Today I’m delighted to welcome Craig Boyack, author, blogging friend and mastermind behind Lisa Burton (I hope Lisa won’t mind me saying that). Craig is a tireless promoter of bloggers and writers across the blogosphere, plus posts plenty of entertaining content, so hop on over to his blog and check it out.

Today Craig is visiting to talk about his latest release, The Experimental Notebook of C.S.Boyack II, now available on Amazon. It’s a collection of short stories, and a follow up to his successful Experimental Notebook I. Here, Craig talks a little bit about the reasoning behind releasing a collection of short stories, and makes some excellent points. In fact, I’m feeling a little inspired myself… Take it away, Craig!

Thanks for inviting me over today. I’m touring around with my new book, The Experimental Notebook of C. S. Boyack II. This is a collection of fifteen short stories and micro-fiction of a speculative nature. You will find some science fiction, some paranormal, and one that might pass as fantasy. This is the second collection of short form stories, as you might guess from the title. Since they are stand alone tales, there is no requirement to read the previous one first. They are both priced at 99¢, so you might want to anyway. (I hope.)

My Muse sends me ideas all the time. They always have some interest, but I used to discard them if they wouldn’t carry a novel. On rare occasion, I might weave something into a novel, but it felt incorrect somehow.

I created yet another living document, and started keeping the ideas. Now, whenever I get stuck on a larger plot point, or I simply don’t have time to work on the novel, I hammer away at short stories.

This poses the question of what to do with them. At first I thought maybe I should use them as blog posts, but there were a lot of them. Then I noticed some people marketing them on Amazon. Some of the early examples were one short story for 99¢. This seemed a little off to me, so I kept observing.

Some authors were writing a short story to drive sales of a novel they’d published. That seemed like a really good idea. I read a few of these and the various prequels felt like they were on to something.

I’m not willing to write out backstory and sell it separately from my novels. Then I had the idea of bundling my short fiction together and offering a volume for 99¢. This felt like a better deal to me, and I occasionally buy a short story magazine, so it was familiar too. This is where the first Experimental Notebook came from.

The first one sold so well, that it was worth doing again. I will always write short form, but there is a certain effort that goes into publishing and promoting. As long as people keep reading them, I’ll keep releasing them.

I decided these volumes needed a theme so they seemed familiar somehow. The first cover had an alchemy wheel, and I decided to repeat that by using two on the new release. If I ever release a third one, it will have three wheels, and so on.

This time you get fifteen stories, an excerpt from my newest novel The Playground, and a revisit with an old friend for those of you who enjoyed Will O’ the Wisp. I like writing the characters from my novels into short stories after the fact. This way it isn’t backstory, it’s more of a where-are-they-now kind of visit.

I’d appreciate you checking it out, and it’s free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

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