Amazon.com to Sell Short Stories

Posted on August 20, 2005

Amazon.com is hoping to reinvigorate the short story market with its new program called Amazon Shorts. For 49 cents each, customer can read short-form literature in a digital format.

"Amazon Shorts will help authors find new readers and help readers find and discover authors they'll love," said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's vice president of Digital Media. "We hope that by making short-form literature widely and easily available, Amazon.com can help to fuel a revival of this kind of work."

"Publishers have always had a hard time selling and marketing the single, short-form work -- the novella, for instance, or the novelette, or its even more diminutive cousin, the novelini -- and these days it's even harder. Amazon.com has created a new way for authors to get that kind of work out there, which is incredibly exciting," said author Daniel Wallace. "It's my hope that their Shorts program brings a renewed interest to the genre, as well as the opportunity for us to keep in touch with our readers in a really direct, fun way between books."

Top authors who are participating in the program include Audrey Niffenegger, Daniel Wallace, Stuart Woods, Richard Rhodes, Terry Brooks, Robin Cook, James Lee Burke, F. Paul Wilson, Danielle Steel, Ann Beattie, Pico Iyer, Walter Jon Williams, Kevin J. Anderson, and Robin Hobbs.

We think it's a pretty cool idea.

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