In this episode we’re talking with special guest Mark Leslie about two topics all three of us are particularly passionate about—writing short, and publishing wide. Mark explains what options writers have when it comes to write successful short stories that sell, and how to use the power of ‘WIDE publishing’ to earn many stream of revenues that will last for a very long time.
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Resources we mentioned in this episode
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Six figure authors podcast
- Stark Reflections Podcast
- In Death Series by J.D. Robb
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
- Indistractible by Nir Eyal
- The Creative Academy for Writers
- Wide for the Win (book) by Mark Leslie
- Writing Into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith
- Taking the Short Tack by Matty Dalrymple and Mark Leslie
- Mark’s Leslie’s website
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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 057: Writing Short and Publishing Wide with Mark Leslie Lefebvre
Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 57 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.
Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.
If you find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking to the buy us a coffee button on the website and the show notes.
Crystal Hunt: Today, we are talking with special guest Mark Leslie Lefebvre about topics that all three of us are particularly passionate about: writing short and publishing wide. But first, we’re going to give you a quick update on what is new in our world. Michele what have you got going on?
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele Amitrani: Crystal, I am working on a brand new mythological fantasy that is going to be hopefully a reader magnet.
Not sure if it’s going to be a short story or a novella. So far, I am at around 4,000 words in. it’s very difficult to know what’s going to happen tomorrow. But what I can tell you is that’s going to be a retelling of the famous myth of Pandora and her jar, which some people believe it’s a box but actually is not. I will keep you update on that. On the non-fiction side I’ve been working on a series of non-fiction books about self publishing for Italian authors and I have written all of them, they are different stages. Book one is done and I just need to rebrand it. It’s already published and I just need to change cover and all that kind of stuff. Book two it’s on pre-order. As of now, it’s going to be scheduled for the 31st of August and I’m very excited about this book because it’s a first for me.
It’s the first time that I actually try to explain something that is a big technical… well, that actually is very technical, and I’m talking about Amazon ads. I’ve been taking a full year to study the platform as you know, because you followed me and you helped me a lot growing up in using this platform.
So I wanted to take my time in trying to understand how Amazon ads work on the Italian market. And I came up with some guidelines and some tips and advice that I really hope might be useful for Italian authors that are struggling with Amazon ads or that just want to learn a bit more about the platform.
As of now 10 people are reading it. They’re part of my ARC team. And regarding the third book it’s already written, I need to edit it and I’m hoping to release it in the fall. And finally on the things that I am not actually doing but I’m absorbing, I am listening to a lot of episodes of another podcast, which you might be familiar with.
It’s the six figure authors podcast and I’m finding a lot of really awesome info on levelling up my author business, but also the writing side of things. Uh, Lindsay, Joseph and Andrea are really great hosts. And if you’ve never heard of this podcast, I strongly recommend you listeners to listen to it because it’s really that good.
Now, Crystal. Tell us everything about your writerly world.
Crystal Hunt: Well, I’m going to hit four things: What am I reading? What am I writing? What am I teaching? And what am I learning? Because I think that’d be an interesting way to break it down today. So reading, I am reading the In Death Series by JB Robb, which has 50 or 60 books in it that are all kind of murder mysteries.
And that has been quite interesting. I think I’m on book 16 of the series so far, and it’s a linear series that develops with a lot of the same characters and that’s just been a really interesting kind of example of that method, which I’m hoping will help as I’m plotting and scheming my murder mysteries, which are also like a linear series.
So that has been good. And nonfiction I’ve been reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and looking at as I go into this nice focused fall phase of writing like a mad person I will be wanting to not be distracted. So Digital Minimalism and Indistractible, by Nir Eyal the two books that I’m using to do a bit of an attention reset over the summer because I find that’s a good time to reset patterns.
So that has been really interesting. I have been writing the murder-mystery stuff and to that end, I’ve been learning about murder, basically not to put too fine a point on it, but Murder Con is coming up at the end of this week and that is a conference where you learn all about basically how to work a murder scene and how investigative procedures work and blood spatter and taking footprints and fingerprints and identifying the, how long a body’s been dead for, by what kind of bugs are on it. Creepy, gross stuff that’s pretty awesome if you’re into that kind of thing, which apparently I am, I went last year. It was great going back this year to catch a different set of workshops and experts. So I’m totally stoked about that on the learning side.
And on the teaching side, I’ve just done a masterclass on how to make box sets and collections in the creative academy. So if you are interested in that and a little looking forward after the interview with Mark, I think you are going to be interested in that, then if you want to figure out how to do a lot of the stuff he’s talking about doing, you can tap into that masterclass.
It’s free for members so go ahead and click the link in the show notes and go check out the creative academy. If you are not already a member. I guess the last piece of writing news is that we are just finishing up the Create with Co-authors book, which is our next non-fiction release in our creative academy guides for writers series, which is due to come out some point in October, we haven’t set a specific date yet, but that is the plan.
So all of that is very exciting. And now without further ado, let’s dive into our special guest interview cause we know you all want to hear from our guests.
About Mark Leslie Lefebvre
All right. We have a very special guest today, a fellow Canadian and a long time VIP in the book world. He writes horror and speculative fiction as Mark Leslie, and is known to the writing community as Mark Lefebvre in his previous roles as president of the Canadian Booksellers Association, he was the director of self publishing and author relations for Rakuten Kobo, Inc. and is currently involved with Draft to Digital as their director of business development and numerous other organizations, events and all kinds of good things. So in those writing related books and world, we know him as Mark Leslie Lafebvre, and we are very excited to have you here because our listeners know your name a whole bunch.
We’ve talked over the last couple of years about all the different books that you’ve written. And when we go trolling for information on subjects that we can trust your name and your books often come up. Your podcast as well. Folks will be able to find a lot of your information and your titles in our resources section on the Strategic Authorpreneur website.
So we’re very excited to have you here in person so we can pick your brain live and see what goodies we can extract from you that maybe not everyone has heard yet, but we really would like to first get to know a little bit Mark the person, since we know you’re not just a figurehead and you don’t just do the business of writing, you are also a writer and a human at the back of that.
So can you tell us a little bit, maybe something a little bit interesting for those of you, you can’t see the backdrop behind Mark, but there is a heck of a collection of skulls going on his books stuff. So you can tell us how you came to maybe acquire that as a hobby. That would be interesting. And a little bit about what you’re working on as a fiction writer at the moment.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks Crystal. So the skulls that I collect behind me are the skulls of my enemies, the ones that I vanquished and destroyed, the people who didn’t leave me reviews for my books. They’re just, they came because a lot of the stuff I write is like Twilight Zoney fiction slash horror.
So I always used horror because it wasn’t quite fantasy and it wasn’t quite science fiction. And so I was like, horror was somewhere in between weird tales and I started. Taking a skull ‘York’, the very first scholar I brought to my book launch in 2004 for one hand. And which is basically a short story collection of Twilight zone tales.
And it fit because it would tell people to either avoid the crazy man… like it’s not my genre, or it was draw the right readers over to me, and then that evolved into a full-size skeleton, Barnaby Bones who does book events with me. And then people would buy me skulls. And, and then I would buy skulls.
And so my office here has I think about last count there was 26 of them in my office. Some of them are scarier than others. Some of them are more realistic looking than others, but it’s just been a thing and now it’s a weird branding thing because people will send me skeleton memes and jokes or anything with a skeleton in it.
And as they say, when I saw the skeleton and they thought of me and I thought. That’s the coolest thing ever. If somebody can see something and it reminds you. So the other things that remind people of me, if this may be interesting, is that a dad jokes like really bad groaner dad jokes. People think of me, which is good or not bad and musical ear ones.
Monty Python references, stuff like that, the things, and of course, craft beer. Those are the weird things that I’m sometimes associated with in different, in different circles.
Crystal Hunt: Excellent. We do like to find out what people’s interest and quirks are, since I think that is what makes us interesting as people.
And there’s a lot of talk about brand and people do think kind of professional, polished, positive. I must be buttoned up whatever. Look the part, be the part. And it’s this idea of what a professional writer is like that they have in their heads and they sort of scrub all their personality out of what their brand is and then it’s not very interesting. It really doesn’t stick with anybody and you don’t have a lot to relate to other people about on those topics. So I think it’s really cool that you’ve been out there with that, and that has become part of your writerly identity and that people really do connect over it.
I think that’s a really excellent example of authenticity in your business and in your branding and in your writing life that really it resonates well with people and it gives us something to connect with and works for memory and all that kind of good stuff.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: I made the mistake with my newsletter, and the way that I approach things is I tried to be more like journalistic and stand back and more professional.
And there’s like… it doesn’t work. People don’t want to connect with a corporate feel. Yeah, I dress a certain way and stuff like that, but you may seem on the beach in Florida with a sport coat on and stuff like that, but I will also then be silly and on my knees pretending to do karaoke as Sonny and Cher, because Sonny was a lot shorter than Sherry wasn’t or at When Words Collide, for example, with my suit on, in a a fort that we made like a midnight fort where we go in and tell ghost stories and stuff like that. So you can still be professional and have that look and feel, but also be a real person too. And I think that’s really important..
Crystal Hunt: Awesome. And having some fun with your writing is really great.
So when I’m curious, is this something that started way back? Do you have a bit of a timeline or how did you come to recognize that you wanted to be a writer and when did that happen?
Figuring yourself out as a writer
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Oh, my God. It goes way back to when I was a kid playing with these little Fisher price figures. And I would actually, instead of just playing with the figures, I had stories in my mind that I needed to tell, and they would be serialized and continued over the course of weeks and months.
Where there’s big epic adventure… and it was never getting written down. It was just in my imagination, I’d be playing and then (my mother would call) “Mark! Supper!” and then I go have dinner. And then, and then I go back to playing and I was an only child. So I had to amuse myself and, and I think it was, I think I was 14 years old and I discovered my mom’s Underwood typewriter in the back of the closet under a dust cover. And I pulled it out and just had a marvellous time. I think it was during the March break. And I just started hammering like some stories and stuff. There were a little cartoon things that I was doing, but it was just started to write some things.
And then in the summer, when I was 14 years old, instead of being out with my friends and playing, I remember sitting there with my Dungeons and Dragons manuals and some of the cartoons I had crafted these characters based on Conan the barbarian and stuff like that from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. And I remember writing. I spent the whole summer writing what I thought was going to be an epic fantasy novel, which was probably only about 25,000 or 30,000 words. But come on, I was 14 and just hammering away at that. And I started sending short stories away. I think I got my first rejection when I was 15. So I really have always wanted to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller.
So it was just something that was always infused in my blood and it just seemed a natural progression. Yeah.
Crystal Hunt: Now, how did that writing self transition into the Mark Leslie self that ended up working more professional or corporately in the writing world?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Well, so my mom would say, when I was a kid: what do you want to be?
You know, I wanted to be a stunt man and a firefighter and an astronaut and a policeman and all of the cool things. And then at a certain point, probably closer to when I was 14, 15, now I want to be a writer. And my mom would say: if you want to be a writer, you better get a good job then. Cause you’re going to be starving. You’re not going to have any money. Like the typical thing we’d be watching TV shows. And I remember if there was some… cause back in the day that was one TV and two channels and stuff like that, the host and the whole family would watch the show… mom would go: ‘See? that’s a writer. Do you notice he has cans of click and craft dinner or macaroni and cheese and stuff? You’ll be eating that if you’re a writer because you won’t be able to afford real food.’
And so it was hammered into my head to get a good job, but I wanted to do something I was interested in. So it was 92. I was graduating from university and I got my first job in the book industry as a part-time bookseller cause I thought, okay, if I need to have a day job, it may as well be something that I believe in some. Cause I believe in books, I love books. I’m so always been a reader, always been passionate about books. And so I did that and as I worked my way through the book industry, I became passionate about selling books.
And that helped me understand the business of book selling while I was trying to sell books and stories to publishers. And then of course, self publishing actually became a legitimate thing as opposed to, oh, you can’t get a real publisher. And as a bookseller, I encountered hundreds of self published authors who had put their typewritten pages in a do a Tang and try and pass it off as a book, to actual authors who have actually done a publishing back when it was hard before print on demand was a real thing and you had to invest thousands of dollars. So I got to watch the industry evolve and change from both sides. And for me anyways, it’s been a really amazing opportunity because I understand traditional publishing and book selling and I understand indie publishing and self-publishing obviously because I’ve had a hand in helping build some of the platforms for that.
So I think I come with a really unique perspective to really walk down the middle of the line and see the benefits of traditional publishing, but also see the benefits of self-publishing. So I often think I have a very unique approach to perspective when it comes to that.
Michele Amitrani: Mark before you mentioned that when you started part of the way you did it was by writing short stories. I think you mentioned that in Wide for the Win, the book, you were trying also to sell short stories, and that you like the process of writing those. And so one of the things that I’m really excited to ask you about, because both Crystal and I, fiction wise, we also write short things and by short I mean anything that can be a short story, novella, novelettes, that kind of thing.
And one of the things that I would like to ask you is first what attracted you to writing short stories.
What got you into writing short stories?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah. Great questions. Thank you. So in the early day, the going recommendation for writers was well because self-publishing, wasn’t really a thing. The way to get an agent or an editor or a publisher interested in you is to develop a reputation, build a platform as a short story writer and then when they ask about your credit, you can say a lot been in this magazine or this anthology, and then you’ll get a publishing contract and a real deal or an agent. And so I did write a lot of short stories and I’m one of the benefits of writing short stories that I think is powerful is it’s actually in many ways, it’s harder to write short than it is to write long because when you have a novel, you can get into detail and stuff like that, whereas with it (almost like poetry is the ultimate of conciseness and varied) every word so carefully chosen and placed. Short stories are that in between where we have a very limited fixed space to get some things across. So you can’t meander too often. You have to get to the point, you have to cut it down, you have to boil it down to its essence and a lot more like maple syrup, which is a Canadian thing as well. But like you’re boiling it down to, it’s not just the SAP, it’s like just the sugars that you want in there.
And that’s a really, I think for anyone who’s never written short fiction, it’s a really great skill to have. The other great thing about it is you can, once you’ve practiced and get good at it, I can crack out short stories really quickly compared to novels, right? Because 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 words is way easier than 80,000 or 100,000 words.
And to that end, I could accumulate lots of rejections really fast, or I can send up multiple submissions to different markets. It’s easier to experiment. So I think, I think those are some of the reasons why I was attracted to short stories. My very first book in 2004 was a self published collection of short stories, which was stories that mostly had already appeared in print somewhere in some small press magazine no one’s ever heard of probably. And I did it because I wanted to… I wanted to actually been scene as a real writer. It could be because I’ve worked in bookstores and people would say, so you’re a writer. I go, yeah, I’m a writer.
I said, where can I find your work? And I’d say you get in a car and you drive about six hours, you crossed the border from Ontario, Canada into New York state. There’s a little shop in this small, uptown, New York village that will have this magazine on the corner. Of circulation 500 people. Oh, but, oh, sorry, that was the end of June. It’s July now. Sorry, it’s off the shelf. You can’t get it anymore. And I was tired of that. So I used an early version of a print on demand through Ingram lightening Source in 2004 to collect my previously published stories, put them in a book. And the reason I got away with self-publishing it’s where the, my whole Stark brand came from. Cause I registered that Stark publishing. My best friend, Steve Mark, That was the name of our DJ company when we were in university. So I leveraged it for the publishing company. And the reason I thought that it was okay to do that is because an editor somewhere, whether they gave me $5 or professional rights or whatever it was that I got or payment and copy of the magazine, somebody picked us out of a slush pile, edited it and said it was good enough for publishing. So it had already passed the checks. It already had the thumbs up. So yeah, 2004 before all the cool kids were self publishing I self-published, because I just wanted to be able to get my book in the bookstores, which I was able to go and do book signings at Barnes and Noble and Chapters because I made it fully returnable and it was easy enough back in the day to call them up two months in advance. Say, I’m going to be in town, you can order it. You can return it from Ingram. It’s all good. And yeah, that’s at least the start of my writing career and getting books out was short fiction.
Michele Amitrani: I think at this point, the one question and might follow up is, I love when I can get to pick the process of the writing of other authors. And I think the listener will be finding a lot of value if I ask you, what is the process, your process of writing fiction that is short. What do you do. What Mark Leslie does? Do you plan? Or you just “pants” it? Do you have a system that you might recommend, there’s something else that you do that there is the Mark Leslie stamp over here.
Is Mark a plotter or a panster?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: You’re not going to like this.
No, I sit down and just write it completely, mostly pants. Now there may be an idea. So for example, I might be working on a novel and have an idea for a side story or something that happens, and I can’t make it work. I’ll put that aside. I actually have folders and folders of notes and sheets and cocktail napkins, all kinds of junk with all kinds of ideas, most of which I’ll never get to, but sometimes I’ll pull it open, pull something out and write. I’m a big fan of Dean Leslie Smith’s Writing Into the Dark. And I do a lot of short fiction. How many, so oftentimes. I used to just have an idea. Chew on it. Sometimes it becomes a poem. Sometimes it’s a story. Sometimes I start to write the short story and realize, um, there’s no way I’m ever going to finish this in 5,000 to 10,000 words or whatever.
It’s gotta be part of a book and I put it aside. Other times, I just chew on an idea and I play with it and the story just comes out. But more lately, more recently, I will read guidelines for an anthology or magazine or some market usually has to be paying, or it has to be a charity I believe in strongly enough that I want to invest time in, uh, because I don’t write for exposure anymore like I did in the early days as you work your way up the industry. But yeah, sometimes I’ll just read a guideline for this editors reading this kind of story and sit down and say. Okay, I’m going to write that kind of story. And just so there is no real magic to the process is you sit down with a blank page in front of you and at the end of that session, you have something on that blank page. That’s definitely an important part of the process.
Michele Amitrani: Basically sit, put the time, put the effort and just come up with something you are interested in generally interested in and something interesting is going to come out.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah. But I also think the other thing that’s important to me as I will finish the story, then put it away usually if there’s time before I can send it to the market for a week or two. And then come back at it and reread it with fresh set of eyes. And then that’s usually when I will redraft that way and take things out or add things because yeah, I think that fresh perspective is really important. At least for me, in my own process for writing
Michele Amitrani: One thing that I actually hear a lot from some authors is that: okay, short fiction is well and good, you can exercise a bit by using it. Maybe if you’re not ready for a novel or something bigger. But it doesn’t really have any impact on an author careers, for example, money wise.
Are there any ways you can use short fiction for marketing or for building the big bedrock of your business? You co-wrote the book Taking the Short Tack, which talks about opportunities of a shorter stories. There are some favourites of yours that you would like to just share with the listeners.
Using short fiction in your writing career
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah. Sure. Thank you for asking. It is harder to sell a short story collection and it is harder to earn money off of short fiction than it is full length books. Yeah especially as an indie author specifically, it’s harder to put up in the early days, you put up a short on Amazon and other online retailers for 99 cents and make a ton of money off of it.
And in the early days it was easy. That’s what I did because I had lots of short stories. So one of the things that’s important to me is (with short stories is) you can reuse and recycle. Is an important aspect of short fiction. So you can sell a short story to a market and ideally professional rights are five to 8 cents US a word, right?
So ideally you’re going to get some money. So that could be a hundred dollars, two hundred and fifty, three hundred, four hundred, six hundred, whatever it is, depending on the word length. But then usually with short fiction, there’s the rights revert back to you after X amount, right? After the anthology has been out X amount of time, or the magazine has been on the market, then the rights revert back to you and you can sell reprint rights.
I just, yesterday in the mail I just got… now this is a perfect example, but Dean Wesley Smith is the editor of pop house magazine and this is that’s really messed up. Basically whacked out stories from Paphos fiction magazine and Dean had selected stories of like really strange fiction that just goes off the beaten path and I knew Dean was putting this anthology together and I said Dean… I thought it was initially going to be a magazine. Cause you know, with magazines, you need layout and you’ve got to piece different things together when you’re laying it out. And I said, I have this thing that are a bunch of different poems I had already sold, published and self published after l ready been used them, already earned money off them more than once. And I collected them into something I just called a Menagerie of Messed Up Shorts. And there was a short story, Nervous Twitching, which is about 600 words, which had been published, Oh God, in the nineties.
And then a whole bunch of poems, dark humor, poems: A Frost After Midnight, Daddy’s Girl, Holiday Demons, Whaling Johnny, but basically they’re micro short pieces. And again, even though I’ve already made money off of each of these and sold them separately to different markets, I just got yesterday in the mail … I got my check last month, a hundred dollars US. No, it’s not a significant amount of money, but it’s a hundred dollars US for stories that I already earned money off of once; they’re still, some of them are in short story collections I have published in print ebook and audio book where I’m still earning money on.
And I can still sell reprint rights to. So the beautiful thing is that it can live multiple lives, a short story. It can be sold and the reprint rights can be sold. Douglas Smith is a perfect example. He’s a Canadian author who has sold foreign language rights to previously published stories, where not does he only get paid to have them published in Italian and Spanish, French, and German, but they’ll actually get rewritten and edited.
And then in some cases even gets the rights back to them in that language. So he can then resell them to other markets. So the great thing about short stories is that you can also do some other things. Like I’m a huge fan of themed collections. So again, my very first book was …What is it? 18 or 19 previously published stories.
Some of them weren’t, some of them were originals that I just stuck in cause they fit, but then I’ve pulled some out and I have a short story collection that is… I call them Digital Chapbooks and this is called Active Reader. And it’s stories about bookish horror or Twilight zone style tails. Three short stories.
I think that was two of which were previously published. One was original and now Active Reader is available as theme. Nice little Digital Chapbook it’s only about 15,000 words. It’s three short stories with stories behind the stories. I’ve got Bumps in the Night, which is four tales meant to be right around a campfire.
Now some of those stories appear in my One Hand Screaming short story collection, other ones appear in other short story collections, I did a series of short story collections that were all themed. The greater theme was called nocturnal screams. And again, it would be three or four short stories, and I actually rapid released them initially experimented with putting that into KDP Select for exclusivity to see if I could game the system and all this stuff that the cool kids were doing. And I played around with it. I had a good time and then I went wide with it and it’s actually done way better. Again, it’s not the best-selling of my works, but I have the individual Chatbooks all themed by these are ghost stories. And these are stories about strangers and these are stories about zombies and these are stories about whatever, right?
So they’re all themed, but then I can do digital bundles of books one through three, or one through four and all eight books, for example, which retails for more than $20, which I can include in Kobo promos, where they’re looking for expensive items that are going to get discounted. I have resold them audio book rights, some of the short stories, for example, One of the ones that I self published in One Hand Screaming, I was blown away. I got a mail from McGraw Hill Ryerson, a Canadian academic publisher saying, oh, we read this story in One Hand Screaming, it was a photocopy of the stories. So it’s like somebody had a print copy somewhere in it. It’s not that I’ve sold that many, that there’s tens of thousands out there. It was a photocopy of a really short story.
I think it was under a thousand words and it was the retelling of that old classic tales of the hook, the couple are in a car and they hearing on the radio that there’s an escaped convict who has a hook for a hand. And that’s how they know. And then in the original story, she panics and says, let’s get out of here.
And then when he goes to let her off at home and open the door for her, there’s a hook stuck in the handle. Like he was just about to kill them. So I told that story from the criminal’s perspective, who was just wanting to escape. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he escaped from prison and he’s trying to get out.
And then he overhears the argument in the car and then they, they tear off and rip his hand off. And he’s upset because they had better science. That could have been more than a hook. But anyways, that was the story and it was called Almost, and they wanted to reprint it. They wanted me to remove ahead a little bit of sexual stuff in there because he’s excited to see these teenagers making out before the audio thing comes on and interrupts everyone.
They wanted me to clean it up, remove some of the adult language and they’ve been using it as a curriculum, actually, there’s been a school, a high school in British Columbia, Canada. That’s been using it almost every year for the past four or five years. And I got a check again from the short story. Every quarter, every time they print it in a book because they’re using it to identify techniques of suspense in fiction writing so that when they’re learning about writing, they can read the short story.
So the benefit to me is I’m making additional money every year I get checks two or three times a year from them every time they print more copies of this customized textbook, but also there may be people who grow up to go, oh, Mark Leslie, he’s written other things. And I probably, and there’s no way of measuring this, they might have discovered some of my other stuff, which is creepy, dark, mysterious writing. So it’s like the gift short stories can be the gift that keep on giving. They’re also like a song or a poem or short enough and small enough that you can quickly consume them and then want to get more. So that is the other benefit too.
It’s not, ok, I need 8 to 12 hours to read this. As I can read this in half an hour, I can listen to this while waiting for my bus or in line at the grocery store. If it happens to be audio. Hopefully those are just some ideas of things you can do with short stories.
Michele Amitrani: Yeah, they can be consumed even faster. One thing that I was listening while you were talking is the word ‘possibilities’.
You can really use the same thing in different years for several different opportunities. So this is something that connects very well also with the book Wide for the Win when you were talking about intellectual property, you can do that different ways in different times when you publish that story, when you are 35, then at 65, that might be another opportunity.
As you said, you will use it so many, so many times.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah, exactly. That is the possibilities. Yeah. They’re always there.
Michele Amitrani: Let’s just say there is a listener, he or she listened to you are very interested in writing and publishing short stories as a beginning. They are not confident in writing a novel yet, but to these people, what would you suggest as a releasing schedule?
Let’s say, should they write and publish a story at the beginning of every month, every couple of months, do you think there is something that can be used for people that are interested in specifically writing fiction that is shorter, releasing-wise? What would you say?
Releasing schedule with short stories
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: The great thing is that there is not one way of doing it, but I think the more often you write, the more stories you’re right. So I think I was at Ray Bradbury or there was, it was an author, a science fiction author that had decided: I’m going to write a story a week for 52 weeks. And at the end of the year, he had 52 stories he could sell, he could now. Publish, self-publish put them in themes, you have all kinds of options.
You have them available to give as gifts. I wrote your story for your birthday, right? That kind of thing. There’s no shortage of that. At the end of there, you probably are going to have some pretty crappy stories that aren’t worth anything, but you have 52 of them. Chances are a small selection of them are going to be awesome. And having the practice gets you into the habit of it. And you have all these. Again, you have 52 little assets that you can use in different ways.
I think practices is important. The other thing is I use, I sometimes use short fiction as a palette cleanser between longer projects.
Okay. Finish this book. I’m working on this project. Oh, I need to just like, have a nice, fresh, refreshing glass of water between this great wine and this delicious stoke beer. I’m going to have the palette cleanser, which is the short story, which is like: Ah,, I feel good. Now I can go back to some bigger projects.
So that’s another way you can think of a short fiction. Short fiction can also be a Kickstarter for your creative process. Sometimes it takes me a while when I sit down in the morning to write. The first half hour is kind of—you’re noodling over things and you’re getting warmed up. Sometimes warming up on short fiction can actually be really exciting.
And again, when I say short fiction, I’m thinking about shorter forms. I have sold Twitter stories. The most money I made per word was I actually sold that. There used to be a market called ‘tweet the meat’, and it was horror fiction for Twitter and it was like 12 words. I made more money per word, off of that than anything I’ve ever sold.
Postcard fiction poetry I used to for a writing warm-up is I would write parody lyrics to existing songs to warm my brain up to get into the creative methodology. Same here’s the beat and cadence and sounds from the song, I’m going to use the background music in my head and rewrite them like several of the songs here is this was a, I called it Whaling Jenny and it’s: ‘Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys, she sings. Mama, don’t let your little ones grow up at all. Because they’re better to eat once you chop off their feet and preserve, they can last through the fall.’ That’s it. That’s the whole poem based on what song it’s obviously based on. One of the ones is that with ode to EAP, Elvis Presley was, instead of, ‘are you lonesome tonight?’ Is ‘are you vengeful tonight?’ about a man worried about his lover he killed coming back to kill him. And so many of my… I ended up that was a writing warm-up exercise that I ended up selling to a market and then reselling at least two times. So I think any of those things you can do, whether you’re using pallet cleansers, whether you use them as exercises or practice, or even just warm up writing exercises may be able to be put to use later on those chunks or nuggets may be able to be incorporated into something else.
Crystal Hunt: Very cool. Definitely a lot of interesting opportunities in the short. I started writing short because I thought, what? if I’m going to learn from doing this whole story arc, I want to learn quick. I don’t want to wait for 15 years. I’ve heard people say, it’s not till like your 10th or 11th book that you start to get a sense of your own voice as a writer.
And I was like, wait, I’m waiting 15 or 20 years for that to happen? Just not that patience. Okay. Let’s just tighten this up a little bit on the timeline and it did turn out to be actually quite profitable, which worked out great. But yeah, it’s interesting to look at how the shortening up of it changes your entire outlook.
And I think you get a lot less precious about each thing when you’ve written a whole bunch of them. And so you’re more willing to kill the darlings where they need to be killed or to experiment with different things and that can be a really valuable kind of craft development. We’ve been on a craft series kick here on our podcast, but that’s a really good way to build your writerly chops and get the whole beginning, middle and end, instead of writing 23 stories where you get stuck in the middle, shorten it up and, and get her done to see how that feels. It’s very rewarding.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah. I liked how you say that. It’s not as precious. You’re like, Hey, I’ve got a lot of these now.
Crystal Hunt: Yeah. And then some people are, so we’re going to switch a little bit to publishing wide and marketing stuff, but some people are so resistant to the idea of giving away a story is just horrific because, like I spent three years writing this novel. There’s no way I’m giving it to anybody who hasn’t shelled out their money to have it. But if you have a whole bunch of stories and you didn’t necessarily spend three years putting it together, you can be more generous more easily with that.
And you can have all these different marketing tidbits. And so that I think is an interesting thing to pick your brain about. So when it comes to using short stuff to help market your wide published fiction, what are a few of the sort of what he’s the most effective methods of doing that?
Methods to market your short fiction
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah, exactly. One of the things you said is giving it away to people, a few different ways of giving them away. So I have actual independent standalone single stories for free, everywhere that you’re allowed to publish books for free, but sometimes Amazon price matches. Sometimes they don’t. I set it to 99 cents and sometimes they price match.
So I like to say it’s free everywhere, except some places that it might not be free cause they’re dicks or they ride Dixon to space. Sorry, I’m just talking about the news lately. And I hope I can say dick on this podcast because I’ve said it three times already. So my apologies for taking it down a couple notches, but I’ve got those opportunities to make them available for free because then if somebody likes you, they can try you out for free.
Very limited. And it’s like half an hour of my time, 45 minutes of my time to read this or 20 minutes or whatever it is. And if they like you… and that’s whether it’s free or whether it appears in an anthology that you may have sold, or it may be an anthology that’s collaborations where nobody gets paid up front, but everyone gets a small share.
There’s different opportunities. Draft to Digital has payment splitting where you can do that sort of thing. That’s discoverability. Oh, I bought this anthology because it has a story from Dean Wesley Smith and I’m a huge fan and I buy everything he’s written. Oh, there’s this Mark Leslie, this weird, funny dark humour poem.
Huh? It seems like a funny guy. I’m going to go, oh, he’s written other things. I might read one of his books or one of his other stories. There’s the ability to write short fiction that’s only available for newsletter subscribers. Okay! This is a side character that people are very interested in, want to know more about.
Okay. There’s a story featuring just them and you only get it when you sign up for my newsletter. You can even use them for bonus. There was a friend of mine who is a writer who wrote a Christmas story every year to give to his family. And it was a short story and he would… this is back prior to print on demand being so much easier than it was today… but he would actually have just a few copies bound.
Right? I think Kelly Armstrong writes stories specifically free for her fans that she may never publish, or she may rewrite later on and republish. But again, it’s a treat for fans. It’s a window into your writing. It’s discoverability. There’s so many things you can do. And I really think it’s really hard to get discovered as a writer.
So if I’ve got, so I’ve got a handful of short stories. So for example, Snowman Shivers is one of my digital chatbooks, which is two snowman tales, both had been previously published and I’d made a little bit of money. It’s free and ebook format. I have a print version because more people still read print than ebooks.
I know it sounds weird for any authors to ever realize that, but that’s why they think publishers don’t know what they’re doing because publishers are focused on, completely on print and have no idea what’s going on in the book world really compared to indie authors. And so I’ve got a print version, that’s $5. It makes a nice product that I can sell at my table amongst my full length, full price books. Even some of my traditionally published books that are $25 for paperback. So I was like, oh, five bucks. Okay. Yeah, I have it available in audio book. It’s cheaper to produce an audio book for short story because you’re paying by the hour.
So if they charge 250 bucks, and it’s a half hour story you’re paying. I can’t do the math $75 or a short story collection is, oh, it’s only an hour and 45 minutes therefore I’m not paying through the nose to be quite honest for all of the audio books I’ve done myself that I’ve paid for, the only ones that have earned their money back have been the short fiction ones.
My novels, which cost me thousands of dollars, I haven’t earned thousands of dollars back on them yet, but the other ones I have earned hundreds of dollars. And so I’ve earned my money back faster. Now that here’s the other great thing: I pay for short story, it costs me whatever, a couple hundred bucks and then this short story, that short story, I can take those same short stories so long as I’ve paid the narrators upfront and I own the rights I can remix them and make unique audio books of all those stories that are a full length book that would have cost me thousands of dollars, but I had them pay for themselves on their own and then I merged them together into a larger product. So again, so much flexibility. I’ve also even posted some of the free, short stories online on YouTube for… I’m not yet at a thousand followers for our subscribers. So I can’t yet monetize it. However it is discoverability and I’ve done free readings on YouTube, on Tik Tok on Instagram, on, on the various social media, on Facebook, social media platforms.
I even did for almost a full year as I did free fright. So I would either read a short story. I already had. Live talk about it, answer questions. If there were comments or I would, if it was non-fiction, most of my nonfiction I’ve sold the rights to a publisher. So I wouldn’t read the story cause technically I’d be in violation of the right assigned over to them.
But I could talk about the research behind that chapter of that book. And again, the whole idea was that free to just draw people in and go, oh, this is interesting. Maybe they’ll buy his book or maybe I’ll buy one of his short story collections or one of his novels.
Crystal Hunt: And one of your books that I read and thought was really helpful is all about working with libraries.
And that is an area where those short stories and the audio books become potentially very profitable because you get paid for library listeners of your short audio books. And those that’s where I make most of my money off audio. So I know that it adds up. In your Wide for the Win book you talk about some of those other bits and pieces as well.
And we often recommend people read your whole collection of author books to get a broad scope of things. But I would…
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: I recommend that too.
Crystal Hunt: You take the time to write a bunch of things that are complimentary. Just go all in people. We’re not about halfway here.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah. They’re all linked together. They look nice on the shelf. They’re all white. They’ve got the same branding looking feel.
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, exactly. And one of the most recent ones in that collection is the Wide for the Win book.
And we had Erin Wright on the podcast a few episodes ago, talking about wide for the win as a concept, we would love to pick your brain a little bit. You’ve seen a lot of authors, you’ve worked with and coached a lot of authors. You’re at tons of these industry events and conferences. What has bubbled up for you as being the thing that people most often do wrong when they take ongoing wide, whether it’s short or long stories, but where do people go awry.
Biggest mistakes people make when going wide
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: The biggest one? And I know Erin is in line with this too, is that they publish wide and then stop there. They don’t actually even look at their books or attend to their books on other platforms.
They only look at Amazon, they only pay attention to Amazon. They only ask for Amazon reviews. So that’s one of the huge, the biggest issues is they publish wide and then assume, oh, it’s everyone else’s responsibility, but mine to sell. But when it comes to Amazon, it’s my responsibility. So there’s this self-fulfilling prophecy that really hurts them in the long run because then they think it’s the platform’s fault.
Not their fault. Yeah, Amazon is the world’s biggest bookstore. I get it. They have bazillions customers, but these other platforms do have tons and tons of customers. Maybe not as many, but they still have customers. And those costumers probably haven’t read your book and there’s ways to reach them. So getting at those customers is great.
The other thing I think is writers don’t… when I say, ‘wide’ I even go further than Erin. Because she goes ‘wide’ when it comes to any publishing and publishing to indie platforms, I’m wide, like I’m going, I need you to be wide everywhere. I want you to think about again… Michele was talking about the IP, intellectual property. Yes. This idea you had was a book could be a story. It could be a poem, could be a song, could be whatever could be TV show could be whatever. Don’t limit yourself to just thinking about one or two formats. Open your mind up to the possibility. I’ve earned money, I talked about the Snowman Shivers stuff sold the e-book sold the audio book, print book as well.
I have made money getting paid, doing talks where or reading of the same stories that are available. So I’ve leveraged the same sort of thing I’ve even leveraged my IP. So I said, I’ve, I sold the rights to Haunted Hamilton was the first book I did with a traditional publisher here in Canada. And they have the audio book.
So I don’t have the audio book rights to it, but I did release through voice map, voicemap.com, GPS enabled virtual walking tours. I have a walking tour of downtown haunted Hamilton where not only am I selling the books, but I have a walking tour that’s based on the research that went into writing haunted Hamilton, where it’s 4,99 US and every time someone buys one of those virtual walking tours and goes and takes the walk on their own, they hear me telling them a ghost story. I recycle it. The research I use to sell a book to a publisher, which I still make money off of. And now I’m making new money off of that. I do continue to get speaking engagements, paid speaking engagements, even for the work I put into that book, Haunted Hamilton.
So for example, so even though I licensed my rights way and I got an advance check in every year, I get royalties, I still can make money off those things. So wide it isn’t just publishing thinking Kindle versus the rest of ebook space. Wide is all formats as many formats as possible. And then as many ways that your IP can be leveraged for you to make money as a creative person.
Crystal Hunt: I love that focus on the multiple streams. I think people often think: I’m going to be a full-time author. I’m going to write this book and then I’m going to make it that one a bestseller. And then that’s going to be the thing that makes me the money. But when you actually talk to authors earning a full-time living and doing this full time, there are not very many who have a book or two.
That’s not a career that you build on just that. No, that’s a lightning strike exactly in space from a unicorn.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: It happens.
Crystal Hunt: It’s definitely not… If you’re looking for strategically building your author career, this is not the thing that you plan for. So you mentioned something interesting.
You get these speaking gigs and other things, and we didn’t really talk about how having an established back catalog and somebody going to your website and seeing that you have 22 published items. I mean, they don’t check to see how many pages are in those items. That’s not the first thing. It’s like you have a degree, but people don’t call up your record of what you got in biology 1 0 1. That’s not a…
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Did you get 99, or did you get 69?
Crystal Hunt: Hello? A hundred. So, yeah, it’s an interesting thing to think about as a career builder and as establishing yourself in a voice, in an industry as well. And I think that gets glossed over a lot, but you really have highlighted it multiple times with our necessarily focusing in on that, but the way that you do what you do is by growing in all of the ways as a writer and a publisher. And you mentioned earlier, like experimenting where you had this thing and you were like, well, let’s just see what happens when I do this. And it goes back to that ability to play around a little bit more and to experiment with things because you’re not like this is my one shot.
Everything is riding on this one book and this one has to work perfectly exactly the way it’s supposed to, or my whole career is over and I had failed and that’s a lot of fricking pressure.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: That’s way too much pressure. You can’t do that to yourself. That’s not fair. But again, like you said, multiple streams of income, so stories are multiple tiny streams of income, but the more you have, the more likely… and again, when I put Almost, which I don’t think I’d ever sold anywhere when I included it in the short story collection in 2004, One Hand Screaming, I had no idea that this story would probably earn me far more per word than had I even sold it to highest paying market that was available at the time, which would have been Playboy where they get thousands of dollars if we could sell them short story. I had no idea that the story…. but I thought it felt good. It felt like it would be in the, in, in, in the collection I put together and somehow, who knows how by making it available, someone found it, somebody wants to saw a use for it. That was neat. So that’s the other thing, right? When you have your work out there in multiple formats and multiple ways, people will find ways other people will find ways potentially to leverage you. They may say: oh my God, you’ve got this story that I read that you posted on your blog or I’m WhatPad, or whatever I’m doing an anthology.
Would you like to be included? We only pay this much, like it’s only 50 bucks. It’s only $25. So only $25 coming into my pocket is better than anything leaving my pocket. So I’ll take any of those streams of revenue because they all up over time. And the more assets you have out there floating around, meaning if one of them dries up or something doesn’t work or get the royalty check from my publisher this year is not as big as it was in previous years, I have the three dozen other streams coming in that I might not even notice. So that’s the benefit, a lot less stress for yourself. Like you said, Crystal.
Crystal Hunt: I’m curious because you have a nice high level view of things going on in the market place and in the industry. If you can break out your crystal skull for a minute. What are some of the things on the horizon that you think are the most exciting or interesting for indie folks that we should maybe keep our eyes on and, or do a little experimentation in play with over the next little while.
New opportunities for indie authors
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah, of course, future thinking. I think we’re still early. We are so early in the digital revolution. I know a lot of people think, oh, the Kindle gold rush days of 2012 are pas. No! We are so early in this phase, most people have never read any ebook, even pandemic, post pandemic when bookstores were closed.
And the only way you can get books was digital books easily. Most people have still never read an ebook. So the growth in the ebook market alone is henomenal. The growth in the audio book market is phenomenal, but the growth of the ability for authors to collaborate with one another, to collaborate with publishers in new and unique ways, the publishers are not yet open to most of them.
The ways that they can collaborate with their readers through social media, through their own website, they’ve never had more access to readers in than ever before. I think collaboration, I said this, I think it was eight years ago at a talk I did for Writers of the Future: ‘The future of publishing is going to be more collaboration’.
We haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg of collaboration. So that’s really important. The other thing is even the authors in the author space who are making six and seven figures, you think of the Mark Dawson’s and the Murray Forces and the Diane Capris and all of those major authors, Bella Andre, even Hugh Howey, nobody knows who they are outside of our spaces.
Nobody. I know Mark Dawson makes six figures a month minimum or whatever on what he’s selling but nobody’s ever heard of Mark Dawson. You can walk into the average books and it’s all at your right, I really enjoy these Jack Richard’s stories, you should read Mark Dawson. (The answer would be) I never heard of him.
So the reality is even the authors who are killing it and making a killing, have still barely tapped into the potential.
And so I’m so optimist that if you believe in it, if you work hard enough at it, and if you really put out the best products you can and you pay attention to the business and you stick it out for the long run, that there’s a possibility that the right readers are going to find you and resonate with you.
And I’ll be honest with you I’ve been in the industry long enough. I’ve seen the highs and lows. I’ve seen authors peter out and drop off and disappear. But I’ve also seen the cycles of nobody reads vampire fiction anymore. And rice was popular in the seventies and eighties with the redoing vampire. No, one’s going to read vampire fiction again.
And publisher said, no, one’s going to read vampire fiction again. Stephanie Meyer proved them wrong. And there, there are fans who will only ever read vampire fiction. So if a big publisher is not doing vampire fiction, because it’s not cool right now, there are indie author who are killing it because that’s all they write and that’s all they care about and that’s all they’re passionate and they’re millions and millions of readers who care nothing about reading that one genre. So if you really believe in something you’re really passionate about it, chances are there’s readers that are too. Do not give up on yourself. We’re in this for the long run. There’s so many opportunities and we haven’t even reached the tip of the iceberg yet.
Crystal Hunt: Speaking of not reaching the tip of the iceberg our hour has flown past in a heartbeat and we have barely cracked the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things that Mark can talk about for us and so what we’re going to do is send you off to listen to his podcast because there’s hours and hours, in fact, hundreds of hours, I believe, of on Stark Reflections on writing and publishing, and we’ll put links in the show notes, of course,
Mark, we would love it if you could tell our listeners, where should they go if they’re looking for more of you beyond our podcast?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Yeah. If you want more of me, whether you want it or not, you can find most of it via markleslie.ca. There’s links to pretty much everything there.
Crystal Hunt: Perfect. Thank you so much for your time today.
It was really wonderful chatting with you. I feel like we could’ve just kept going longer. We’ll have to have you back at a future time and we’ll shift our topics. In fact, I know that you are writing a book with Joanna Penn and we would love to talk about that approach, which is I’m hoping we can talk about that, it’s come out in newsletters, but the Relaxed Author, which… I’m a health psychologist by background, I’m super interested in balance and maintaining the lifestyle and things like that. So we would love to have you back to talk about that potentially with Joanna, whenever that book is ready to go live, that would be really fun to dig into some of that stuff.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: That would be, because I’ve never written a book like that in my life and it’s just so relaxing.
Crystal Hunt: You look relaxed. It’s clearly you’re qualified to talk about this, so that’s great. All right, everybody, we hope you enjoyed today’s show. Remember to hit that subscribe button wherever you’re listening to the podcast and to visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com for show notes and links to the books, resources and tools that we talked about in today’s episode.
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Michele Amitrani: Happy writing everyone.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Happy writing everyone.