: Re: 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

@Speyer920

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I have a series of short stories that I have published under a pen name, and I had a lot of difficulty getting any exposure or sales. Each short story was a stand alone story, and I priced them at [CO].99 each. I then combined them together (five stories) into a collection that I listed at .99. The first couple of months I would sell a few short stories and maybe five or six collections. Then, back before Christmas, I started giving away one of the stories for free at Smashwords, which I used to distribute to the Apple store, B&N, and Sony. Within a week, the story was free at all of those sites as well. I then used the link on my Amazon page to inform them of the lower price, and they matched it within a week.

In January, I gave away over 10,000 copies of the free book at Amazon and sold over 150 copies of the collection. I also gave away about 6000 copies at B&N and sold another 85 copies of the collection there. In the first two weeks of February I have already matched those numbers at Amazon. (B&N reports monthly through Smashwords, so I don't have any numbers for them.)

Right now with all the people that bought or received new e-readers for Christmas, there are a lot of folks going through the freebie lists looking for new titles. If you can get some of them to pick up your freebie then you may be able to "ride the wave". I have done something similar with a series of books and have had even better success with that.

As far as building up your brand or promoting yourself with a blog, I haven't done either. What I have done is write, write, and then write some more. If you have plenty of titles then you have a better chance of getting people to pick up other works. Free will get you noticed, but then it is up to you to make sure they want to go out and buy whatever else you have to offer. If the writing is good (especially on the freebie), then the rest will take care of itself. Nothing promotes you better than having more titles from which to choose!

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