Short stories provide ideal reading for digital reading like the iPhone, iPod touch, cellphones and also e-book readers such as the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle.
Here are a few reasons why short stories make such ideal reading:
As you may know, the Sixty Minute Story is based on the average reading speed of 250 words per minute, and so an average reader could read around 15,000 words within a single hour.
Just like their larger and longer cousin the novel, short stories are a canvas for expressing a writer’s ideas, style and techniques. Both have the potential to be the same. One is just longer than the other.
There is a major difference. Short stories don’t sell on their own.
Each short story has the potential to be amazing. But of course commercially, it would not make sense to publish a short story of its own.
It seems that the short story (in the past) would only make sense if it was published as a collection of works. Either a collection by a group of authors, or once the author had enough short stories worthy of being published in a collection.
The Sixty Minute Story is designed so that any short story can be published without having to be part of a collection or anthology.
Here is all that you need to publish your short story as a Sixty Minute Story for millions of readers who have an iPhone, cellphone or e-reader:
As the appeal of the SMS is that it can be read by an average reader, in full, within sixty minutes; your short story must have a maximum of 15,000 words. There is no minimum number of words.
It is in the interests of both the readers and writers that the short story is be available in three key formats (epub, pdf and txt) so that the short story will be readable on all the e-reading devices and so that the reader is sure to be able to read it on their preferred device.
The epub is a free and open standard for e-books, defined by the International Digital Publishing Forum. There are many tutorials on how to manually create an epub of your book but the easiest tool is found on http://www.2epub.com where you can upload a file and it does the conversion for you.
The pdf is a widely-accepted and widely-used file format. Many tools to create a pdf are available but you may find that it is included within popular word processing software.
A plain text file is, you guessed it, a simple file containing just plain text. You can create a plain text version of your short story by pasting your content into notepad and saving it with the file extension txt.
No, a cover is not needed. A cover image helps your short story stand out, but if you do not have a picture to use when you upload your short story, the MeeQi website automatically creates a cover using your book title and your pen name. You can return to upload and update the cover at a later date.
This video shows you how to publish your own Sixty Minute Story.
If you have any questions please use the comments area where we will post help and tips.
I have traded my longer larger novels in favour for small bite sized stories and so far, short stories which I can read within sixty minutes get thumbs up from me.
I hope myself and millions of readers out there get the chance to read it soon!
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