Let’s Get Digital

Remember that old tune by Olivia Newton John, Let’s Get Physical? Yeah, me too. I’ve had that song in my head all day today, only I’ve been replacing the word ‘physical’ with ‘digital.’

I’ve been fighting it for so long, not wanting to accept that my beloved paperbacks were going the way of the dinosaur. Oh, it’ll still be a few years before they’re completely extinct, if at all, but they are certainly dwindling away for various reasons. I didn’t want to accept the digital age of fiction. Who the hell would want to read books on a hand held device? The answer, as it turns out, is a lot! I got curious, ended up buying an e-reader and low and behold, I’m one of those people. Now I’ve embraced digital fiction like a long lost lover and am slipping it the tongue.

I recently announced a series of short stories that I’m doing called Deviant Dollars. These are short, 2,500-3,000 word stories that I am writing and selling for $0.99 cents. At first I was just going to sell them on my website in PDF form. Then I decided that I was going to put them up on Smashwords and try and gather some sales that way. Now I’ve decided that I’m publishing them myself directly to the Amazon Kindle. I’m getting digital.

As a content creator, this is an exciting time for me. I’m learning so much about digital publishing, what works in terms of marketing and getting the word out there. It’s basically a chance for me to step away from the FREE model that I’ve been using for so long, and test the waters of the digital age of fiction as it relates to e-readers and e-books. Will it be successful? Who knows, but I’m willing to be one of the first of my kind to branch out and try new things in terms of monetizing my fiction. My short story, SNOWMEN, just went up for sale in the Kindle store this morning, and already it’s selling better than 371,000 other e-books that are there. It’s not ranked at a high number, but it’s certainly far from the middle and right now, that gives me hope and validates my decision to do this.

I know that it’s going to take time and effort and a little ingenuity to sustain those numbers, and make them climb higher, and I’m okay with that. Nothing happens over night. The important thing right now is to keep writing, keep telling stories, keep giving stuff away for free, develop a presence on Amazon by leaving a digital paper trail so that when my book Escape hits the shelves in March of 2011 from Simon & Schuster, people will already know me. They’ll know me from my short stories, my novellas and say, “Hey, he’s got a novel out now. I think I’ll check that out.”

Whether I fall flat on my face, or end up scaling the mountain that is before me, I just want to be able to say that I did my best, and for any author, creator, artist, musician, that’s what it’s all about. Doing the best you can with the tools you have so at the end of the  day you can look back and say you gave it your all. If you succeed, great! If it fails, you can pick yourself up, dust off the cobwebs and move on to scaling another mountain. Rest assure, there will always be new models to try.

So if you want to help support this creative venture that I’m on, head on over to Amazon and grab a copy of SNOWMEN. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can buy it at Smashwords, and if all else fails, you can order a PDF copy directly from me. All formats for just $0.99 cents.

Let’s get digital, baby!

~JM