This answer suggests that nothing published through Amazon (or other indie e-book route) should be priced at $0.99, and I'll give that Dean Wesley Smith has a lot of experience at this and is a pioneer in the field.
I see long-established authors like Barbary Hambly selling what I consider short work for $5 (too short for me to be willing to pay that much, in truth), but they're asking $16 for their novel length work. Many indie authors (including one I live with) sell novels for $4 to $7, which would push short work (say, under 20,000 words) into the dollar bin.
This seems to imply that I shouldn't even attempt to publish single short stories on their own, or that I should expect to price all my work at the same level as long-established authors. As it stands, I have a 2000 words short-short on Amazon at this time, and in the past two years it has sold one (1) copy (to someone who knows me), but I have no way to know if that's because the $0.99 price is putting people off, the generic cover isn't attracting clicks, or just because it's not coming up in the recommendations (never sold, so doesn't get recommended, so never sells -- I call this "the Amazon trap").
Should I just not bother publishing short fiction independently, or wait until I have enough for a collection? Or should I try to avoid writing short fiction, and concentrate my time and energy on longer work, even though shorter work is easier to finish?
Answer
Should have read deeper.
In this article Dean Wesley Smith goes into ebook pricing, and includes a section specific to short work (by his definition, under 10,000 words). Much of his advice is based on an author who has many-many works available to a reader, but his take in general is that even short work in stand-alone format shouldn't be priced low enough to be limited to 35% author payment on KDP. He sells his own short work for $2.99, though he sometimes offers short term discounts and bundles the works into discounted "omnibus" or "collection" form that sell for much less than $2.99 per story.
His reasoning is that it's important to value your own work, to avoid the situation where it becomes "not worth your time" to continue writing. As well, low pricing leaves no room for temporary "sale" discounting, and you'd have to sell 2-6 times as many units at the lower price to make the same income as the higher price (comparing $0.99 short stories to $2.99, or $1.99 novels to $5.99) -- and are unlikely to do so.
Naturally, this is a long term strategy -- it assumes that an author will continue to write, in volume, producing new work on a regular basis (as Dean Wesley Smith has been doing for the past forty years or so). It is not really applicable (in terms of short-term sales to draw in new readers, at least) to the author who has only one or two works for sale on Amazon. However, it does seem to provide a good guide to setting up a business plan that doesn't undervalue one's work.
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