Amazon Shorts

I was wondering, does anyone else here besides me use the Amazon Shorts program? If so, what do you think of it? I've only started using it and I have 3 short stories through them (one available for download and two which should be available in about a month).

For those who don't know, Amazon Shorts is a program for authors to provide their previously unpublished short stories for download. For a price of only $0.49 people can purchase your short story to download or read online as much as they would like. Proceeds are divided 60-40 between the publisher (Amazon.com) and the author. In order to qualify for this program, you have to have a novel currently for sale on Amazon.com. I guess that is really the only thing PublishAmerica did in my favor because the rest of my experiences with them have sucked.

Amazon Shorts also has an editorial staff that reads through all the submissions sent to them and accepts or declines them. It usually takes about 2-4 months from the time you submit a story until you will hear about an acceptance or refusal. Then it takes another month or two for them to prepare the story for download.

I have been using Amazon Shorts because I'm working on a short story series of about 20 episodes long and it would take way too long to submit it to journals/ezines/etc. Then there is the worry that one market won't publish the entire series, which defeats the purpose entirely. I hadn't heard anything bad about Amazon Shorts before, so thanks for letting me know. I'll check out the Bewares and Background Checks page for it.

Momento Mori said:

Depending on the genre, you could always query a magazine/ezine as to whether they'd be interested in looking at the series. Are they interconnected stories or do any of them work as stand-alone? If you've got any as a stand-alone, then it's definitely worth considering a magazine/ezine.

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The stories are all interconnected, but they stand alone as well (sort of). There is an overall plot that flows through the entire series, but each episode also has it's own plotline arch. The problem is that if you don't follow the series from episode 1 to the end it becomes difficult to understand the overall plot, even though you can still get the individual plot. Also, the episodes are all told from first-person perspective by one of the characters. Episode 1 is told by Charme, while episode 2 & 3 are told by Kaze.