Thread: How to attract readers
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Old 09-04-2015, 06:51 AM   #18
Rev. Bob
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Device: Kobo H2O, iPad mini 3, Kindle Touch
One thought on length: make sure people know what they're getting!

Amazon's good about showing buyers the estimated page count for a book, but other retailers... not so much. Nobody wants to spend three bucks on something described as a "book" that turns out to be a short story of a few thousand words. Likewise, half a dozen shorts totaling less than a hundred pages do not constitute a "box set"! On the other hand, someone who just wants a quick read may be unhappy to find out that he's picked up a 600-page opus. Indie prices are all over the map; a 99-cent ebook might be anything from a single short story to a first novel to a bulky anthology. Nobody wants to guess about what they're getting.

Misleading your readers that way, either deliberately or by accident, is a good way to earn low ratings. Save everybody the trouble and put a line in your blurb about the length. You don't even have to get very specific; just calling it a "short" versus a "novel" or "novella" gets the idea across, and something like "this 7000-word short story" is easy to work into a blurb.
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