How You Can Market Your Short Stories Online

The web provides a remarkable medium for marketing short stories. The basic formula is this: Give away a few advertised, high quality, free, stories and offer others online for sale. Here are some of the specific procedures.
There are several options for offering stories online. You can provide your advertised free stories as ‘to be read online’ or ‘copy and paste’ presentations. Msword or one of its compatible cousins (Open Office) may work better than PDF files on your website. The freebees can be presented as a group – “My Free Short Stories’ or they can be sprinkled in among the total list of stories. That is perhaps the best marketing ploy. While folks search for the free stories they find others that may catch their fancy enough to purchase.
The stories online that you have for sale will need to be formatted for downloading from a ‘pay you’ site such as payloadz (typically pdf). You upload your story files to be stored on their server and link each story to it. You set prices and so forth. There are special low fees (a nickel or so apiece) for items selling for under $2.00. Patrons order from your website (it can be quite simple), pay through the download site (payloads, etc.) and your earnings – less the transaction fee – is direct deposited into your bank account. How simple!
Make sure some of your best stories are offered as your free short stories. When patrons find the free stories enjoyable they are more likely to purchase your other stories online. For several reasons it is best to make your free short stories your short, short, stories. They require less space and they can be read quickly. Web surfers are often impatient so to maintain their attention, make those free stories really short, easily read and understood, and ones that leave the readers with a real emotional reaction.
Many folks who look online for short stories are senior citizens. They typically need inexpensive items and a straight forward, simple method for acquiring them. Give your site the appearance of absolute simplicity. Use font sizes of 12 and above. Make it clear that although some of your short stories online cost a small fee, there are also many free short stories available. Explain how to easily tell them apart.
Visit several websites that offer short stories and examine the systems and presentations they use.