Promoting Short Stories

When I first started writing short stories (yes, back in the days of manual typewriters and carbon paper), once you sold the short story, the magazine or anthology you sold it to took care of all the promotion. Yes, you announced the sale to your friends and maybe there was a writeup about it in the local newspaper and maybe industry newsletters, but that was about all you could contribute. The magazine or anthology promoted the various authors whose stories appeared in the work, depending on the author’s status.

Nowadays, with social media, you aren't as dependent on the publisher or the publisher's or editor’s idea of author status and who gets promoted. You can do your own promotion. You can announce the sale on Facebook and Twitter and Google+, and put a link to where the story appears on your website once the issue or the work is released. Some small press publishers furnish promotion material for their anthologies, like bookmarks, that authors can take with them to conventions for freebie tables or to hand out at signings.

Promotion by bookmark is good if you are traditionally published (where you only have a small window of time in which to promote) and even more so if your publisher is a small press, because with a small press you can continue to promote the anthology for years. Or until the publisher stops furnishing promo material for the anthology.

This is what I've done in the past to promote my short stories published in anthologies. I've also listed the story or anthology in the bios I've been asked to provide for conventions as an author participating on panels. But now I'm moving into new territory. One of my publishers, Amber Quill Press, is now publishing short stories on its website and then releasing the stories on Amazon Kindle. I've got one short story, “The Oracle of Cilens”, available through this program and another (“Search and Rescue”) will be released in August. So I started wondering how one goes about promoting individual short stories.

Searching on the web turned up only the suggestion to blog about your short story, both on your own blog and well as guest posts on other blogs. And of course mentioning the short story on your website. One author I know has had postcards on freebie tables at conventions advertising his free short story, and I liked that idea, but I wasn't sure if that was done for short stories for sale. So I asked some of the writing organizations I belong to, such as Broad Universe on Facebook, figuring I wasn't the first to wonder about this. Kelly Harmon kindly responded with an image of the rack card she uses to promote her six short stories at conventions.

So, with only two short stories so far, I'm going with a bookmark to bring to LonCon 3 (Worldcon in London) followed by Shamrokon in Dublin next month. The front of the bookmark has the two covers and the back has the blurbs for the stories.

Three questions: How do you learn about short stories? What promotions have you seen? What do you use to promote your short stories?

Beta Readers

Beta Readers. Some authors count them as valuable as editors. Some never use them, relying instead on the editors provided by publishers. In my opinion, having someone else take a look at your manuscript and just point out where the story ‘got confusing’ or where perhaps a bit more description is needed, is enough to get a stubborn story moving again.

If you ask authors at a panel how they make sure a world or a character is believable, the answer is usually “beta readers”. You’ll see ‘thank you’s to beta readers in acknowledgements or afterwords in books.

How do you find a beta reader?

This was one of the questions asked of me at an author question and answer panel at a recent convention. I had to stop and think about this from a new author point of view since some things have changed since I first started trying to find someone willing to read my stories and give me helpful criticism. And some things haven’t changed.

As a young writer starting off at age 14, my first beta reader was my mother. Not precisely the best choice, as she didn't read science fiction, but I didn't feel confident enough to ask my father, who was the other science fiction reader in my family. But after getting feedback of “it was so sad when she left home” when the story was supposed to be on how happy the character was to leave Earth, I moved on to other beta readers. My English teachers approved of the symbolism in my first book (which surprised me since I hadn't put any in), and that was the last time I asked them. I did find a few friends in high school that read fantasy and science fiction and who could be counted on to give good feedback. Nowadays I have friends I've met at conventions, fellow writers, and people who have read and enjoyed my work (and like getting an early look) who I can ask to beta read.

The person asking the question didn't have any local friends who read the genre he was writing. I've got one friend in my town that I can ask to beta read, but the other friends I can ask, depending on their schedules, are all at a distance. Which is not much of a problem in the days of email. The questioner, however, didn't have any writing friends or friends who read in his genre either local or online that he could ask.

So the next question to him was, was he a member of a writing group or organization? I'm a member of both Broad Universe and EPIC, and I've seen the occasional call out in the email and Facebook groups for those writing organizations for a beta reader on a particular genre or topic. There's usually someone willing to give feedback in return for critical comments on their own stories. He decided to check with some of the fan group tables at the convention.

I've even seen the call out on an author's Facebook page for an occasional beta reader or proof reader.

Of course, what do you do once you've found a potential beta reader? If all you get back is “It was good”, then you need to ask detailed questions (and maybe find another beta reader). Jodie Renner had some excellent suggestions recently in “15 Questions for Your Beta Readers”. (She also has some suggestions for finding YA beta readers.) I tend to ask more vague questions like "Did what the character do make sense?"

Take some time to absorb the comments you get back. Sometimes you can see right away how to revise the story and sometimes you’re not actually ready to accept what you hear.

It also helps to have more than one beta reader. If both readers comment on the same thing, then it definitely needs fixing. You might also have a beta reader who just focuses on the technical details or language rather than the overall story.

How have you found your beta readers? Are you a beta reader for another author?