Posted on DriveThruFiction

I must have purchased over 100 items from DriveThruRPG over the years.  They're one of the largest markets of PDF and print and print-on-demand gaming books.  More and more works have become available from the 80s and 90s from classic game systems.  So I have whole folders of RPG reference material from them, and recently bought a huge bundle that ended up being about 50 PDF books for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition.  Wow.  It's never-ending.

They always seemed like a very active market, with a lot of free preview editions and Pay What You Want items.  I have known for years that they had a sister site for fiction: DriveThruFiction.  I'm just not sure why I never thought to list any of my own items there.

This weekend I set up three of my existing poetry chapbooks.  They were already in PDF format, so there wasn't much work to do.  Their forms were fairly simple.  There was an interesting part where (if your documents is a PDF) you can choose a page range to make an automatic preview document.  So if I wanted to showcase page 6 to 9 as my free preview, just enter 6 and 9.  You could upload a cover and some other graphics, then upload the main document and click "Make Public."  You get a message saying to allow up to 3 days for the submission to be approved.  That's reasonable.  I like that content is approved by someone before appearing on the marketplace.

It turns out, all three were approved by noon the next day, and that was a sunday.  So here they are:

I will be adding more documents, probably newer editions of past books and chapbooks.  My author page is here.

I don't know if this will be worth the time.  For most sites with tons of content, you always feel like just another fish in the ocean.  If a site has a half million items and only 10 of them are yours, you are just a tiny percentage.  And these are just Pay What You Want with recommended $2 each. They are just 27-30 page booklets -- old poetry chaps won't be popular, but I thought their poetry collection could use a little more weird.  ;-).  Still, most of my creative output has been for pizza money, so maybe this can earn a salad somewhere down the line.

I tried doing some research, and you can always find videos and blogs talking about how every attempt to promote work is always a waste of time.  Or similar content saying how wonderful it is, and how this one person makes thousands of $$ a month.  What's real and what isn't?

You never know unless you try, and it's another platform where I am now visible in some form.  I will try to report in future posts about how it works out. 

I realize that most of the content on these sites was submitted by publishers, or at least very small companies.  I can't see going through the trouble of establishing yet another business name.  I'm just an author offering my own works.  All of the rights reverted back to me at some point, and I should be able to use them as I see fit.

The 2024 Novel Writing Tools Bundle

I am a sucker for online bundle deals.  They are such a modern, fun way to get a lot of content at a good price -- some of them are even "pay what you want".  Some of they send a percent to a charity: in this case you have the option to donate to the Neil Peart Brain Cancer Research Fund.  Here is a bundle that I heard about from Kevin J. Anderson, and he would know, since he is the curator.

This is The 2024 Novel Writing Tools Bundle, and you can find it here until Nov 30.  My little screen grab does not show all the book included, but I wanted to highlight the one by KJA called "On Being a Dictator."

I have always admired his ability to be out hiking at some amazing location and dictate chapters of his books into some device.  I have tried it a few times, but hearing my own voice makes me self-conscious around people, or immediately knocks me out of story mode.  Or both.  I just can't get enough separation to make it work, so that's the book I wanted most, and I hope some of the others can help me feel relevant or productive again.

I just wanted to pass this along.  A good little library put together by a good guy for a good cause.  Worth sharing.

Another Sale or Two, new Poems and new Blanks

I sold another poem to Dreams & Nightmares last week and have a flash fiction coming out in Flash Digest (Jan 2025).  I really need to get more submissions out there.

I brought some scrap paper to a winery in Escondido about 3 weeks back, where Astra Kelly was playing.  Look her up.  When there is live music playing, it helps disconnect me from day-to-day worries, and I can fill a few pages with poems and fragments.  So I got some new pieces done, none of them especially "genre", so I don't have any idea where to send them.  I don't know what's up with the vast percent of "literary" zines paying copies only.  I am not expecting a ton of $$, but zero is too low for me.

I have posted plenty of articles on my various blogs, so those are rolling along nicely.

Today we drove up to Ramona and did some thrifting before seeing Astra again at a different winery.  This time, the pages stayed blank.

I have ideas in my head.  Some new story settings.  Some old tales to dredge up and overhaul after 20-30 years of dust.  

I also want to get a few mini-collections into PDFs for DriveThruFiction.com.  I must have gathered over 200 titles from DriveThruRPG over the years, and you would think that the fiction cousin of that site would be a good match for me.  But you know how creative minds sabotage themselves -- I have had works on many sites over decades and failed to get a single actual sale, so when you get onto a site with hundreds of thousands of competing items, you expect to be just a drop in a bucket.  I can see myself spending hours getting this set up, only to get nothing out of it.

But it's still a bug in my ear this week.  Meant to do it, got hung up on other things.

That is the writing news for this week, such as it is...