By now, you may have seen our post announcing that IGC Publishing will no longer be hosting advertisements, or at least noticed that advertisements are no longer appearing on the site. That for the most part doesn't affect the site's formatting, but it did mean that I needed to develop a different way to indicate a section or chapter break in our stories, since I had originally intended to use the advertisements like commercial breaks. So I broke out my limited graphic design skills, and attempted to create something suitable.
Too Many Ads?
I have recently learned that to other readers, there are significantly more advertisements, and that they are taking away from the reading experience. I would still like to be able to monetize my story-telling using low-impact advertisements, so I will be spending some time in the coming weeks attempting to clean up the site and figure out why there are advertisements showing up on places I didn’t explicitly put them. Hopefully, I will be able to soon provide a cleaner experience for all of you readers, with the focus being far more on the stories being told, and less on the distracting advertisements.
Business Musings
There is a reason that this site is called "IGC Publishing." Despite the online format, I'm largely modeling my efforts after traditional publishing methods, wherein I go through the steps of writing a story, advertising it, formatting it, building the front and back matter, and then selling the story as a stand-alone piece of work, available for download at a prescribed price point. That is, I am treating my stories as products.
Ads
I need to initially sell 15 copies of a short story to recoup the ISBN cost. I'll further need to sell 50 additional copies of short stories a year to fund the website in its current form, or 150 additional copies of short stories a year for the plan that would let me set up a nicer storefront.
IGC Publishing 