Free short stories for promotion?

I don't have any answers, sorry. But, I've been wondering about the same thing since I find writing short stories harder than writing novels.

Why have you not considered getting them published in magazines? They would probably reach a larger audience than your blog. In the byline you could always put your blog address and mention whatever novel you are working on. Plus, if the magazine accepts you get paid.

dakota said:

Lyra, you are exactly right. I guess I didn't specify enough. For the short story that I was speaking of, it is in the same world as my coming novel. My plan is to use it as a teaser. I do have other short stories submitted to magazines with that very goal but for this idea I wanted to expand my fantasy world in a way that would be beneficial to me and my publisher.
Thanks for replying.

Click to expand...

Have you asked your publisher or agent? I would and then go with whatever they suggest.

I tried this in August to November, using a short story I released as a serial. These are just my thoughts:

Pros

• Generates a lot of buzz
• Reaches a wide audience
• Free

Cons

• Uses up first publication rights on the story
• Takes a lot of time to set up syndication to reach the audience
• Doesn't convert directly into sales
• A lot of your audience will follow the story with no intention of buying the book

Overall it seems to be more effective to build buzz than generate direct sales, but if you can draw it out it will keep building interest for some time. If you keep the rights, you can re-release it on a number of free platforms to reach new audiences e.g. the same story is now up on Smashwords, and a few other places, as a giveway.

Check with your publisher first to make sure that what you are doing works with their promotion plans.

I've been putting this exact idea to work for a few months now for a website called Wattpad.com
With my publisher's permission, I took an extremely minor character from my book being published and wrote an entire story about her. The whole point is to gain readership and help people get familiar with my world, since my novel does have to do with an alternate world. In the three days that I was away from the comp for the Thanksgiving weekend, I received 0ver 20,000 reads. I get about 1000 reads every hour. I have a fan base that I can be proud of, knowing that my actual novel is only going to be released in June of '11. I say, if you can, go for it!

If you're chosing which site to use, to follow up with some hard stats for comparison between smashwords and authorilinca's experience with wattpad, for smashwords I've had over 1,000 downloads since it went up. It is due to hit the premium catalog in January, but hasn't yet so I don't know what effect that would have on the stats.

More read online, but as it's on several sites it is hard to create an aggregate total figure.

There are a few other authors who did comparisions between smashwords and feedbooks on their blogs:
http://michaelgraeme.wordpress.com/
http://www.adammaxwell.com/

If you are using the story for promotion, you might want to put it on all of these for maximum exposure.

Thanks people. If I can get a decent short story written -- without sounding like it's the start of a novel -- I'll put your suggestions to work.

Have you tagged up the stories with all the relevant tags? Also, how many backlinks have you got? If you choose one location/URL and submit it to every ebook directory, listing site, etc. that you can find, it does help.