StoryBundle for Orphaned CZP Authors: Author Info Sheet

To my fellow CZP authors:

After the CZP news broke, I reached out to Jason Chen, who runs Storybundle and who I've had the pleasure to deal with multiple times in recent years, to ask him if he'd be willing to run an ebook bundle in support of ChiZine authors who've had their CZP titles orphaned. As I expected, Jason replied that he would and that, based on my note, he will not be working with CZP again.

The bundle would feature titles from CZP authors. I expect most would be back-list titles (already published by CZP).

Note to authors of yet-to-be published titles: You are free to participate in the bundle but may prefer to market your books to other traditional publishers once your rights revert. If you include your title in these bundles, it will have been indie published, and it is very unlikely another traditional publisher, even a small press publisher, will be interested.

Any author who wants to be in the bundle would first have to:

  • have your ebook rights reverted from CZP;
  • produce your own ebook edition (you can't use the CZP ebook edition, even if your ebook rights are reverted. That edition belongs to them and any royalties for its sale would belong to them, which defeats the purpose of the bundle).
  • related to the 2nd point, produce a new cover or obtain rights to your original cover from the CZP cover artist if you want to reuse it.

I will curate the bundle and donate the normal curator fee to the author payment pool. I've been in or curated about eight bundles via Jason, and they've all brought between $500 - $2,000 dollars to the individual authors in the bundles. No guarantees for this one, but these are always great projects to be included in.

Hopefully, if there is enough interest and titles available, we could do multiple bundles, but there's no guarantee Jason would agree to more than one—it will depend on sales, and he has a business to run. To make more space available, I will not be including my own CZP title.

No idea on timing, as a lot will depend on when authors can revert rights and create ebook editions.

If you are interested in being included in the bundle, email me HERE with your interest. I'll send you info on next steps.

How you can help:

  • Spread the word: If you know a CZP author not listed on this spreadsheet, please forward this note to them and ask them to contact me directly at doug@smithwriter.com if they would like to have their CZP title(s) considered for the bundle(s).
  • Ebook creation: I'm guessing that most of you will have zero idea on how to create an indie edition ebook. If any of you are whizzes at that and wants to offer up their services to help your fellow CZP authors create ebook editions, that would be awesome.
  • Cover design: Some of you may elect to rebrand with new covers, too, so if there are cover design whizzes here as well, the same offer would be a way of helping out our fellow writers.
  • Bundle curation: If there are future bundles, it would be great if someone wants to put up their hand to curate one of those bundles. It doesn't take much time at all, and you could reuse what I'll produce for the first bundle re why it's a great bundle to support etc.
  • Promotion: once/if the bundle comes out, please promote the crap out of it.

A few other points:

  • These bundles are non-exclusive, meaning they don't tie up your ebook rights at all. You can have the titles up for sale on any or all of the major ebook e-tailers at the same time. Besides, these bundles generally only run for about three weeks.
  • You need to produce both an epub and a mobi (Kindle) edition.
  • If you need help creating an ebook edition, see this link for a fast, free option via Draft to Digital that produces high quality ebooks in both epub and mobi formats: https://youtu.be/fE1VQd870Mg. And you do not need to be a D2D client to use the conversion tool.
  • I'm also gathering names of people who know how to do this and have volunteered to help do a few for free for you folks.
  • If you want to do it yourself, I'd recommend Jutoh for Windows and Vellum for Macs.

FYI, I reached out to Christie Harkin, the "interim" publisher at CZP. She confirmed that they are working to (a) have all reversion letters out by November 22, 2019; and, (b) all outstanding royalty payments paid by the end of 2019. We'll see if that happens.

Thanks.