Publishing - Part II

After some thought, and a bit of discussion with a friend who is knowledgable of such things, I am going to attempt to set up a merchant site wherein I can sell my stories directly.  This will be an experiment in ePublishing, and will be limited to short stories for now.  I'll be pulling my Kindle stories out of the KDP program, which prohibits me from publishing elsewhere, and offering them on my own site for the same price of 99 cents (I wish the keyboard had a quick way to enter the "cents" symbol, come to think of it).  They'll still be available through Kindle, as I want to keep the option open for readers to comment and review on the Amazon site.

The stories will be available in various formats: MOBI for the Kindle, EPub for the Nook (and others), and PDF for those without eReaders.  Ideally, you would select which format upon purchase, and your "shipping address" would be an email.  I'm still researching the logistics of this, but I hope to have the ability to have the site automatically send the file to the designated address.

I will most likely be using Wordpress.  My friend told me about a free add-on they have for this sort of thing.  My only concern is how to receive payment.  If I use PayPal, they will charge me a "small" fee of 2.9% plus a 30 cent processing fee.  This might not sound like much until you figure that, for a $1 purchase, this is about 33% of my profits.  I'm hoping I can find a fee-less option, but somehow I doubt I will.  Nothing is free in this world.

I even came up with a clever name for this endeavor (well, I think it's clever): Short Attention Span Epublishing, or SASE.  See what I did there?

I'll be sure to keep you posted on how it works out.  If it looks like it could catch on, I'll probably work out a method by which I offer the use of the site to other authors.  Not sure if I will ever expand beyond short stories, but you never know.