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I’ve joined the ranks of Ether Books authors. Described as ‘Ether Byte Sized Reads’, the app is for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch and readers can download from their library of short stories. It’s an attractive interface – the pages turn when you slide your finger on them.

You get tags, blurbs, author pics and bios to help you choose and there are free downloads too if you want to try it out.

There are some bestselling authors on the menu along with the less well-known.

One of the great things about publishing on Ether is that your stories can be previously published elsewhere so you don’t have to tie up new work you might want to enter into competitions, and stories already published have a chance to get new readers. Ether are friendly and helpful with any queries and they promote you too.

‘Mirage’ was the first of my stories to be released. I was surprised and delighted to see that it reached number one in the ‘charts’ that week. It’s good to know that the story was downloaded.

Stories cost 79 cents each per download.

Some Ether authors may be familiar to you. You might want to download stories by Madeleine D’Arcy, Brian Ahern, Aiden O’Reilly, Carys Bray and Rebecca Emin, to name just a few great examples.

For writers it helps if you tweet or send your link out on Facebook. Ether encourages you to get involved with promotion. Having a blog is handy too. These days there are lots of ways to promote your work and apps are a great way of doing that.

You can download the app here. Just search under author or story name (for mine: ‘Mirage’ or ‘Valerie Sirr’).

I blogged earlier about Five Stop Story, another story app you might like to try.

Every writer wants an attentive reader and I was lucky to have ‘Mirage’ reviewed by short story aficionado Mel Ulm from Manila at The Reading Life. Thanks to Mel for including my work in the Irish short story section and to Nuala Ni Chonchuir for recommending me to him. Mel will review more of my stories in the coming months. He’s passionate about the short story and is dedicating space to Irish women writers until July. You’ll find great short stories from all over the world on his website.

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