I’ve so far written three stories, and a few things are becoming clear. One is that I’m not very comfortable at writing this length. While I can certainly write at shorter length, and I think I can create compelling stories while doing so, they aren’t the kind of stories that I enjoy writing. I like to really dig into the emotional undercurrents that live within science fiction and fantasy, and that is nearly impossible to do at this length. In a lot of ways I enjoy the tapestry of life and how all the threads illustrate a scene, a story, a situation, and that kind of rich view requires more than 750 words, that’s for sure.

I do want to note that you can certainly achieve a high level of emotion in a flash piece, but it is generally intense and highly situational. The emotion runs strong but is not very nuanced. As a writer, I miss the nuance. I like the nuance. I need the nuance.

So flash isn’t a length that feels natural to me. Still, it can be fun to write, and I definitely see myself occasionally dabbling in it. Just not very often.

One of the reasons they aren’t taught is that the subject is incredibly complex. It is often much easier to just tell writers to read a lot and to use the lessons from the prose they are reading as a guide. The trouble is that I’m just not sure how effective that is. Be that as it may, let’s take a look at  the most basic of prose tools, the simple period.

A period, as with most punctuation, has really only two jobs: To provide clarity and to provide rhythm. The clarity is simple enough–we use periods to let us know when a subject completes an action in a self-contained manner. Jack runs. Sarah reads. Toby presses the button on the microwave. Those sentences make sense because there is a period there. Try to parse this sentence:

Sarah reads Toby presses the button on the microwave Jack runs

It’s confusing. We need the period to provide a clarity that doesn’t exist otherwise. So in the writer’s toolbox, the period is pretty important. But, wait, the period also has a more subtle job–it helps convey rhythm as a device that means “stop.” It is here that things start to break down for the writing instructor, because rhythm is very much relative and clarity and rhythm are often in conflict. Summarizing simple rules for the period is thus a formidable task. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples why.

Let’s first take a quick look at rhythm. Rhythm is how the words and sentences flow as a reader reads them in his or her mind. Rhythm can be short and sharp:

There was a crash as the car slammed into the house. Siding fell onto the hood. A single brick dropped onto the windshield, creating a spiderweb of glass. John felt his forehead. At least he wasn’t bleeding.

Each sentence is intended to be foreground and consumed as a whole. This, this, and this happened. The rhythm of the prose tells us read-stop-read-stop.

Sentence rhythm can also flow like a single thought told in multiple sentences. Here’s Nick talking to Jay Gatsby. Note how this is all really one thought told in a few sentences, and as you read it there are no real hard pauses, even though there are periods. In this instance, the flow of the words overwhelm the pauses a period would normally demand:

I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.

There is actually a slight pause after the first period, which just goes to show you how difficult this is to discuss.

Beginning writers often see comments like “stilted prose” or “awkward prose,” and this is very much an indication of not “hearing” how sentences flow to the reader. One valuable solution for someone frustrated over seeing lots of criticisms like this but not knowing what he or she is doing wrong is to read your work to yourself. Spoken word demands a rhythm, and often you will be shocked at how different your prose reads when it is spoken aloud versus in your head.

But what defines stilted prose? Generally speaking, prose is awkward when it is written without any real effect in mind. It is solely put on the page to get the message across. This is a common problem across all of prose tools today. With the period–and rhythm specficially–it means that the writer doesn’t know why he or she is putting the periods where they are. Note: The sentences may be clear, because that is certainly one of the jobs of the period, but they sound off.

In other words, whenever you use a period to construct a sentence–especially when you are revising–you need to know why you have made the choices you have made. It just isn’t enough to “wing it” until you have become accomplished enough that criticism of stilted prose are no longer aimed at you.

Okay, back to the simple elegant period and why this is very complex. We are told that a comma indicates a short stop, and a period indicates a longer stop. This is often true, but not always so. The words also have a huge impact. You can have a long paragraph of many sentences that reads as one flowing thought. But how is that so?

It is so because advanced writers know that more than just a period affects rhythm. The result we often find are writers who “break the rules” because the tool just isn’t getting the job done. And this is critical, because authors with great prose don’t start with the tool (such as a period); they start with the effect they are going for. After they examine the various tools at their disposal, they pick the best tool for the job. Sometimes it’s a period. Sometimes it’s not.

Let’s look at an example from a story I wrote recently:

We’ve isolated the failure to the rotating part of the fan structure. The moment he fixes it, the blades will turn, and he’ll be knocked off. It’s a long fall.

Now it was important to me to have a very hard pause between “knocked off” and “it’s a long fall.” Why? Because the person he is talking to has never been in the structure. The person speaking realizes this and quickly adds the “it’s a long fall” line to let him know it will most likely be fatal without saying it explicitly. Now normally I would use something like “there was no response, so he continued, ‘It’s a long fall.’” That neatly solves my problem, but there is one issue–I had already used a similar technique earlier in the paragraph. This put me in a conundrum. I really wanted to have a very hard stop after “knocked off,” but the sentence rhythm and the period didn’t stop long enough on their own. I had to artificially create this stop somehow.

You can come up with your own solution (including the conclusion that this isn’t a big enough problem worth worrying over), but the key takeaway here is that as you write your prose, think about how you want each sentence to be presented, and then make it happen. It’s something that will often be second nature, but there will always be moments where you’ll hear in your head a sentence not doing what you want it to do. That’s when you need to think about things like the period and it’s modest role–is it doing its job creating the rhythm you want or do you need to call in reinforcements.

So what a great way to launch 2012. I hope that your goals for the new year start off as well as mine have.

Despite my being thoroughly new to the science fiction and fantasy genres (I hadn’t followed them to any significant degree since I graduated high school) and my newness to the craft of writing fiction, I had what many writers would consider to be stupid goals for 2011–to sell two or three stories to professional markets. I sold one story in 2011 to a professional market, so I fell short of my goal.

Many writers would call my goals foolish, as they depend entirely on things outside of my control, but if I learned one thing in my many years in the entertainment industry, it’s that most of the goals worth striving for include many elements outside of your control. So while I can certainly understand aiming for specific goals like word count and submissions, those just aren’t inspiring enough for me, so I ignore tangible goals and focus on intangible achievements. Maybe I’m a masochist.

So, 2011–good start, but not quite as good as I had hoped.

Looking ahead to 2012, I have expanded my goals a bit:

1. Complete my YA fantasy novel in Q1
2. Sell my novel
3. Write at least one short story a month
4. Sell three or four stories to professional markets

Of course my immediate concern is to finish my novel, and that will be the focus of my writing efforts for the first part of the year. The good news is that I have a chunk already written, and I have it plotted.

I’m looking forward to a wonderful 2012, and I certainly hope that the year treats you well, too.

There are a number of external reasons for this, from my tendency to file away stories early in the submission process so that I can improve them later to the fact that I only submit to a few fiction publications. But the biggest reason, I believe, is that I’ve done a ton of experimentation in my writing over the past year. Looking over my stories, I see that I’ve used: an epistolary narrative, a non-linear narrative, a fairy tale, a story with nothing but dialog, and a brutally honest and adult story about genetically modified humans. None of these are what you would remotely call mainstream in presentation.

I title this post “experimentation,” but it could equally have been called “having fun,” because some of the choices I made in story structure or format was nothing more than to challenge myself and to have fun doing it. My fairy tale certainly fits the bill here, as does the story that contains nothing but dialog. I set myself the challenge of writing a story like that, and I did. Mind you, I think they’re good stories, but their presentation is decidedly uncommon.

But more than half of the stories that were atypical in structure or presentation weren’t created with any particular style or structure in mind. The story and how it needed to be told demanded it. This was true of the epistolary story I sold to Lightspeed, and the non-linear narrative I turned into a novella. So it’s not just about having fun but also picking the right tool from the writing toolbox for the job at hand.

I foresee continuing to use all those tools in 2012, so we’ll see how mass-appeal my short fiction will be, but one thing is certain–I’ll have fun doing it.

Fantasy Magazine opened for submissions on May 1, and I’ve been wanting to write a fantasy story told in a very simple fairy tale style for a while now. I’ve finally finished the first draft on a story entitled “Fetch” and am currently revising. I expect to have the submission into them within the next week or so.

My story “The Old Equations” is still scheduled for a July release at Lightspeed Magazine.

After my fantasy story is done, I’m planning on writing another science fiction story, but may finish one of two horror stories I have in mind. I’m not sure yet.

I did a number of Kindle searches via the fantastic Jungle-search.com site. The goal was to see what price points had the greatest competition and which had the least. Note that I filtered out books in the public domain. There are a lot of those, including major literary works, but those aren’t competing in the same way as an unknown author looking for readers. So let’s start with free. Consumers love free, and there is nothing stopping someone from sampling your book if you provide it for free, but the question is: How many others have the same idea? The answer: Not as many as you may think.

Price Point: Free

# Books available for free via the Kindle bookstore: 11,656

You can, of course, break this down further via searches by genre (which many readers do), but the basic competitive landscape is crowded. You have to stand out from over 11,000 other ebooks. However, as you will see, the number of ebooks available for free in the Kindle bookstore is small compared to those at other price points. If your goal is to stand out from the crowd via an Amazon Kindle search (and you can be sure that a lot of amazon searches are sorted with “free” on top), then offering your book for free is probably one of the better strategies.

Of course, relying solely on a free price point to market your work and build a fan base is not very practical, but it turns out it is a lot more practical than using a higher price point, and that’s excluding the fact that the reader doesn’t have to pay for the book. In short, the free book market is significantly less competitive than higher price points.

Price Point: Less than a dollar

# Books available for under a dollar (but not free) in the Kindle bookstore: 91,462

Yes, you are reading that number correctly–There are roughly nine times as many books available for 99 cents than there are available for free (excluding public domain books). Knowing that you’re not going to get rich with a 99 cent book, it certainly appears that providing the book for free is a better marketing strategy. Why? Two reasons: 1) There is no barrier to purchase. The book is literally free. 2) There are fewer books competing at this price point.

The second point is worth considering more closely. If one of your goals is to generate grassroots marketing attention to your book via things like Kindle searches, it is practically a guarantee that the free price point will get you a better search result than a 99 cent book. Readers browsing Amazon generally search like this: They open the Kindle bookstore and are presented with the bestsellers. There are generally two next steps: They sort by the genre they are interested in and price point, low to high. If you are properly categorized, then in this scenario Amazon searches by price point will see the free books float to the top, and that grouping of books is a lot smaller than those at the 99 cent level.

In short, 1 book out of 11,000 is a lot better than 1 book out of 91,000.

Price Point: $1 to $2.99

# Books available from $1 to $2.99 in the Kindle bookstore: 113,590

And, yes, it gets worse as you go up in price. The theory that the vast bulk of low quality Kindle ebooks are packed at the free and 99 cent price points may be true, but that volume is still way lower than the volume of books at a higher price point. This brings up the interesting point: If you have a quality release, would you prefer to be the shining example amongst 11,000 crap releases or just one of 113,000 releases at the one- to two buck level?

Price point: $3 to $4.99

# Books available from $3 to $4.99 in the Kindle bookstore: 134,890

Again, as you increase your price point, the competition increases.

Price point: $5.00 to $6.99

# Books available from $5 to $6.99 in the Kindle bookstore: 234,881

And from here on out things remain competitive at a high volume level. Interestingly, there are fewer books priced from $7 to $9.99 (191,030) than at the next lowest tier. Part of the reason is that the Kindle royalty is 70% for books priced at $2.99 and above and a measly 35% for books priced below $2.99. So it is quite possible that there are a large number of authors looking for the nice mix of high volume from low or mid-level prices and the higher royalty from the $2.99+ price point. My guess is that independent publishers and authors will be hovering between the $3 to $6.99 price point looking for the sweet spot of maximum income.

In Conclusion

If you’re a new author looking for an edge up, pricing should absolutely be part of your strategy. If part of that strategy is standing out from the crowd, and you were worried that your book would be competing with a kazillion free books and thus priced your book at 99 cents or $1.99 due to the lower competition, well, that appears to be a mistake. Oddly enough, pricing a book for free will let your book stand out much more than if it is priced at 99 cents, at least in terms of raw Amazon searches.

One of the interesting things that we can expect to play out in the ebook space over the next couple years is discovering that perfect price point where writers can maximize their income. We all owe a debt to authors like J.A. Konrath, who are experimenting on price point and sales in the pursuit of the perfect return for independent authors. This comment of Konrath’s, where he updates the results of his price experimentation, should provide an excellent context for the figures above:

There’s probably a formula in it somewhere. But I’m 100% sure I’ll make a lot more money in 28 days at $2.99 than I did for the 28 days it was 99 cents. However, I wouldn’t be making the current figures if I hadn’t priced it at 99 cents. (source)

For indie authors, consider that the definitive statement we have thus far on ebook pricing strategy.

I had several options for publishing this short story, but I decided to publish it through my in-house publishing company, Hotel Room Press, as an e-short in the Kindle and Nook bookstores. It’s 99 cents and features a fantastic cover painted by Tom McGrath. This is my first foray into digital ebook sales, and I’m curious as to how it will perform, especially as it is a short story.

Deadeye is on sale now at Kindle ebook store and the Nook ebook store.

Here’s the publisher’s copy:

In this searing short story, Kerr takes steampunk conventions–alternate history, airship battles, and even an invention of Nicola Tesla–and weaves them into a highly personal tale of a soldier looking for redemption.

Deadeye is the tale of “Deadeye” Wolfson, a decorated civil war soldier making his way home to see his ill father. But a simple trip is complicated by contraband, his fame, and an air battle where Wolfson’s life is changed forever.

Obviously, three units isn’t something to be excited about. Even if you were selling three units a week consistently that would add up to 150 or so sales a year, or income of $50 after Amazon/Barnes & Noble take their cut. That’s a far cry from the income you could get from a sale to a magazine like Analog. And the exposure would be much less, as well.

So, clearly, for a brand new writer and someone doing zero marketing, this is not a good strategy.

Next week, I’ll start to investigate some self-marketing to see if I can juice the sales some more. That is phase two of my experiment.