Are you fond of writing short stories and wanting to publish them? Let me tell you how you can get your short story published on Amazon as well as some tips to help you sell your books.
Mary had written several short stories. But she considered them to be way too short to actually self-publish them onto Amazon KDP. But she was completely incorrect in her assumptions
And that's why in today's article, we're going to be talking about Get Your Short Story Published on Amazon. So, it was about a year ago and Mary had written by this point several short stories.
She was thinking about the option in terms of what she should do with them. So, she decided she would put them on Wattpad. After she had put them out there, she started noticing that people enjoyed reading these short stories.
They were giving her a lot of positive feedback. The thing though was that she wasn't making any money off of the site. So, she was considering the possibility of whether these short stories could just as easily be published on Amazon even though they were quite short.
She wasn't sure if there were any rules or things that would prohibit that. Or maybe they wouldn't make any sales. She would do better just by putting them out there for free.
The thing is that she had always enjoyed writing. Her short stories were quite popular. But by being so short, who was going to pay for a book on Amazon paperback or Kindle if the book was just a very short one?
And that were some of the limiting mindsets that she had regarding this. So, she wrote these books, put them on Wattpad and she started seeing herself getting thousands of downloads. People were reading it and giving positive feedback.
Check out this related article: How Long Should A Self-Published Book Be?
She also went on to Amazon and noticed that the books that were on there were long ones like novels. Things that were much longer than the stuff that she had been writing. So, she was thinking this was not possible.
That's one of the reasons why she took her stuff and she decided to ask a question on Quora. She sent me a question on Quora and said, “What should I do with these stories? I've been giving them away on Wattpad and I'm just not sure what the next step is.”
How to get your short story published on Amazon? And so, I answered her on Quora. But in addition, I suggested she booked a free Discovery Session so we could just take a look at her short stories to see what was going on.
The first thing I told her was you absolutely must get these things published on Amazon. Regardless of whatever you have written, you're going to want to take that writing and put it on Amazon.
Now, there are a few rules to keep in mind here when we're looking at strategies. I'm personally interested in helping you sell your books. To get them going, moving, and optimized on Amazon.
If the goal is just to get your short story published on Amazon, you can almost upload a Word file. And then they're on Amazon. They're not going to sell many copies, but you can go about doing that if that's something you want to do.
Knowing What Our Audience Wants
A couple of key issues are we want to stick with only one genre or micro-genre niche that we're targeting. You don't want to have the same author's name targeting multiple niches. So, make sure these things are all together in a single niche.
Now you can use the initials of your name or something like that. But ideally, you would sort of have a different name on each of those different things that you're targeting.
The other thing is that as we're publishing them out, we're going to need to figure out and let the audience tell us what's good and what's not good. That's the reason why we want to publish as many books as we have.
How to get your short story published on Amazon? If we've written a lot of short stories, we're going to get them all onto Amazon. We are not our audience; we don't know what our audience wants.
So, we want to let them have the opportunity to tell us what they like and what they don't like. But we want to give the books the best opportunity to sell as possible. So, it'll motivate us to write more books and we continue this exact process here.
The next thing you're going to want to remember with your short stories is that if we can get it up to 24 pages in length, then we're going to be able to sell these books as paperback books.
And so, when it comes to Amazon, as I teach in my formatting course as we're going through that particular thing, we're doing everything in our power. To ensure that the formatting is in a way that's going to give our books the chance to reach about 3000 words.
It should be sufficient and many people's short stories are already across that. If your short story doesn't meet the 3000-word limit or you're formatting it incorrectly, then we're going to make sure that we combine two short stories or three or four or whatever it takes to get our short stories to that limit.
Check out this related article: How To Price A Self-Published Book On Amazon
In addition, they're all going to be in the same niche or genre that we're targeting within that. So, then we're going to have our paperback. We're going to have our Kindle version; we're even going to get this into audiobook format.
The only rule is you need to make sure the Kindle version of your book is already on Amazon if you want to publish it through ACX Audible. That's a very important point that so many authors forget.
Getting an audiobook version is even easier than it is getting a paperback version. Usually, it's because of the cover. Formatting is more difficult for the paperback version.
But the audiobook version is quite simple. Finding a narrator is very easy if we're going the free route. The other route is a little bit trickier but still completely doable.
As I have done with many of my coaching clients. We work through those steps to get it up and running. So, the other thing is maybe you want to continue to give your books out for free.
Or maybe some of the books for free on Wattpad or some other site. You can do that, just make sure that your Kindle book is not registered under KDP Select. It is a very important thing if you're going to have it on other sites.
If not, then definitely register under KDP Select. Because they will then promote your book in ways they don't. Books that are not singularly sold, not just on Amazon.
Finding The Mentor for You
If you want to go wide, then just pull it out of KDP Select. And if you wait 90 days, it's no problem at all. I did that with all of my books because I want to get them selling on other platforms.
There's a lot of money to be made out there on your Kindle books. And you don't want to give them the biggest opportunity. So as long as they're selling lots of copies on Amazon, leave them there in KDP Select.
When the sales start to decrease, then we pull them off. We're going to push them through Draft2Digital or Publish Drive or something like that. This works both for long books and especially for these short stories.
We're going to want to get them out there. Many authors just like yourself have written short stories and are wanting to get them onto Amazon. You need to have a cover which I recommend 99Designs.
You need the formatting which I recommend you learn how to do yourself using Jutoh. Then, we're pulling that together. We're going to have a description.
We're keeping it inside a single niche and then we go from there. So that is one of the big ones. As Mary was working through the process, I just pointed out it's easier if you have a list of steps like a clear checklist.
That's the reason why she just grabbed a copy of my free Self-Publishing Secrets Checklist. Just to make sure that she wasn't skipping any of the necessary steps to get her book or her short stories self-published and selling.
So, how to get your short story published on Amazon? Ultimately, what happened then with Mary was that she did get her paperbacks posted out on KDP Print. She had her Kindle books out there.
She started seeing her Wattpad readers coming in and purchasing these exact books. That's when she realized that we as authors have a lot of barriers that we put on ourselves.
These internal limitations and these limiting mindsets that we have that are in place tell us we can't do something or it's not possible to do something. And that's one of the reasons why it's so important to plug in, if not with me with some other coach or mentor.
So that's it, that's how to get your short story published on Amazon. When it comes to publishing your books, make sure that you're not making the mistakes that are so easy to avoid. Just by doing one discovery session with me.
Now she did continue but doing one discovery session was enough to get her going on the correct route. And that works with so many authors who are getting started and even authors who are established but simply aren't getting the sales that you would like to see on your books.
There are just so many mistakes that you can make and I can tell you one thing. These Mistakes Cost Me Nearly $3K. so you're going to want to check that out.