Now You Can Buy The Tumor with PayPal

When I decided to self-publish THE TUMOR, my new short story about a guy who wants to kill his wife and her tumor, I chose Gumroad as my payment platform because a) my friend Clayton Cubitt recommended it, b) it's super easy, c) it looks great. And, as of yesterday, you can pay with PayPal on Gumroad purchases. This is the perfect option if you like using PayPal and/or felt unsure about using Gumroad for the first time. So cool of Gumroad to do this!

As far as updates on this experiment in selling fiction online, thanks to my great readers, it's been a rousing success! My goal was to sell 100 copies, and last weekend I reached my goal. Because Gumroad offers the option of using Pay What You Want pricing, which enables customers to pay what they want for whatever product they're buying, my sales are $609 on 102 copies. So that's an average sale price of about $6. Not too shabby, and way more than I ever would've made selling that story to most literary magazines.

Currently, I'm at work on my next story that I'll be selling the same way. It's about a man, a female robot, and a brave new world in which everyone's a little cyborgian. I hope you'll keep an eye out for it.

If you haven't tried selling your work online, I highly recommend it. THE TUMOR project has had a profound impact on me in a couple of ways:

1. It enabled me to move on and get over it. For some reason, self-publishing this piece that was based on my real experiences having cancer (I was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in late 2011 and am now cancer-free) enabled me to move on from being Ms. Cancerpants and get on with being a regular human being. For years after my treatment, I had terrible anxiety and suffered a certain degree of professional and emotional paralysis. Making a real tumor into THE TUMOR proved cathartic. If stories are children you put up for adoption, I put a malignant mass on the market and people seem to have enjoyed it. Since, I've felt happier, freer, and more determined than I have in a long time.
2. It empowered me to stop being a victim. I've been a freelancer for 17 years. That means the majority of your work life is spent trying to get people to give you permission to do what you want to do. This sucks and is awful. It means your success and self-worth depend on the whims and taste of a cast of editors, publishers, and advertisers that usually have agendas focused on the bottom line and not on producing great work. It's convenient, though, isn't it? To let everyone else decide who you are. God knows how difficult it would be if you had to decide who you are. Self-publishing, with its soup-to-nuts nature, forces you to own everything: the way it reads, the way it looks, the way it sells. If it bombs, you've got no one to blame but yourself. And if it succeeds, that's all you. When you self-publish, you get to decided who you are. In other words, I highly recommend it.

Buy THE TUMOR! "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."