How to Monetize Short Stories?
Hello everyone! I have a question: How would I monetize and make money off of short stories?
Recently, I wrote several short stories and shared them with my English teacher who said that this is worthy of money (something along those lines) and now it's stuck in my head...
What I came up with was to create an Instagram page, and find a mentor who could help me grow the page and help me make content. I am thinking of posting my journey to writing short stories, inspiration, and the actual process of writing short stories. After growing it quite a bit, I could maybe sell my short stories? I dunno yet, I need to figure that part out lol. Maybe afterwards I could make a blog page and put ads on there or whatnot...
The previous paragraph is what I think is the most optimal route to going about this. Any input/help is much appreciated! Please keep in mind I am a high school student and therefore I do not have a lot of time, but I think I can manage this task (I have created other Instagram pages and made money via ads)
BTW does anyone know any good programs or services that can help me sell e-books? thanks in advance <3
create a weekly newsletter. Sell a package of stories on Gumroad.
Thanks so much, @AndrewKamphey! I have never heard of Gumroad, and after a quick google search online and I have come to find out that it is the perfect solution for what I am trying to do! Many many thanks to you 😁
Ahoy Ali 👋
I wrote up a spreadsheet detailing how I think about the numbers. This assumes that you'd write one short story per month. The spreadsheet is publicly writable, so you can modify it as you please. However, it's publicly writable, so you should make a copy of it before someone else messes with it :)
The key takeaway is that if you're interested in selling your ebooks, you will want to cross-post your stories to as many places as possible so that you can get people onto a newsletter, and from there you want to try to point people from your newsletter to your Gumroad.
I found a list of a bunch of these on this post on Reddit. I'm sure there are others. If you do some searching on Reddit, Google, etc, you should be able to find a bunch of these.
The idea is that it's basically free to post to all of these sites, so you should post to as many as possible. Each site has a low probability of being a great source of revenue, but posting to multiple sites is probably worth the time. At the bottom of your stories, you should be linking to your newsletter, where you can give people updates. On the newsletter, you can ask people to buy your stories to support your writing, or maybe offer stories for sale for early release. I'm not quite sure what incentive structure to use, but you can play around with it.
You'd also want to consider a Patreon, and promote that on the newsletter.
Good luck!
Thanks a lot, @jakevoytko for the spreadsheet and this valuable information! I will definitely put this info into good use! I like the idea of writing to multiple websites and informing readers of my newsletter, instead of my original idea of posting to Instagram and making a big clutter there. And I will also look into Patreon and what benefits I can give my patreons. Once again, thanks for your help!
No problem. Good luck!