short stories

Optimizing Fiction Workshop Submissions

July 16, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

For the purpose of this post I’m going to break all writing workshops into two groups. In the first group are workshops taken by writers who are learning craft. People in these workshops, whether students in a formal sense or like-minded individuals sharing a passion, are primarily interested in improving their writing skill. In the second group are workshops populated by seasoned writers who already have a solid understanding of craft. These workshops primarily help authors determine whether their fiction is functioning as intended.

To the extent that writers are always learning, and that all writers want their work to be successful, there is obviously some overlap between these two groups. Rather than argue any pure distinction, I will simply note that this post concerns writers who are primarily interested in learning the craft of storytelling, and who are taking workshops that support that objective.

Uncontrollable Variables
There are a number of factors that can help or hinder the rate at which you learn the craft of storytelling. Here are three aspects of any workshop that are outside your direct control:

Workshop Leadership
If the person running your workshop does not know how to moderate such a group, or if they lack the ability to articulate craft issues, the workshop will necessarily suffer.

Workshop Sophistication
The more experience workshop members have at giving feedback, the better the feedback will be. Better feedback — by which I mean more craft-focused feedback — will necessarily improve your understanding of craft.

Authorial Ability
Every writer learns at their own rate, and that rate is not consistent. (Think fits and starts rather than steady growth.) Other than writing as much as you can and participating in workshops, there’s not much you can do to speed the rate at which you learn. There is no crash course.

At best you might hope to control for two of these variables by asking other writers for recommendations, but in general you simply have to trust the fates to even things out over time. What these inevitable uncertainties should encourage you to do, however, is put a premium on variables you can control. [ Read more ]

The Year of the Elm

April 19, 2010 By Mark 15 Comments

That’s the title — and this is the cover — for the short story collection I’ve been working on, which I referred to in an earlier post by the TYOTE acronym. I put the collection on Smashwords last night. [Book removed 01/03/17.]

There are twelve short stories in the collection. The first three stories are free. The price for the full collection is $4.99, for reasons that have been exhaustively detailed in previous posts. (Regular readers are now laughing themselves silly or suffering flashbacks.)

I am making three stories available for three reasons. First, I like the idea that a prospective online customer can peruse part of a work as they might in a bookstore. Second, I believe self-published authors have an obligation to demonstrate that they can carry a tune before asking someone to pay for their work. Third, I intendThe Year of the Elm to create an overall effect, and I feel an obligation to make the structure clear to the prospective buyer. Reading the first three stories should do that.

The next step for TYOTE is to put together a print-on-demand (POD) version, probably through Lightning Source. I’ll have more to say about TYOTE, and about the process of publishing it myself, in subsequent posts.

On the horizon, my next project involves a novel I’m revising, and what may or may not be an innovative attempt to meld the strengths of the internet as a medium with the craft aims of traditional storytelling. I believe that all mediums are eventually turned to fiction, and my hope would be to show how that might be better done with the internet itself.

— Mark Barrett

TYOTE

April 9, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

The title of this post is the working-title acronym for my collection of short stories. I’m 99% sure the title is the one I’ll be going with, but until I’m 100% sure this is what I’m calling it.

It’s been interesting getting the stories in shape. I’ve pushed myself to make the stories good, and been pushed to do more by the finality of the act of publication — even if I’m only self-publishing them in digital form. Nobody wants to make an idiot out of themselves.

I’m pretty close to being able to put the stories up on Smashwords. I’ve worked through the formatting style guide, and I have a working comp for the cover art. I just need to do a final version of everything and a final read-through of the text and I think that’s it. (I’ll have more to say about the various steps in the process when I’m reasonably confident I didn’t mess things up.)

What I can say so far is that the impending act of publication has helped improve my work. Because I’m taking it seriously, that seriousness is producing benefits I hadn’t imagined. I’m not new to turning in final drafts of fictional copy, or scripts that will be produced by others, but this is a more solitary process, and I’m glad to find that it is not without rewards.

Even as I am starting to see the larger self-publishing movement as a fad or balloon that will inevitably go bust, I’m also utterly convinced that the internet as a distribution and publication platform is for real. I can put these stories where others can find them, and I don’t have to ask permission to do that.

As small as the collection is, and as limited as the economic upside might be, it feels like a big deal. Regardless of the outcome, I’m glad I’m doing this.

— Mark Barrett

Price Ranges

March 10, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

More than once in my life I’ve had someone tell me they would like to own ItemX. When I asked how much ItemX cost, however, the person replied with, “I don’t know.”

Now, it’s not very often in our commercially saturated lives that we encounter a product which is outside our pricing experience. And that’s particularly true if we know enough about the product to know we want it. Which is why, when this scenario unfolds before me, I invariably respond like this: “Is it a dollar? A million dollars? Ten dollars? A hundred dollars? Ten hundred millions dollars?” And on and on, until the person calmly replies that one of those numbers is close to the mark. [ Read more ]

Pricing A Short Story Collection

March 8, 2010 By Mark 11 Comments

I am in the process of readying a collection of short stories for online publication. The stories are literary, and focus on one character (a young boy) over the course of a year. I hope readers connect with these stories emotionally. If not, I failed to hit what I was aiming at.

I will be posting the collection first on Smashwords. I have decided that I will not be posting the collection for free, but rather will be setting a price. I do intend to allow readers to sample the collection to demonstrate that I can, at the very least, carry a tune.

The question before me now is what the price should be. It’s a question everyone is wrestling with, so I don’t feel alone in my consternation. Whatever your feelings about the fluctuating price of gasoline over the past few years, at least there’s a constantly-updated market price for that product. If I was trying to unload a gallon of gas right now I’d know where I stand. Twelve literary short stories? Not so much. [ Read more ]