Have you ever come to the sudden realization that you’re doing something simply because that’s the way you’ve always done it? And there’s no real reason not to change it? And, in fact, there might be a few good reasons to change it?
I think that’s where I’m at right now with my collections.
When I got started, way back in 2014, I tried to be experimental and try new things, but I had a kind of clear goal with my collections. At one point, they were an experiment to me: write six episodes, collect them in trilogies, then collect two trilogies into a Season. And it worked. Like REALLY well. Back then, those Complete Seasons were what paid my fucking bills for the most part.
So I think that, combined with the uncertainty of how Amazon felt about putting something in the KU twice (once as a stand-alone title and again in a collection) really locked doing it just like that into my head. It wasn’t until recently that I even had the notion that I should probably be unlocking that bonus content I generated for the collections.
But it kind of just hit me today, for some reason, that I should stop doing this. Tons of people are releasing their Complete Trilogies and Complete Series in the Kindle Unlimited alongside their stand-alone titles.
So that’s what I’m going to do as an experiment. For now, I’ve made the first titles in Hellcats & Desire free, and I want to see how that does. But for the rest of my titles, I’ll be slowly working them into the Kindle Unlimited.
This will include the bonus content short stories.
Which is why I am going to cancel the Quickies. Since the beginning, even when I was excited about the idea of Quickies, something has felt off about them. Kind of…I don’t know, sloppy, I guess? Asymmetrical, unbalanced, uncertain. Just off. Although I’ve generated a fair amount of new content, it just hasn’t been feeling right. It’s been kind of fun writing for old stuff, but it’s also be unusually taxing. I’m terrible at writing short stories, to be honest. I don’t enjoy them and they slow me down way more than you’d think they would, and almost no one seems to be buying them. Not that I blame people.
So this is what I’m going to do. With the exception of Hellcats & Desire, given I can’t enroll them in the KU since they’re on other sites and part of the First Title Free experiment, I will take down the Quickies and integrate any bonus content into the Complete Trilogy and Complete Series and put them in the KU once they are updated. I’ll also probably drop at least some of them to 99 cents to help with visibility.
What does this mean for the immediate future? Well, since I’m putting a halt on Quickies, I’ll dive right into Haven - Epilogue.