52 Chapbooks: A 2022 Challenge

Back at the tail end of 2020, Dean Wesley Smith laid out a challenge to aspiring indie writers who had a short story back list: publish 52 short stories over 2021.

One of the key details in his write-up is that the focus is publishing rather than writing. As he put it:

A lot of writers I know have collections published which have stories in them that are not yet published stand-alone. Those would be easy to mine for stories for the challenge.

A lot of writers I know have unpublished stories sitting, waiting. Heck, a bunch of writers did the write 52 stories in 52 weeks challenge and haven’t got most of those out yet.

POINT #1… So to get to 52 stories, you might have to write a few a month, but most writers have a bunch to start this challenge.

I’d been thinking about that challenge a lot as I wrote up my notes on making good use of your backlist for the RWA workshop in December, because one of the key ideas I was trying to get people to wrap their heads around is the idea of the “just in case” release.

The logic goes something like this: traditional publishing makes decisions based around economies of scale. Producing a book is an expensive prospect, and physical books need to be shipped around and warehoused, all of which means you want to focus on selling as many books as possible in a short space of time in order to minimize the ongoing cost of maintaining inventory.

This means the books that get published are typically a) likely to appeal to a wide range of people, and b) are books that can find that audience quickly. Short stories–which are a hard sell as stand-alone releases–make more sense bundled into collections, and even then only when the audience has sufficient fanbase to justify the release.

And so the short story collection or anthology became the default form of presenting shorter work.

Indie publishing inverts a lot of those assumptions. It’s relatively cheap to produce a book, and if you’re using tools like ebooks and print-on-demand, there’s no ongoing warehousing costs to cut into your bottom line. Releasing a book that a handful of people might buy in a particular format is a somewhat more reasonable decision—putting releases out just in case they find a reader is a perfectly viable strategy. 

Lots of indie folk balk at releasing stand-alone short stories because they don’t see the sales to justify it, but a project like this isn’t about sales. It’s got a lot more to do with discoverability and the narrative that builds up around your career, as well as having a deep toolkit you can leverage to promote your work (the number of authors who have sold me dozens of books after a slow and steady drip feed of free stuff I enjoyed is staggering…)

And, for writers like me, there’s a lot of underutilised work in our backlist. I’ve got three collections of work and a history of doing stories as stand-alone chapbooks, but even I’ve dragged my feet on doing more with them.

Unsurprisingly, some aspects of trad pub have already embraced that on the ebook level when the author profile (Neil Gaiman) or the publisher brand (Tor.com) justify using the ebooks as an added extra or loss leader. They might not expect them to make huge returns immediately, but they’ll always be there just in case a reader takes a chance on them and there are layers of discoverability in play. 

Meanwhile, Smith and his (oft-referenced here and in newsletters) wife Kirstyn Katherine Rusch have both built short fiction into their business model from the outset. 

Rusch is a prime example of using previously published short story releases as loss leaders. Every week she post a free short story to her site as a free read for the next seven days. If you like it and want a copy, there’s a link to the stand-alone ebook and collections that include it attached, and the post serves as a placeholder and add after the week is done. 

Smith used his short fiction to very different effect — when he first went indie, the top books attached to his name were all work-for-hire novels he wrote for Star Trek and other franchises. He used a steady stream of short stories to get his indie work front-and-centre when folks searched his name, as a self-published sale would be worth more than the royalty on his licensed work. That paid off when he started releasing novels, especially the ones built off short story series.

I didn’t do the 52 releases challenge in 2021 because…well, it wasn’t a good fit for the Brain Jar Press brand. It took me an embarrassingly long time to come up with the solution to that, which was basically doing what trad pubs do when they want to release work that doesn’t fit with their remit (start an imprint).

But I’m considering embracing the challenge (reworked as 52 Chapbooks rather than short-story specific releases) in the coming year. My other Eclectic Projects patreon challenge will cover 11 of the 52 releases, while I’ve got about 37 stories in various collections that could be re-released and point readers towards the longer work. There’s a few RPG releases I’ve been kicking around, and older short fiction books that need a print release and more strategic approach. Plus, the joy of a challenge like this is pushing yourself to look at your backlist differently.

And, as I discovered today, when I’m having a bad anxiety day about the idea of going back to work at a job that’s an increasingly poor fit for me, even a small step towards building a larger backlist helps an awful lot.