In 1998 and 1999, best selling author Elaine Cunningham published short stories in Dragon Magazine that were small vignettes about the popular characters ElaithCraulnober, ArilynMoonblade, and DaniloThann.
The purpose of these short stories was to market her novels by introducing these characters a new audience and to maintaining the interest of her past audience.
While physical magazines are much less popular today, the principles behind this idea remain true. Short story publishing is an effective way to market your fiction novels.
Short Stories as Marketing
The best way to publish your short stories is on a blog dedicated to your fiction. This proves to your readers that the fiction you are writing is actually canon.
A blog also lets you easily provide links to your author bio and, more importantly, the novels you are marketing. When writing these stories, remember your audience.
You need to write stories that entice new readers and reward past readers for their loyalty. In general you should focus on your most engaging characters.
One difficulty you will need to deal with is bringing readers to your blog in the first place. The nice thing about writing short stories is that they practically advertise themselves.
Publish an excerpt of your story on popular fiction forums that discuss your genre of fiction, or even fanfiction.net, with a link directing readers to your blog page for the full story.
A good excerpt will draw traffic to your blog and a good story will earn sales for your novels.
Serial Writing to Expand Your Fictional World
In addition to one-shot short stories that paint a vignette about a character or piece of your fictional world, you can also engage in serial writing. This requires effort similar to writing a full length novel, but has the advantage of getting return traffic to your blog, which will increase your blog’s search engine ranking.
Since the purpose of serial writing is to drive sales of your novels, you want to avoid revealing too many major events of your novels. Weave the events of your serial story to the events of your novels in a way that augments and builds on them, without revealing them entirely.
Make sure to tell your audience, in a footnote, exactly what novel is being referenced.
For example:
The events depicted above tie into the events in chapter 14 of “Dancing with Penguins.”
This points the reader directly to where they can read more about the events described. When your reader sees the major the serial content is tied into your novels, they are likely to have an interest in purchasing those novels.
