No Gatekeepers: Indie Publishing Your Short Fiction

Excellent short fiction craft skills are necessary but not sufficient to find placement in the traditional short fiction market—there are many more deserving short stories than there are slots in the trad market to accommodate. But you don’t have to wait and hope that those gatekeepers will find your stories in their enormous slush piles. With an indie mindset, you can not only reach the readers who will love your stories and entice readers to become fans, but also generate income from your short fiction! Matty Dalrymple, the author of the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels and Suspense Shorts and the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, as well as Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction, will discuss: - The opportunities available to authors to independently publish their short fiction as standalones, as collections, and in anthologies (and why I chose this path for my own stories) - The logistics of publishing short fiction (editing, proofreading, cover design) and how to make it affordable - How to maximize the value of your content (as long as you’ve retained the needed rights) by publishing it multiple times, on multiple platforms (especially with the rise of serialization), and in multiple formats (including audio and video) - Other income opportunities such as patronage sites - Opportunities to connect with readers by using short fiction as reader magnets or reader funnels, or for social media promotion (especially with flash fiction) - Use of short fiction for market research - How being an active member of the writing and publishing communities paves the way to short fiction success

Difficulty level: all_levels

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