One of my projects for this holiday break is to publish a bunch of short stories on the Kindle. Each story will cost a buck and will be on the Kindle only for now. The challenge in making short stories available for e-books as opposed to novels is that people don’t expect to be able to buy individual short stories. At least not yet. So you have to set them apart from novels both visually and in the product description.
The hardest part of that is doing cover art that lets the reader know visually that this is not a novel, but is in fact a single short story. I plan to do this my making all my short story covers fit a template that clearly indicates a short story and not novel. My covers for these shorts will have a spine down the left side that simply says SHORT STORY. There will be no art on the covers, just the title and the author name. The colors I will use will determine the era or generation of my space opera that the stories take place in.
So for the first generation, those stories will have a green spine, the second generation red and the third generation blue. These colors were picked for their emotional meanings; Peace, War and Understanding. The actual cover backgrounds will probably reflect the materiel used on the covers of the Star Series books. For instance, Starforgers will have a marble feel to it, suggesting the classical foundation materiel. The second generation or Starstrikers will be concrete and the third generation or Starveyers will have a stainless steel look to it.
The goal is to make them completely different from novel covers and yet still interesting and appealing. I’ll do some Gimp tests this weekend to see if this whole concept is viable. By eliminating cover art, I’ve made it easier to crank out these covers by just changing the colors, background pattern and titles.
GENTLE REMINDER: Tomorrow is Buy TYRMIA Day on Amazon. Buy the new SF novel set in the Starstrikers Universe and help push it up on the Kindle Best Seller lists.