Kindle direct publishing short stories
I got my first check 60 days later, like clockwork. Then, it dropped down again and went back up, and stayed there. My account of getting shipwrecked in 2001 was published in April of 2011. I was like, “Well, I did get shipwrecked that one time.” He goes: “You asshole, that’s the story!” Besides, I told him, I was sober now and didn’t have any more stories. I told him it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard, that it would never work, and that if it worked for anyone, it wouldn’t work for me. It would be available on all platforms-any smartphone, tablet, or computer-but it wouldn’t be printed in any form, and it wouldn’t be available on the Internet. He said that Amazon was going to be publishing writing for the Kindle. I had written for him over at the New York Press and he had just gotten an editor job at Amazon. That said, I’ve probably made $400 or $500 over the course of several years.ĪUTHOR A: In 2011, David Blum invited me out to breakfast. We worked together to translate them over the course of a year, and they’re currently being released in Serbia, which is cool. They had seen my books on Amazon and wanted to publish them in Serbian. I thought it was spam for a while, but it turns out it wasn’t. One time, this small publishing house in Belgrade, Serbia got in touch with me. The first thing I put up was a book of short fiction. A month later they were bought by Amazon, so I got access to their self-publishing outlet. I was promoted to full-time staff writer with a salary and benefits within a month a coveted position to be sure, but I just took the mail job to pay bills and wrote for the fun of it.Īuthor D: I was doing the same thing six years ago through which is a self-published, on-demand print service. I never got paid as a writer until I was in my mid-twenties: I took a job in the mailroom of a website and was so disgusted with their poor content that I started writing my own for them in my downtime. Being accused of plagiarism is pretty flattering if you have the right attitude about it. When I showed them I was serious about writing, they backed off. I had also just paid $2,000 to a writers conference, which helped my case. I was even accused of plagiarism at one point for writing a paper so well that it was submitted to a contest without my consent as an apology once I systematically proved I had written it. I always addressed the subject matter with my own voice instead of just regurgitating whatever I had read. When I was in college I won some awards for papers and had multiple professors tell me they loved reading my work. I’m pretty sure I failed the class, but I fell in love with writing. It changed my life.ĪUTHOR C: I used to hide in my sixth grade social studies class, handwriting stories in a notebook. I never expected it all to turn out so well. After contacting this person, they showed me the ropes and hand-held me through the process. It was just one of those, “Hey, I could do that” moments. When I was 43, two years ago, I stumbled upon a random post online about someone self-publishing erotica and making a thousand dollars a month. It didn’t occur to me that I could get paid to write until I had spent most of my life wasting away, working mostly clerical jobs while I raised my daughter. I started writing poetry and short stories soon after, but I kept them to myself and rarely shared them with anyone. Literature became my escape from an abusive family. But it also made me think that I may be able to write for a living, and not do anything else.ĪUTHOR B: I first fell in love with reading as a child. My pal from across the hall walked in, and said “You need to read this.” He threw a book at me. Whether or not the format takes off now depends on readers - to try it out, you can access Vella here.Then, when I was 16, I was laying in bed in my dorm room with my girlfriend and a bottle of wine. "I’ve published close to 30 novels, and I’m enjoying the adventure of writing The Marriage Auction in this new format,” said bestselling author Audrey Carlan in a statement. Since Amazon opened Vella to authors three months ago, "thousands of authors" have published "tens of thousands of Kindle Vella episodes across dozens of genres and microgenre," Amazon said.
To boost engagement, authors can speak directly to readers at the end of episodes to "share story insights and behind-the-scenes content," Amazon wrote. To that end, readers can follow stories to be notified of new episodes, leave a thumbs up for episodes they like, apply a "Fave" for their favorite story of the week (provided they purchase tokens), and share on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. Authors, meanwhile, will receive 50 percent of the revenue along with bonuses based on engagement with the app's social media-style features.