I am very grateful that I have many dedicated fans, all of whom I consider to be my friends.

Well, friends, I need your help! I am calling on you for some assistance in furthering my writing career.

After studying the way authors write, publish, and market themselves, I’ve come up with a plan to continue the writing and publishing part, and I’m going to ask you to help me with the marketing part.

I intend to publish a flash fiction story each month on my blog which will be free for the reading. Flash fiction is a short, short story, usually between 500-1,000 words that you can read in 5 minutes or less. In this mad-rush world where information comes flying at your face from all directions, I figure that something short and savory is much better than something long and time-consuming.

I’ll post a story each month, on the 9th–nothing much happens on the 9th–and I’ll send out electronic notices in various forms for several days beforehand to let you know that the 9th–and a story–is about to arrive. (I’ll also continue to post my usual observations, particularly on baseball, as well.)

Here’s the part where I need your help. If you see the link to a story is up on Face Book, I need you to repost it on your Face Book page. If you see the link on Twitter, please retweet. If you subscribe to my blog via an RSS feed, please forward that to your friends who enjoy reading or who simply enjoy getting free stuff. If you have a blog or a website of your own and you feel it’s appropriate, please link to the stories that you like, or display a permanent link to the series.

Think of me as that lady in the supermarket with the tooth picked samples of those little sausages, and think of yourselves as my helpers. The idea is to pass out as much sausage to as many people as we collectively can. This is not about selling. If my writing is good enough and enough people notice me, then sooner or later, folks will buy lots of sausage. Until then, I want as many people as possible to get a taste of my work.

I’ll do my best to take care of the good writing part and I’m asking you to help me with the getting noticed part. If you really like what you’re getting for free you can certainly buy Safe at Home: A Season in the Valley or 3 Tales From the Grand Old Game. (Sure you already own a copy, but your Aunt Mary would much rather receive a book this Christmas than the fruitcake you always send her. I had an Aunt Mary who was a fruitcake, but that’s the subject for a story.) At some future date, I might ask you to subscribe to an upcoming story or book, but otherwise, I just want you to enjoy my work.

Of course, that begs the question as to whether I’m any good at it. That’s up to you to decide. In fact, I want you to be very active in making that judgment. Please leave comments, good bad or indifferent. The good ones I reserve the right to republish in any future marketing effort. The bad ones I reserve the right to indignantly reject for 24 hours or so, then examine and take to heart in order to improve.

Furthermore, I not only want you to be active, I want you to be interactive. I am deliberately NOT going to post any photos because I would love for you to post ones that you feel illustrate the story. Perhaps at some point we will have an illustrated story collection to publish. Any photos that I get, I will post to a Pinterest board.

In addition, I am more than happy to take requests. Have a theme that you’d like me to examine? Send in your request. Want to have a story written about someone (perhaps as a gift?) let me know. Want to be in a story? Tell me! Naturally, I’m hoping that there is a financial payoff for my efforts down the road, but as long as we’re having fun as we travel along, then the journey is worth the effort regardless of the ultimate destination.

I’ll post the first Five Minute Fiction for Free story entitled, “The Bedford Girl” this coming Thursday. Each day at various times between now and then I’ll post on Face Book and Twitter that it’s coming. Once you’ve seen the notification post or received the e-mail, just ignore those that follow; I want to make sure you know about it, but I don’t want to annoy you! (The surest way to receive the link is to subscribe to the RSS feed through the blog.) The story will be posted right in the blog and a PDF file will be available for those who like to have paper copies.

Thank you so much. I need a little help from my friends and I hope that you’ll enjoy the stories enough to say that it is worth your efforts on my behalf.

–Austin