Thursday, September 30, 2010

Interesting Ways to Sell Writing

Tip of the Day: If you put one of those Werthers caramel candies in your mouth and take a swig of apple cider, it's pretty good.

We talk a lot about traditional publishing on here since we're all either traditionally published or getting close. And I feel like I know a lot about publishing articles in magazines and online and how to get short stories published. And I even feel like I've heard a lot about self-publishing and epublishing to understand how it all works. But in the last week or two I came across two ways people are selling their writing that I have never heard of before so I'm going to share.

First came via a post by Karly Kirkpatrick. If you don't know Karly she's a facebook rockstar, blogging goddess, and soon to be epublished author. Her first book, Into The Shadows, comes out November 1st.





















The other day she posted on facebook that you could subscribe to her blog on Amazon. As in, you go here, pay $1.99 a month and you can have her blog posts downloaded wirelessly to your Kindle. How cool is that? Maybe I'm a bit behind but I'd never heard of this before. It sounds awesome-- especially with how much work and thought so many writers do put into their blogs.

I had another No Way, That's Cool! moment about two weeks ago. I was at an author fair in Aurora, IL, with a ton of authors and we were having lunch. While I was chewing on a yummy turkey roll I was listening to the fascinating Greg Stolze, writer and game designer, talk about fan publishing. What's fan publishing? Well, here's an example. Greg set a $$ amount on one of his short stories (somewhere between $400 and $500 I think) and fans could pledge money and once that amount was met he released the story for free on his Web site. Interesting right? He has an illustrated serial up right now too. If you go to the pledge page for From The Dragon's Mouth you can see that so far 12 people have pledged $305 of his $500 goal. If you look at one of his roleplaying games you'll see he had 124 backers pledge more than $2500 for him to release the game for free. C'mon, how cool is this?

Have you guys come across any other interesting and untraditional ways people make money with their writing?

Kristina, Miss See Me on the Shelves




2 comments:

Jennifer Hoffine said...

That pledge thing does sound cool. Thanks for sharing!

Kate Fall said...

Wow, that's very interesting. I can totally see this working if you get hooked on a story world. It makes me very happy to see authors getting involved in electronic publishing ahead of the curve.