Publishing short stories and giving them away for free on Amazon has been the most effective strategy I’ve found so far. If you don’t already have an audience, a following, or a network, offering something for free is often your only real option.

Sure, you can rely on luck and hope your writing finds an audience on its own. But for 99% of writers, that simply doesn’t happen. It certainly won’t happen for me.

That’s why I’ve come up with a plan: I’ll write 52 short stories, publish them as Kindle books, and give them away using Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited promo tools.

I just finished my second attempt at this. My test run brought in 28 downloads for the first book and 35 for the second. Not huge numbers, but still — that’s 63 readers I didn’t have before.

The great thing is that I can reuse these books in future campaigns. The first one was only downloaded 28 times, but as my platform grows, I might be able to double that next year, triple it in two years, and maybe even attract thousands of readers over time — from that book alone.

These stories are designed to be giveaways, and once created, they can be used again and again as evergreen promotional tools that neither cost me money nor time.

Amazon allows you to run a free promotion with a book every three months. That means I can promote each book up to four times a year. With 52 books, I could be running free promos year-round — without spending a cent on marketing.

I haven’t seen anyone else trying this strategy, so I can’t guarantee that it will work. But it’s worth a shot. It doesn’t cost me anything. It doesn’t cost the readers anything. And I get to tap into Amazon — one of the biggest search engines on the planet.

Of course, it will cost me time to write the stories. But writing is fun anyway.

So far, this is the best strategy I’ve come up with. I plan to stick with it for a year and see what happens.

That means: My current plan is to write 4 full-length novels a year, plus 52 short stories on top. Wish me luck — and cross your fingers that this strategy helps me build an audience.