Free Short Stories!

For the next four days I'm giving away six free short stories on the Kindle.  They are part of my Asian Heat boxed set which is now free under the Kindle Select program.

The stories are The Threesome, where a husband makes a disastrous decision to have a threesome with his wife; The Alphabet Game, where a young man gets involved in a strange sexual game; and The Pregnant Wife, where a man discovers the love of his life as he sleeps with a succession of available girls.

Also included as a bonus are three very short stories set in Thailand.

So six short stories - free until June 2.

You can get them in the UK - BY CLICKING HERE

And in the US - BY CLICKING HERE

Another Free Short Story

I'm a big fan of giving away free stuff as there's no doubt that it does pull in new readers, and the best stuff to give away free is a short story. That way a reader can tell pretty quickly if they're interested or not.

One of the first short stories I gave away is called Banging Bill's Wife.  It's a story of a Singapore-based stockbroker who gets more than he bargains for when he answers and advert for a strange sexual encounter.

It was meant to be an erotic story but it didn't really work out that way and actually ended up more as a comedy.  I wasn't sure whether or not I should publish as a Stephen Leather book but decided that I'd rather do that than use a pen name.

You can get it FREE in the UK -  HERE

And you can get it FREE in the US - HERE

I've written several other short stories set in Asia, including The Alphabet Game, The Pregnant Wife and The Threesome.  They give me a chance to explore life in South East Asia, and while I set out to write erotic stories the thriller writer in me always takes over and they end up having a twist in the tail.

I do enjoy writing short stores and find them a way of relaxing between novels.  One of my Spider Shepherd novels would be about 130,000 words and that's a lot of work.  A short story of 10,000 words might only take a few days to write, and allows me to get into the head of characters who wouldn't normally pop up in a Spider Shepherd novel.

My First Short Story

It's generally accepted in publishing circles that short stories don't sell.  The simple fact is that a collection of short stories from an author, no matter how famous or respected. never sell as well as a novel.  That's as true of Stephen King as it is of an up-and-coming writer.

I always felt that the arrival of eReaders would change that.  The problem in the past has been that a reader has never been able to buy a single short story, only a collection.  But for the first time the eReader gives the buying public the opportunity of buying stories one at a time.

In the winter of 2010 and spring of 2011 I had a huge amount of success self-publishing eBooks.  I am the only self-published author to ever have the top three places on the Amazon UK Kindle list. And my book The Basement was number one in the US and the UK Kindle charts.

I realised that the eReader gave buyers the chance to buy single stories at a reasonably low price. On Amazon that's 99 cents.  And it's also possible to give away eBooks, for free.

So I self-published a story about a Chinese detective in Singapore with a fondness for locked room mysteries.  I now give away Inspector Zhang Gets His Wish for free.

You can get it in the UK  HERE

And in the US  HERE