Short burst of stories from aspiring and popular authors.
Amazon is terrible in terms of finding new books, we rely only on reviews but in reality we never know whether a book is a good fit for our taste.
1618 Words intention is to show you episodes from books (not just an excerpt from the beginning of the book like Kindle preview). We receive every story directly from the authors, and they know well the most engaging parts of their book, so you will find unique reads here. We always ask authors to send us stand alone stories from their books without harming the main storyline of their book. This way you could meet the main characters without loosing anything from the storyline.
There are short stories and insights both in fiction and non-fiction genre. We have a detailed keyword tagging on our site, so if you are looking for a time travel science fiction, just pick the category and find stories. In order to endorse the authors, we place the book’s links at the bottom of the stories.
For authors, it is a great opportunity to show their book on a curated website. We pay attention to every story, we list the author(s) and add links if available. But most importantly, our silent goal is to connect your book with readers.
Let me share you a story about the success of Paulo Coelho. He wanted people to read his book so badly that he even shared it for free on the internet in the 2000s, literally with everyone. Later he also wrote an article on his own official blog.
Why I pirate my own books?
Publishers have a tendency to try to protect the content. It’s a lost battle.
Around 2000, I found a pirated Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, and we were selling 1000 copies a year in Russia, that’s not very impressive, so I said OK, let’s put the pirate edition online for people to download. In 2001 it sold 10’000 copies, and everybody was puzzled, and the next year we went over 100’000. His publisher had not done any particular promotion. It was, believe it or not, the free-for-download book. People downloaded it, started reading it, liked it, and bought it.
— Paulo Coelho
The takeaway is that you need the share your stories, maybe not on torrent, but directly to readers. We often see “Downloadable PDF” on Facebook and on many sites, it is so old school marketing, we don’t like that, and I suspect neither other readers. On mobile, we hate download and open things, but we like short reads. We hate websites with a lot of advertisements and “click here and there” instructions.
What if a website would share episodes from books, in a modern readable mobile ready format without any disturbing factors? This was the core idea of 1618 Words.
1618 is a magical number, at least for us 🙂
1.618 is also called the “Golden ratio“, so we decided to follow that number.
Think of any two numbers. Make a third by adding the first and second, a fourth by adding the second and third, and so on. When you have written down about 20 numbers, calculate the ratio of the last to the second from last. The answer should be close to 1.6180339887…
What’s the significance of this number? It’s the “golden ratio” and, arguably, it crops up in more places in art, music and so on than any number except pi. Claude Debussy used it explicitly in his music and Le Corbusier in his architecture. There are claims the number was used by Leonardo da Vinci in the painting of the Mona Lisa, by the Greeks in building the Parthenon and by ancient Egyptians in the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
— Guardian
Of course it’s just a number, we do accept stories between 1,000-2,000 (sometimes more, just to keep the story as a whole)
As an author or publisher, you need to grant a non-exclusive right to us to share your story on our website. We would never share anything without your direct consent. We also doesn’t distribute your story on other websites, our only official partner is joelbooks.com.
In case your Kindle book is enrolled in KDP Select, we suggest not to share more than 10% of your book’s length, to remain on the same side. If you have a 10,000 words book, please don’t send us more than 1,000 words.
When we post a story on the site we ask for a small amount of money, which covers the creation of the cover creative and a quick review, formatting of the text, additionally adding the author’s links to our website, but this fee only covers our time.
We utilize affiliate links on our website, which grants a little bit of income (less than $10 in the first year) on our side. Using our links doesn’t make any books more expensive and even the authors receive the same amount of royalty after each sale.
In the following years (2020-2021) we wish to build up an exceptional reader friendly site for you.
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