How To Write And Sell Short Stories: A Fiction Writing Guide For Writers: Books for Writers and Authors, #5

By Connor Whiteley

Short stories amaze writers with their money-making opportunities and money. Writers love short stories for their benefits, and short stories are so much fun.

This great insightful book based on practice, listening to professionals and personal experiences, you'll learn how to improve your short story writing, why short stories are amazing and why they're great for money-making opportunities.

If you want to investigate the amazing world of short stories. You NEED this book.

BUY NOW!

• Language: English
• Publisher: CGD Publishing
• Release date: Aug 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201285340

Connor Whiteley

Hello, I'm Connor Whiteley, I am an 18-year-old who loves to write creatively, and I wrote my Brownsea trilogy when I was 14 years old after I went to Brownsea Island on a scout camp. At the camp, I started to think about how all the broken tiles and pottery got there and somehow a trilogy got created.Moreover, I love writing fantasy and sci-fi novels because you’re only limited by your imagination.In addition, I'm was an Explorer Scout and I love camping, sailing and other outdoor activities as well as cooking.Furthermore, I do quite a bit of charity work as well. For example: in early 2018 I was a part of a youth panel which was involved in creating a report with research to try and get government funding for organised youth groups and through this panel. I was invited to Prince Charles’ 70th birthday party and how some of us got in the royal photograph.Finally, I am going to university and I hope to get my doctorate in clinical psychology in a few years.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Short stories are amazing.

Both in terms of craft and business, short stories are great. Not only because they offer you an amazing opportunity to improve your craft and improve your writing. But they can be very lucrative too, and you can potentially make a lot of money with them.

As a reader I love short stories because if I have half an hour to read, I can quickly grab a short story and read it.

As a writer, I love short stories even more because they’re a great WAY to improve my crafts and experiment with new things. And on the business side, to some extent I prefer them to novellas and novels and short stories can be a bit more fun.

Also with the short story magazines and other new short story opportunities popping up every month, this is the best time to become a short story writer. Or at least add them to your publishing arsenal!

Who Is This Book For?

Regardless of whether you’re a traditionally published author or an indie (self) published author, you’re going to love this book.

If you want to know how to write short stories, how to sell them to traditional markets and how to sell them indie as well as lots of other fun ways to make money from short stories.

Then this is the book for you!

And you’ll learn a MASSIVE tip for formatting short stories in Word that no one tells you about. I wish I’d known this when I first started writing short stories.

Speaking of formatting, this book will tell you how to format your short stories for the traditional markets too. This doesn’t sound important but it’s the differences between an editor reading your story and deleting it within ten seconds of seeing your story.

No joke!

Who Am I?

I always love to know who writes the nonfiction I read so I know it comes from a good source.

So in case you’re like me, I’m Connor Whiteley an author of over 150 major titles in the Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, nonfiction psychology and more genres.

I was also the host of The Global Author Podcast and am the host The Psychology World Podcast available on all major podcast apps and YouTube.

In terms of short stories at the time of writing, I’ve written 250 short stories and published more than 150 indie and to professional magazines like Pulphouse Fiction Magazine. Including a short story challenge I completed in August 2021 where I wrote 30 short stories in 23 days, and readers love them.

So I know how to write a good short story and now I want to share my knowledge with you.

Now that’s done, let’s start learning about the amazing world of short stories!

PART ONE:

HOW TO WRITE SHORT STORIES?

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF WRITING SHORT STORIES?

Whilst other benefits will become clearer throughout the book of writing short stories, we need to see some of the benefits that are almost never mentioned when it comes to writing short stories.

For ease of group, the benefits can be broken down into two areas: craft and business.

Craft Benefits of Writing Short Stories:

Since I became dedicated to short stories in early 2021, I’ve always used them to practice new techniques and improve my writing. Because you can do things in short stories that won’t work in a long piece of fiction.

For example, the other night I read this amazing, twisted story told from a point of view of a character is a book. I mean this character was just created and it was the character trying to figure out what had happened to them. Because they had these memories but they knew none of them were real, since they were created on the page of a story.

Now, that doesn’t work for a long story because it’s not how fiction works, it’s not how identifiable characters work. 

But it worked for a short story.

If we look at my own work, I have some choice based short stories which work for a shorter story but I wouldn’t want to write them as a novella. Because I prefer action packed stories.

Another benefit is they allow you to practice specific techniques. This is possibly the best benefit of writing short stories because the problem with writing a novel, novella, etc. is these take longer to write so it makes it difficult to practice certain things.

For example, practicing endings and validation (we’ll talk more about this later), if it takes you three months to write a novel. Then you can only practice endings 4 times a year, but with a short story (it takes a day to write) then you can practice at least 90 endings in a year. Just some random maths because writing 365 days in a year is hard (unless you’re a professional writer).

So if you want to practice fiction techniques before committing to a longer piece of fiction then short stories are amazing.

My Practicing Examples:

In addition to using short stories to explore new genres and explore characters in more depth, I’ve used short stories to practice a lot of craft.

For instance, Claws of Death was the first story I ever used romantic interest in and this story and all the others allowed me to practice writing romantic interest in a character before I used it in my novellas.

Another example is dialogue so I used short stories to practice writing better dialogue for my novellas.

Then the final example I’ll use is a relatable goal. Because having your characters have a relatable goal is a technique of building suspense in your stories and before I learnt that I had no idea that was a thing.

So I made sure I wrote a few short stories with the focus being on the relatable goal so my readers would bond with the character even more. Then I did this with my novellas and longer work.

Two Important Craft Benefits:

These two points I wanted to point out and highlight because these explain why short stories can be really amazing.

The first special point is short stories are great for investigating your universe and fictional world in more depth, and chances are if you’re writing from your creative voice, it will come up with things you want to explore in even more stories.

For example, as I write this, in my Agents of The Emperor series I already mention there are traitors who the Human Empire is fighting against and so on. But I’ve never explicitly explored them in any great deep but there’s a novella I wanted to do where they would be a massive part of it.

So I need to understand them first.

As a result, I knew I wanted to explore them so my business side wanted to do a short story collection themed (more on this later) on the traitors, meaning I needed to write 5 short