A few weeks ago, my agent was contacted about a new service from Amazon: buying shorts from authors directly and selling them for 49 cents a pop as downloads. While buying downloads of articles is not new to Amazon, these are not reprinted from magazines that have previously published them, and so the cost for Amazon, and the reader, is quite low. It’s an interesting concept, and so I sumitted some pieces, two of which were taken and are now on-line:
Courtship, a story from my grad-school years, about a man trying to get his wife back.
Half-Lives, my essay on living in exile, which once used to be free on my site, but now ain’t. (Sorry about that, but the Amazon rep, after taking it, pointed out I better take it off my site.)
According to the press on it, the real star attraction is a cinch to figure out. Though it doesn’t seem to be up yet, Dan Brown’s “alternate ending” to The DaVinci Code is bound to make some waves when it arrives.
Amazon Shorts
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)