with a novel he was writing. I encouraged him at every turn, but he was one of my many epic failures.
Unfortunately, critical voice settled in and he stopped writing the novel. Yet even in the wake of that experience, now he's defending the myths via the old standby: "Hey, whatever works."
Of course he, like the multitude of others who utter that phrase, never defined "works." Sigh.
Sometimes I'm able to pull a writer from the muck and mire of the myths. Much more often, as in this case, I don't because they let go of the rope.
Of Interest
Amazon KDP just slashed [paper] print royalties Hmm... Maybe time to switch POD to Draft2Digital?
1-2-1 Marketing for Authors Nothing new, unless you haven't seen it before.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 1040
Writing of Blackwell Ops 46: Sam Granger | Still on the Ghost Trail
Day 1…… 1814 words. To date…… 1814
Day 2…… 2645 words. To date…… 4459
Day 3…… 1507 words. To date…… 5966
Fiction for June………………………. 3002
Fiction for 2025………………………. 493454
Nonfiction for June………………....... 15460
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 141610
2025 consumable words…………….. 628554
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 12
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 27
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 116
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 297
Short story collections……………………. 29
Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.
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Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.
Hope that writer finds the rope again when ready. Good to know about the Amazon pricing changes.