TS Paul: The Unusually Successful Short Story Author

I recently featured Steve Higgs who is a successful author who goes against the grain of conventional beliefs in book writing. Now, I will feature successful short story author TS Paul who is also an unconventional author.

Steve Higgs and TS Paul are just two authors that a lot of aspiring beginner authors could take inspiration with. They are not only successful, but are quite different in the way they came about with their success in writing books.

They may both be unconventional, but there are still a lot of differences between them. For one, a lot of authors either successful or yet to be successful spend heavily on marketing like Steve Higgs.

TS Paul is different in that he did not spend any money initially to market his books. His book sales grew organically. According to him, his books became known thru word of mouth. The only initial marketing he did was thru his Blogspot/Blogger blog.

This may have to do with him not really intending to have an author career. According to him, he was just encouraged by a friend to upload his stories on online book stores just to see what would happen. Luckily for him, it turned out to be a full-time career.

Here are two YouTube videos where TS Paul was interviewed regarding how he became a successful author:

1. YouTube Video: SPF Podcast 62: TS Paul

2. YouTube Video: Selling Short Fiction and Actually Making Money with T. S. Paul

If you’re interested to know a lot about TS Paul, It’s up to you which of the above videos you would like to watch. Both videos are more than an hour’s long and Paul may babble at times, but I ensure you that you would learn a lot.

If you are interested in knowing more about TS Paul besides these two videos, all you have to do is Google the search keywords “TS Paul” and you would be taken to a lot of sites and articles dedicated to TS Paul.

Before we start on TS Paul’s successful, let me first inform you of one of the reasons why he became a successful author: He likes to read. By being a voracious reader, he was able to familiarize himself on how novels are made.

I have read of many authors even successful ones who were mainly just readers before, but after realizing that they were not satisfied with the novels that they have read, became so convinced that they should write their own version of the novel they have just read.

This may be you, you may not be a heavy reader of novels but have watched for example movies that you are not satisfied with. In short, the more you read, hear and watch a story, the more you would become educated in the way these stories can be improved.

Another thing that you would learn from reading, hearing and watching stories is that the different story genres have their own particular rules. For example, if you wanted to be an author of romance stories, one of the thing you need to write about are happy endings.

Simply put, even if there is romance or love in your story, unless your story have a happy ending in terms of the love relationship between the main protagonists, it is not considered a romance story.

He uploaded his first 20,000 word ebook on Amazon on the February 18, 2016. It sold a few copies only, but this did not discourage him. Within the following three weeks, he was able to write three more ebooks but again, according to him, he only had meager sales.

But let us define what he meant when he said the words: “meager sales.” During the first month he sold his first four ebooks, he made $US 150. I don’t consider this as meager sales considering that he sold his ebooks at $2.99 each.

This means that he would have sold approximately 13 copies of each of his four ebooks. I wouldn’t consider his sales meager as it took me a few months before I even began selling a few copies of my first ebook.

Another thing to note from him is that he didn’t price his ebooks at the discounted rate of 0.99 US cents which many beginner authors like to price their books in the hopes of attracting readers to try their ebooks. This means that readers still wanted to read his books even though he’s a new author then.

On his second month, he earned $US 2,500 and on his third month, he earned $7,500. As you can see, the sales of his ebooks became very fast exponentially. We can call it luck or something else, but it would be definitely worth advising to try to check out some of his stories.

We can call his initial success luck but according to him, he had sales of 5, 6, 8 and 9 thousand $US months. Having lived in a developed nation, I could say that this is already more than a living wage for most people in developed countries.

According to him, he is now on track to earn almost half a million $US in the annual sales of his ebooks. He is not only earning more than living wage, but is earning much more than the average person earns. We could consider him rich at this stage only after 3 years of writing books.

According to him, in the three years he has been writing ebooks, he has written already 85 ebooks of varying lengths. His first few ebooks had only 18,000 words followed by 20,000 then 25,000 then 26,000 and then 30,000 words.

According to him, the only reason why his ebooks became longer and longer was because his ebooks of which he writes in series got more and more complex. He however still maintains only short narratives for his stories.

He for example would write only short and simple descriptions for the persons, places and objects in his books. He states that he doesn’t need to explain the narrative of how a space ship would operate in space.

He leaves the operation of the spaceship in space for example according to the imagination of the reader. He states that he doesn’t need to explain that machines needs to be greased in order to operate.

Being a writer of novellas myself, I can understand his way of thinking. Lengthy descriptions of items in your short stories can be counterproductive unless you are writing an epic novel which has a lot of room for lengthy book item descriptions.

As we can see, he found his success in short stories the way many self-published short story authors have found themselves in the ebook market. The days when you are forced to write only lengthly novels to be a successful author is coming to an end.

Even the world’s most prolific and successful author, James Patterson, is also foraying into short stories. He has even publicly stated that a major part of his book publishing efforts would be devoted to writing short stories.

This is because he and many other authors whether successful or not have realized that there is a profitable market for short stories especially in the age of ebooks. Novel length stories still prevail in the world of printed books, but short stories are slowly conquering the ebook market.

To be honest, writing a novel can be very exhausting and risky. Having written a few novels myself, I can definitely attest that the longer your stories are, the more exhausted you would feel. There is also the danger that you would interest in your novel and stop writing it altogether even you’re already midway into writing it.

Writing novel length stories can also be very risky. You may end up spending a lot of time and resources creating your novel only to have no one buy a single copy of your novel. This can be very discouraging and could sap the motivation of any author.

According to him, he did not pay to advertise his ebooks until month four of his writing career. But by then he is already earning a lot of money from being an ebook author. This is good news for any aspiring author who still does not have the money to advertise his books.

This means that although it is very remote especially in Amazon where it is beginning to make out like a ”Pay To Play” system where the only chance of you being discovered by readers is if you advertise with Amazon Ads.

According to him, although he now advertises his ebooks, he still spends only a little money in it. Let us again analyze his words. He claims that he is now close to earning half a million dollars in yearly earnings.

Despite this, he only spends $US 10,000 yearly on advertising. This means that he only spends two percent of his annual earnings on advertising. He is unlike many authors who rely a lot on spending a lot of money to advertise their ebooks.

Could the successful word of mouth of his ebooks be due to his blog and other online presence? In his blog, he also writes short stories which serve as a sampler of his story writing skills.

This is another thing different from him. He does have a blog, social media accounts like Facebook but he has not mailing list. Ordinarily, many so-called experts in digital content creation would advise everyone to get their follower’s e-mail addresses as early as they can.

But not him, he says that he would find it hard to maintain and capitalize on his mailing lists. According to him, the main interaction between him and his followers would be via his blog which he regularly updates.

As you can see, he goes against the grain that to be a successful digital content creator, you have to maintain a mailing list. I don’t know if maintaining a mailing list for him could bring him more money, but as we can see, he’s already rich and successful even though he doesn’t have a mailing list.

One thing to note about mailing lists is that it goes both ways. Both you and your followers have equal opportunity to “bother” each other. It’s not as simple as you regularly e-mailing your followers. Your followers can e-mail you too regularly.

What If you have 1,000 e-mail subscribers and each one of them decided to communicate with you on a regular basis. Just imagine the havoc this could do with your social, business and personal life. There are people who do not e-mail others because they don’t want to be e-mailed themselves.

To many authors, having their books published in printed form and on display on book cases is a definite source of pride. I myself want to see an ebook of mine in printed form and displayed in someone’s book case.

But the numbers do not stack up to self-publishers to have their ebooks available in printed form. For one, on a per unit basis, ebooks are more profitable than printed books. This despite the royalties one can potentially have from traditional publishers.

Another problem would be logistics. Because printed books require space to be stocked and displayed, you would definitely run into logistics problems and cost unlike ebooks which are available in electronics devices even cellphones.

According to TS Paul, he only forayed into printing his ebooks upon the request of one follower. He had five books printed and he bought three of them. This means that the story content of his stories are more popular in ebook form rather than printed form.

There are novice authors who are so enamored with having their books in printed form that they spend a lot of money self-publishing their books in printed form. At a minimum, having your books printed can cost you thousands, so be very careful in how you spend your money.

There is still many more that can be learned from the author career of TS Paul. He decided to become an author on a whim with little to no budget. You could call it luck or some other thing, but his writing product needs a second look for any aspiring author.

One thing we can learn from him however is that he never went all out in terms of effort and costs. He first really tried to assess if he would be a successful author by writing only short stories and then even when he is already a success, still minimizes his advertising costs.

Steve Higgs: A Successful Author That Deviates From The Norm