AmazonShorts

Have you heard of AmazonShorts? No, it's not a new line in beachwear being promoted by the world's favourite Internet bookstore. Rather, it's a range of previously unpublished short stories and articles available from Amazon.com (not Amazon.co.uk or others just yet) for a price of just 49 cents.

Amazon is inviting anyone with at least one book currently for sale on Amazon.com to apply for this scheme. Once accepted, you can submit as many short works (2,000 to 10,000 words) as you like for inclusion. In effect, Amazon are acting as the publishers of AmazonShorts, not just the retailers. As far as I can see, however, they don't actually pay any royalties on sales.

So why would any writer want to submit work to this programme? Well, here are some of the advantages, as listed on the Amazon Shorts FAQ page:

* Access a powerful marketing tool to promote an author's backlist in a new and meaningful way
* Create an author profile page with biography, photo, and complete backlist
* Maintain author's visibility between published projects
* Establish a more direct and frequent communication with readers
* Introduce readers to unfamiliar writers
* Provide a new outlet to sell short fiction and nonfiction

In addition, you can get paid (a small amount) each time someone you have referred to AmazonShorts buys one of your stories or articles, or someone else's. To achieve this, you first have to sign up as an Associate with Amazon. You can then put some special code provided by Amazon on your website, and every time someone clicks through from your site and buys something, you will get a percentage of the sale. I think the figure is around 5 per cent.

In theory I would be eligible for AmazonShorts, as I do have several books listed on Amazon.com (though not as many as at Amazon.co.uk). However, I am still thinking about whether to apply or not. The books I have on Amazon.com are a few years old, and in several cases I was paid on a fixed fee rather than a royalties basis, so there is no advantage to me in promoting them now. It might be fun to publish some of my short stories on the site, but financially I'm not sure if it would be a smart thing to do.

Don''t let me put you off applying, though. If you have titles for sale on Amazon.com you want to promote, AmazonShorts could be a great tool for doing this. And if you have some unpublished articles or short stories gathering virtual dust on your hard drive, it need not even involve much effort to get started.

Finally, if you don't have any books published on Amazon.com but you still fancy getting involved, it's worth noting that the online community Gather has a free contest where members can submit work for other members to read and vote on, with the best three items guaranteed publication as AmazonShorts. The contest is currently open for submissions, with voting by members starting on Friday December 1st. I am actually quite tempted to enter one of my stories in this contest rather than apply to Amazon directly, as the publicity benefits to me anyway could be greater from going down this route.