Marketing your book with Amazon Shorts, Part II

As explained here, Amazon Shorts are one way to use impulse purchases on Amazon to bring attention to your full-length books. Amazon Shorts are e-books that cost readers 49 cents.

But for some authors, the book sales are merely gravy because customer acquisition is the name of the game. For example, perhaps the most prolific Amazon Shorts author is business consultant Lonnie Pacelli, who has 16 bestselling Shorts. The Shorts are cross-promotional tools for his two business hardcovers and 13 full-length downloadable books sold on Amazon for $4.99 apiece. All these e-books help publicize Pacelli’s fee-based seminars conducted on the Web. His most popular Amazon Short is The Perfect Brainstorm.

Shorts can also be used to test ideas for full-length book ideas or expanding into new topics or genres. It’s possible to use Shorts as a full-blown author laboratory, testing story concepts and soliciting feedback from readers. For example, fiction writers can give an update on characters from a book series, give hints on what might happen in the next hardcover installment, and use reader comments as a free focus group test.

The recommended length for Amazon shorts is 2,000 to 10,000 words, and the work is supposed to be exclusive to Amazon for six months. Amazon splits revenue 60/40 with the author, and Amazon covers the costs of payments transactions and customer service.

Some other interesting work with Amazon Shorts:

• In A Man and His Luggage, Stuart Woods departs from his tried-and-true mystery technique for a humorous essay on his wish to find the perfect travel companion. (ASIN B000A0F6JA).
  

• In Bubble After Bubble in the Ongoing Bubble Boom, (ASIN B000A0F6Q8) Harry S. Dent updated his 2004 economics bestseller The Next Great Bubble Boom. Six months later, he published an updated edition of the hardcover.

There's no copy protection for Amazon Shorts, the PDFs can be printed or copied and forwarded via e-mail. When viewed as an HTML document, the text of Shorts can be
copied and pasted into a word processor.

To apply for participation in the Amazon Shorts program, send an e-mail to Amazon-Shorts@Amazon.com. To be eligible, you must have at least one book currently for sale on Amazon.

You can browse the available Shorts here.