For the past couple of years I’ve been creating yearly eBook collections of the Saturday Story Prompts, sort of a virtual tip jar, but they haven’t proved as popular as I had hoped. The Custom prompts books over on Etsy are doing a lot better, but I get more favorites than sales (alas). I’m actually making more from the Google AdSense… and that’s just sad.

I haven’t completely given up on those books and I’m working on ways to draw in some new readers to the older books. I’m running a quick test on Amazon advertising, so we’ll see if that changes anything. I’m also trying to get some views through Pinterest by creating a board of prompts and I’ll be uploading one of the older SSP books to Wattpad starting a little later this month… but I’m not overly optimistic about my social marketing skills. 😉

Which brings me back to pondering how to bundle these guys in a more appetizing fashion!

So instead of releasing a 2016 eBook I’m focusing on releasing smaller themed collections instead. The SSPs cover such a wide range of topics and genres I could see where a writer might prefer a more focused collection if they were trying to get work done. I’ve had some practice now, thanks to the Custom Prompt books, so onwards! 🙂

These books will function like the retired monthlies— they’ll have some old prompts from the blog as well as prompts that haven’t been posted yet. I want maybe 30% of the prompts to be old and the new ones will be scattered into the future with no more than 10 posted a year. (So if there are 50 new prompts it will be five years before they all show up on the blog.)

I’m aiming for ‘Penny Prompts’ so the current goal is a collection 99 prompts long. I’m hashing out the layout as I go, but I’m trying to include sections on how to brainstorm ideas specific to the theme, so readers get more to play with than just the prompts. That might get too repetitive, as folks buy more than one eBook, so I’m a still waffling.

These may be Amazon exclusives, but so far 99% of my sales in the past few years have come from Smashwords. Which, in theory, is the opposite of how it’s supposed to work? It should be interesting to try them both ways and see which gets more traffic. *starts laying out plans*

Target publication date for the first book is February 1st… so wish me luck! 😀