I have been thinking a lot about publishing a 4,500 Word story to kindle to build up some followers for my writing. I was wondering what people thought about this idea. Would it better to have it published in a magazine first?
I'm going to look at this from a total business angle for a minute.
My first question is what kind of followers do you want to build up? If you plan on publishing a short literary story and making it free, what readers do you hope to gain? If you have no other offerings on Amazon, it's not going to gain you readers for your next work unless it comes close on the heels of the first one. If it's going to be months, they'll have forgotten about you by then. If you want to publish a story in the hopes of getting tons of great reviews and some popularity to help with publication in high-paying or prestigious lit mags, I honestly think that's a waste of time. Editors look at the story in front of them, and if it's not what they want, no heavily downloaded story from Amazon will change their mind.
Now, if you wanted to have a free short story that was the first in a series, or a prequel to a longer work, your odds of gaining readers are better, especially if the work is in romance or a popular genre. For literary fiction, this trend doesn't seem to hold.
If you're writing literary fiction, and I'm guessing you are from your site, submitting it to the proper magazines is most likely the way to go. You can always self-publish the stories separately or together later. Probably the best thing to do is write as much as you can and submit to the places you'd like to be published. Keep writing and submitting.
If you're talking genre, there's much more benefit in a short freebie, but you have to do it right to get much of it.
Also how many kindle pages is 4,500 words?
Amazon seems to calculate their pages based on about 350 words per page, so a 4500 word story will be about 12-13 pages. You'll have to price it at 99 cents until it price-matches to free from Apple, Kobo or B&N, or enroll it in Select where you get only 5 free days per quarter.