The Never-ending FAQ: Doing the Mid-Year Pivot

As we head into the final weeks of Q2 2024, we’ve been taking a very close look at what we’ve been doing in the past year, and especially at what’s been happening with our book sales and SHOWCASE daily readership numbers. We can think, hope, and believe what we like, but raw data doesn’t lie. Here’s what the numbers tell us.

1. Sales of Stupefying Stories cratered after the release of Stupefying Stories 26. That book was an enormous and expensive flop. It didn’t just fail. It seems to have strangled all interest in every previous issue that was also available.
   
   
2. Our best-selling title this year is The Princess Scout. After that it’s all original novels on our top-sellers list, and mostly from backlist. The only short story collection in our Top 20 this year is Stupefying Stories 25.
   
   
3. SHOWCASE readership is on a steady downward trend. Average daily readership dropped by half when we closed to submissions. This tells us people weren’t reading the stories because they liked the stories; they were reading them in hopes of figuring out how to sell a story to us. This also tells us we’re doing a better job of reaching writers than of reaching readers, and this is a serious problem.
   
   
4. The primary objective of SHOWCASE was to draw new readers in and hopefully to get them to take a look at the books we have for sale. This is not happening. We aren’t drawing in new readers, and the SHOWCASE readers we do have aren’t even clicking through to read earlier SHOWCASE stories by the same author, much less taking a closer look at the books we’re trying to sell.
   
   
5. Concurrently, our decision to “go wide” and distribute on every e-book platform we could find was a serious strategic blunder. Yes, we sell a few books on Nook, Kobo, and Apple Books every once in a rare while, but all the other e-book platforms we’re on are a complete waste of time. Worse, to go wide we had to give up being on Kindle Unlimited, and that opportunity cost turned out to be far too high.
   

So it’s time for us to perform a mid-year course correction and pivot to a new heading, to improve business in the second half of 2024. Here’s what we plan to do, and what it means to you.

1. We are going to wind down and phase out SHOWCASE, as a daily free flash fiction feature.
   
   DON’T PANIC! It’s will to take us three months to do this. If you have a story that is under contract for SHOWCASE, we will publish it, sometime between now and the end of August.
   
   If you’re going to demand that we give you a firm publication date for your story right this very minute: please don’t.
   
   
2. We have already begun the process of pulling all of our books back from wide distribution. This is a slow process that may take weeks, but as soon as we can confirm that a given book is exclusively on Kindle, we will enroll it in Kindle Unlimited, to make it available free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
   
   Yes, we know we complained that being on KU cannibalizes sales of short story collections. But once we considered whether ‘twas better to have people read only one or two stories in Stupefying Stories 26 or never to read it at all, the answer was obvious.
    
3. On the subject of Kindle Unlimited, take a look at this:
   
   
   
   The authors were kind enough to give us permission to reactivate the Amazon listing, so SHOWCASE #1 is back on Amazon, and this time it’s free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
   
   That’s right. SHOWCASE isn’t going away forever. It’s going back into the shop, to be retooled and redesigned. We’ve been doing this with SHOWCASE ever since its inception as a weekly webzine ten-plus years ago: in fact, the first ten issues of the original version of SHOWCASE are still out there, waiting for you to discover them.
   
   We have a sizable backlog of stories out there, waiting to be found by new readers. We’re currently in the process of reaching out to past contributors and either reactivating the Amazon listings for selected backlist titles, as in the case of SHOWCASE #1, or putting together new collections under the Stupefying Stories Presents aegis. SHOWCASE will return…
   
   Just not as a free webzine, and not as a flash-fiction-only title. The next iteration will look a lot more like SHOWCASE #1, which was always meant to be a prototype.
    
4. The long-delayed print editions of Stupefying Stories 24 and Stupefying Stories 26 will be coming out this summer. Our targets for these books are to have them out in July, at about the same time as they finally come off wide distribution and we can put them on Kindle Unlimited.
    
5. Right now I am working on Stupefying Stories 27, which has a release date target of Monday, July 1st. So if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get back to work.
   
   

Any more questions?

~brb

Categories: The Never-ending FAQ