Can you make money writing short stories?

How long is a short story?

Someone challenged me to write a short story per day for a week. Authors like to prove how fast our fingers can move, much like gunslingers in the Old West would call out other shooters to check out their pistol skills.

I've been in a 100k words in a month challenge, the always fun NANOWRIMO in November where everybody is encouraged to write their first novel, or third, or more.

And I've even challenged myself to get work done, to finish faster and get stories out there, especially when I get an email or review from a reader who says they're waiting!

But a wor dslinger called me out on writing shorts for a week.

The challenge was, "Can you write a short story per day for seven days?"

I thought, man, that would be fun to try.

Especially if I got out four prequels in the Z series, and 3 sci fi shorts that have been lingering on my to do list.

But then I had a thought.  I have over a dozen novels that are just 10k words from being done, but exist as stand alone titles, meaning they are not in a series.

My stand alone titles don't do as well at finding readers.  Take Holy War for example. Fast fun, action packed about Templar Knights fighting in a narrow mountain pass against invading Saracens.  It gets read about 5 times per month.

No traction.  Could be the cover. Could be the title. Could be that it's just 1 book.

Compare it to Battlefield Z, book 1 of 6 in the series now.  It gets about 500 reads per month, and a lot of folks who like it go on to books 2-6.

Which brings me back to the challenge.  Instead of trying to decide how, which and if I could write 7 short stories in a week, what if I could finish 7 novels by adding 5k-10k words to each in a week.

Each is a stand alone title, but may be worth putting up and out there just to see how the challenge goes.

Anyway, I’ll be exploring a lot of this on my blog in the coming months. Many of the posts will debut on my Patreon page first. There’s already some exclusive content on that site as well about licensing and thought and changes.

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Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

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