A classic advertising image – the cool smoking blonde. Yeah, that will work!
First, thanks to everyone who bought Pirates of Misfortune. In just a single week it became the most successful short I’ve ever released gaining more purchases than some stories years older. Thank you very much.
Currently all I have available for purchase are some short stories. None have gained a whole lot of attraction simply because I’ve never really promoted them beyond emailing family and friends and posting announcements here and Facebook (ugh). With only a couple more down that would allow me to generate a book or two of short stories and books are eminently more likely to be read then short stories, so the benefit is obvious.
However, people are busy these days and short stories have enjoyed a bit of rennaisance. People with ereaders and small periods of time to read for pleasure have begun picking them up in place of books. But, with thousands of short stories out there finding an audience if more a matter of luck than anything. To get there attention you need to advertise which I’m unwilling to do at this time. I will advertise when I have a novel or two to sell but not for any short story. So, what to do?
Amazon has KDP, the Kindle Direct Publishing channel, an exclusive way to get your story or book in front of millions of readers eyes. Basically for their monthly fee people cansample, read, and enjoy all the books included in the program without having to purchase them. Previously a pool of money was divided between the authors participating in KDP based on the number of downloads they received for their work.
Recently though Amazon changed the way it calculated payments, basing it more on pages read rather than the number of downloads. This effectively means that as long as the reader enjoys the story the more pages they read and the more money an author might receive for their work. Short stories have been very successful in KDP, so much so many authors broke longer books into parts to enhance their download counts. Now that is no longer necessary as the readers enjoyment of the material is what counts, not downloads.
With that in mind I’ve pulled two short stories, The Huntress and Nemesis Probe from all other publishers (Apple, Smashwords) for the next 90 days and placed them in KDP to see if I can get a few more readers to see my stories. It ain’t much more than an experiment but what have I got to lose right now.
