Will Work for Free

What makes a person buy a book? Is it the plot, the genre, the brand, the advertisement? Is it the title, or the blurb?

Back in olden times, authors didn't sell books to readers. Authors sold manuscripts to publishers, who would take those stacks of awkward phrasing and stilted dialogue, edit them to their own liking, change the title, slap an unrelated illustration on the cover and flip them into bona fide, genuine, honest to God books. Publishers didn't buy manuscripts because they loved the stories. They bought them as an investment. They made the decision based on myriad criteria, including how much work it would take to make it presentable, if there was a brand to be exploited or built, and if they thought the market was looking for that kind of thing at the moment. Whether or not the novel was a good one was not part of the equation; it was whether the novel would appeal to the masses.
Consequently, writers didn't have to worry about how to sell to readers. That was the publisher's job. All they had to worry about was selling to the publisher, which has a different set of criteria.

Then the Technological Revolution hit us like a sack of mealy potatoes, and books would never be the same.

There are so many changes, good and bad, that have been wrought by the advent of self publishing but the one I want to focus on here is how readers buy books. Readers used to go to brick and mortar stores, browse the displays, pace through aisles, thumb through pages, and examine handwritten staff picks scrawled on index cards taped to the shelves. The books they used to examine were universally pre-approved and professionally edited, guaranteeing a certain degree of quality. They started with genre, scanned titles, looked at covers, read blurbs, perhaps surveyed the table of contents, read the first paragraph. Maybe the first chapter. At any time, if they lost interest they could shelve it. Nothing lost but a little time. Selecting a book was part of the rite, part of the pleasure. Now it's all searchwords and algorithms, and 'customers also enjoyed' and 'frequently purchased with.' There can be pleasure in this process as well, but it now carries more risk. You would spend fifteen dollars, but you could be assured that the writing would at the least be competent. Now you pay five, or two, or even one dollar, but the market is riddled with landmines. You never know if the self published author took the time to polish their work, hired an editor, listened to and applied constructive critique, or if this book was just their ill informed vanity project. This has made readers suspicious. They want assurance that their next reading experience will at least be bearable before they plonk down their hard earned clams. They prefer known quantities with their authors and, barring that, they want a free trial.

It's not fair to ask someone to work for free, but I'm over it. Life is not fair. I'm not in a rush to get paid anyway, so I'll go ahead and work for free. That's exactly what I am doing with this new short I am working on. It's essentially a long advertisement for the series, an extended blurb. The question is, what part of the series should I represent?
I'm already writing in first person, like the main series. I'm introducing the conceit of the sci-fi elements, inhabiting the same world, using pop/gamer culture references and using characters in the same age range. I'm foreshadowing plot points that were originally designed as standalone for the book, which is a skill I never suspected I'd use or even existed, but that's fun. What I'm worried about is if the whole thing will work because, despite our professional compatibility, J.C. Ahren and I are still different authors. We have different names and different authorial voices. Should I ghost write this, or does this not matter to readers?

What do you think?

(I inevitably have to plug something, so here it is)
In order to help you out here, I suggest looking at the Juniper Tales project. Author Aaron Michael Ritchey created a wonderful book series in the Juniper Wars series, and an incredibly rich universe for the series to inhabit. Then he invited other authors to play in his sandbox. There are currently four short stories only obliquely related to the main plot, all featuring different characters, all written by different authors, but all in the same Dusterpunk universe. They are available for free in pdf. here. Do these make you want to check out the series, or at least make you feel like you can make an informed decision to not check it out?