What marketing techniques are effective for short story eBook collections?
I have a collection of short stories that I'm currently selling in the Amazon Kindle marketplace, and one of the biggest hurdles to actually getting my works read is lack of exposure.
My passive plan (once my KDP Select period is over) is to publish to multiple marketplaces, in order to have my works available to the largest audience possible. This may be a good strategy in the long run, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of pushing the most eyeballs toward my works.
In what ways can I market a collection of short stories that would be most effective, without being obnoxious in regards to volume?
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2 answers
Who's your audience?
Answer that, and you'll know where to focus your efforts. Wherever that audience gathers; whatever the norms are among them; whoever within that group makes book recommendations people pay attention to.
Blogging and telling friends is nice. It also doesn't get you very far, because thousands of other eBook self-pubbers are doing precisely the same thing. The common reader is inundated with plugs for self-published work; as long as they're promotional plugs, most readers will ignore them simply because he comes across so many. Two exceptions to this:
- Some works may have some special feature that'll grab some eyes even in a plug ("Ooooh, I love vampire time travel stories!" or "Hey, a how-to book on building origami tables - I never thought about it, but that could be cool!" or even "Cool, this book only costs a buck!").
- If your book is good enough and you get it out to a large number of people, you might be able to get a word-of-mouth thing going, and then you're golden - you've got people recommending your work to friends; that's just about the best publicity there is. But, this is hardly something to rely upon; it depends heavily on the quality and accessibility of the book (which is practically orthogonal to marketing strategy...); and it's pretty much outside your own control.
So, knowing your audience and targeting them is extremely helpful - it helps you aim for the first, "special feature," reaction, and it focuses on groups most likely to have that reaction.
A great difficulty is that many ebooks (and short story anthologies even more acutely than novels) don't really have a clear audience beyond "readers" or maybe "readers within [Genre X]." And that's tough, because so many readers are spread out all over the place and it's hard to find a clear focus, and because such a broadly-defined group already has plenty of reading material to their tastes, and is already fending off similar broad plugs.
So what I'd suggest is to see if you can brand yourself. Figure out, in detail, what existing communities would most enjoy your work. Build around that. If you need to change, add, subtract - I'd strongly suggest doing that. Build up your brand, know who you're aiming for, figure out how to reach them. Each of those steps will be very individual to your particular work and style - but those are the steps worth figuring out, and taking.
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The challenge with publishing these days, especially with the great supply of e-books, is getting people to look at your stuff among all the competition. There's so much to choose from; if I've never heard of you, what will get me to buy? Short stories seem to this consumer to have a big advantage: you can give one away for free and people can get a sense of your writing. I've bought several collections because I was able to read one story, either via the Kindle preview or via a posted copy on the author's web site.
Of course, the writing does need to sell the work too, but I think the biggest problem is getting the eyeballs in the first place.
This is a consumer's perspective; I haven't tried to sell.
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