Emailed Short Story Subscription Service And A Little About J. Thorn

I happened to watch a video from the Self Publishing Formula YouTube channel regarding their interview with author J. Thorn. And I’ve managed to gain a good insight of how authors these days are making money besides self-publishing their novels.

J. Thorn may not be a very rich author from writing novels, but he makes decent money producing other content related to self-publishing a book. He for example produces materials for other authors.

But I won’t go into the details of who J. Thorn is and what he produces. You would better be informed by going to his website:

The Author Life

This is also the link to the Self Publishing Formula YouTube interview of him:

Indie Author Mastermind: One Short Story a Week (The Self Publishing Show, episode 281)

I strongly advise that you go over his website and watch the video to get a good grasp of who J. Thorn is, but if you’re mainly just interested on making money by emailing short stories to your subscribers, then read on.

He’s an ex full-time teacher who used to write horror but transitioned to fantasy and then back to horror again. He still teaches part-time at a university but according to his website, he’s a full-time author. So you might want to read between the lines of what he says.

He has a Patreon page and makes part of his income teaching other writers. According to him, he used to write novels using strict timetables. He used to finish a novel every couple of months but has since abandoned his timetables.

According to him, writing novels began to feel like work when he was following a rapid release strategy of publishing a novel every couple of months. He now writes with a more relaxed timetable.

According to him, this enables him to feel more immersed in the novels he is writing. But even though he is writing his novels slower these days, he still writes stories while following a strict schedule.

His business plan is to write 2,500 words short stories every week and email them to his paying subscribers. He charges a flat rate of ten dollars per year in exchange for all the short stories he has written in 2021.

According to him, at the end of the year, he would then get to decide on what other monetization methods he might want to do with these short stories. He can for example bundle them into one book, offer them as free giveaways and so on.

As has been said, this article is not mainly about J. Thorn, rather, this article would delve more on his strategy of emailing short stories per week to his subscribers. This is the first time I’ve heard of a short story monetization concept like this, so I think it’s worth a thought.

I have no direct contact with J. Thorn and I wrote this article towards the end of 2021. Unless J. Thorn makes his earnings public for this business endeavor of his, we may never know for sure if he really made good money for this moneymaking experiment of his.

J. Thorn has 62 patrons in Patreon. He has approximately 2,000 likes on his facebook page. So it’s pretty conclusive that at least in his Patreon and his facebook page, he doesn’t have a lot of supporters. I might be wrong, but I think he’s not earning much from his short story writing activities so far.

But let us assume that a different person tried his strategy. Maybe someone who has built already a small subscriber base of let us say a thousand subscribers. This subscriber number is not an overly big number for an average content provider.

Let us use J. Thorn’s rate of a flat rate of ten dollars a year. This amount multiplied by a thousand subscriber means $10,000 a year. This amount is all for writing a 2,500 words short story without fail every week for an entire year.

This might look like a small amount but consider the time and effort needed to do the job. I myself can write a 2,500 words short story in just almost an hour. There are approximately 52 weeks each year.

So if we divide $10,000 dollars by 52 weeks, we would get a weekly earning of approximately $192 dollars for each of your short stories which only took you an hour at the most to make. A good deal right?

And we’re just talking about 1,000 paying subscribers. Imagine if your paying subscribers are more than a 1000 like for example 2,000. Let’s not compute the figures anymore. It’s clear that this could be a very profitable venture.

I currently live in the Philippines where the daily minimum wage is roughly about $12 dollars. This means that I would have earned more than twice what a person from this country would have earned by working eight hours per day including Saturday and Sunday work.

This means that I would only need to write a short story for one hour a week to earn what a person on minimum wage from a country like the Philippines would earn from 56 hours of working each week.

This is good news for anyone who is an aspiring writer from a developing country like the Philippines. They not only earn twice what a normal person is earning from the Philippines, but they only also need to work an hour a week.

This is assuming that a short story author from the Philippines is able to get a thousand paying subscribers in such developed countries as America and Europe where the currency has a disproportionately big exchange rate.

This is why I advise authors from developing countries to target the international market and not only concentrate on their local story reader market. Writing today is one profession where you can go global in reach without having to leave your own country.

Building an emailing list of a thousand subscribers doesn’t have to be strictly composed of subscribers from developed countries. Ten dollars is quite affordable for people too of developing countries. As said before, it roughly amounts to a day’s wage.

If you do the maths, your 2,500 words short story would amount to less than 20 cents each. Since there are 25,000 words novellas that sell for about 99 cents each, the price of your short story would be just about market rates.

For Your Subscribers In Developing Countries:

Your developing country subscriber would be paying for each of your short story like they were paying for a stick of a cigarette if they do smoke. If you want a healthier comparison, it’s like they’re paying for a cheap candy.

So don’t think that your only market is for subscribers from developed countries. Besides, the people from developing countries who are likely to read and pay for stories are the highly educated ones.

They are the likely people from developing countries who have the purchasing power and have a want for stories to read. And since English seems to be the de facto language for international reading, you have a good chance of marketing to them as well.

For Your Subscribers In Developed Countries:

Just like for people in developing countries, 20 cents is not a big amount for people in developed countries to fret over. Especially if they’re spending it on a product which would take them approximately about 20 minutes to consume.

This is especially good news for many short story authors. Short stories are becoming more and more popular especially in the era of self-publishing. They are so popular that even Amazon has an entire category for short stories.

If even the mighty giant of e-commerce has an entire category for them, it just means that there is a good market for them. This is probably because more and more people are beginning to prefer short stories because they have lesser and lesser time to read.

But let’s go back to being an author in a first world country. $10,000 a year might not be a big amount of money, but as we have said, you have the potential to earn $192 for just an hour’s writing every week.

According to my research online, the minimum wage in America is about $7.25 an hour. This computes to about $60 a day. I don’t think I need to emphasize this, but here it goes: a person in America would have tripled their daily earning for the day by only writing for one hour that day.

Although this might be good news already, let’s think further ahead and go as far as being able to support yourself from this kind of writing business. The maths are easy enough, if you were making minimum wage in America, you would have been approximately making $300 a week.

This means that you need to double your short story subscribers to about 2,000 to be able to make a full living supporting yourself as a writer. The good news is that you not only support yourself full-time but you also get to earn more than minimum wage.

This is because you almost get to earn $400 a week while still just writing one hour a week. Isn’t this a good deal? This is the reason why I said that J. Thorn must be on to something when he thought of this moneymaking scheme.

Talking about all the money one could earn and the easy one hour a week working schedule might seem great, but as we can see, there is a glowing problem that is ever present in this writing moneymaking scheme.

The obvious fact is that you need to build an email subscription list first before the money would come rolling in. It’s easy enough to write compelling short stories, but you need to find paying readers first.

It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss about building an email list. Not to mention that building a paying email subscriber list is even more difficult, but it can be done. One of the most famous advise people involved in email marketing like to give is that you should develop your email list as early as you can.

This is because it’s very hard to get eyeballs for your content and it’s even much harder to keep these eyeballs from coming back. So, try to capture their emails the first chance you get if you are serious about making money from paying subscribers.

J. Thorn might have a genius of an idea when he tried to write email delivered short stories to his subscribers. There is good potential in his idea. You only need about a 1000 paying subscribers to make good money.

All thing aside, writing short stories for one hour a week is not really that hard. The much harder part is developing a paying email subscriber list. It takes a lot of skills and experience to build and maintain a good email list.

Can You Make Money With Your Own Short Story Website?