How can you use short stories to improve your writing craft across different genres? How can you make money from licensing your short stories in different ways? How do you structure a short story collection? Douglas Smith shares his tips.

In the intro, S&S imprint says that authors no longer need to get blurbs for their books [The Guardian]; James Patterson will be headlining Author Nation 2025; How to sell books from a table [Novel Marketing Podcast]; My lessons learned about screenwriting; Death Valley, a Thriller.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Douglas Smith is a multi-award-winning Canadian author of novels, short stories and nonfiction, with over 200 short fiction publications in 36 countries and 27 languages. He's also the author of Playing the Short Game: How to Market and Sell Short Fiction, now out in its second edition.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• How beginner writers can use short fiction to improve their writing craft
• Overview of the different short story markets
• First rights and second rights for selling short stories
• Financial expectations for traditionally published short stories
• Tips for self-publishing a collection
• Benefits of exclusive short stories
• Using Spotify playlists as a discoverability mechanism – here's a playlist of my short stories on Spotify
• How to market a second edition

You can find Doug at SmithWriter.com.

Transcript of Interview with Douglas Smith

Joanna: Douglas Smith is a multi-award-winning Canadian author of novels, short stories and nonfiction, with over 200 short fiction publications in 36 countries and 27 languages. He's also the author of Playing the Short Game: How to Market and Sell Short Fiction, now out in its second edition. So welcome back to the show, Doug.

Douglas: Oh, thank you, Joanna. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me back.

Joanna: Oh, yes. So first up­—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and short stories, in particular.

Douglas: Well, I guess I did a fair bit of writing in high school and a bit in university. Then I just drifted away from it, pursuing a business career and raising a family, etc. I always told myself I would go back and chase the writing dream someday.

I remember, I was in my early 40s, and I came back from a family vacation, and one of the first things I read was the obituary for one of my all-time favorite writers, Roger Zelazny. He was the American science fiction fantasy writer, and he had died far too early at, I think, 56 from cancer.

That just drove home the fact that none of us are guaranteed of a someday. So I started writing that summer and turned out about eight short stories. I joined a writing group to get feedback on my writing.

Then about a year and a half later, it was actually on New Year's Eve of the following year, I got my first acceptance letter. So that was a great way to end a year and start a new one. So that's how I started. I started with short fiction. I started because one of my favorite writers died far too young.

Joanna: What was your previous career?

Douglas: I was an IT executive. Just in case people are wondering, I remained an IT executive. I did not give up the day job, so writing was done in spare time. Especially when I started with short fiction, it's very hard to live and raise a family on the proceeds of short stories.

Joanna: I think that's a really important thing to say. I suspected you were going to say that. Then just with perspective—

So what year was it that you did that first sale?

Douglas: That story came out in '97, so a long time ago. That story actually ended up winning an award. So, yes, it was a good start, but I stayed with writing short fiction for about 10 years.

Part of that was inertia, and part of it was just writing a novel at that time seemed kind of daunting. I finally did decide that I needed, for the same someday issue, that I wanted to move into novels, and I better not wait any longer.

Joanna: Yes. I mean, obviously the publishing industry is quite different from 1997, and we'll come back to some of the other markets. What have you noticed with short fiction in particular, or in general with the indie author community, and things changing? I mean—

This book, Playing the Short Game, you self-published this, right?

Douglas: Yes, I did, and my novels as well. My collections, which were the first things I put out, they came out from traditional publishers that are small press publishers, one in the UK and one in Canada.

When it came to the point where I was ready to publish my first novel, for me, I saw no upside in trying to go a traditional publishing route.

Ironically, my advice is quite different for short fiction. One, I think writers should start with short fiction and that they should pursue the traditional short story markets that are, if anything, far more numerous now than when I started.

Thanks to the option of a lot of these short fiction magazines or anthologies, they put out ebook editions, so it's a lot easier. You don't have to worry about the physical distribution, physical production of the magazines.

There's still a lot of print magazines around, still a lot of print anthologies, but you'll find there's a lot of options for selling short fiction. Much more than when I started.

Joanna: So let's get to some of the pros and cons, I guess. So you said there you do think fiction authors should start with short stories. Why do you recommend that?

Why write short stories? What is fun about it? What are the good craft reasons?

Douglas: Yes, it is fun. I mean, if you do not like short fiction as a reader, it's going to be difficult for you to be successful as a writer. So that would be the first thing. The standard advice for any writer is you've got to be a reader.

If you don't read, you're not going to be a writer.

Why short fiction to start with? My main, strongest argument is that it helps you learn your craft. It teaches you how to be a writer.

There are far too many indie novels out there that are, quite frankly, terrible.

The good thing with short fiction is that it gives you a method where you can try out a lot of different types of stories, types of story structure. You can basically build your toolbox as a writer, and many of those tools are the same ones you're going to need if you move onto novels.

The other thing is it gives you a benchmark. If you're writing short stories and sending them out to professional markets—and I assume we'll get into that—you get a wonderful little measuring stick for when you've become a professional writer.

Or in other words, when your writing has become good enough that someone out there wants to pay you money to publish it, in the hopes that they will make money from what they publish.

So if you don't do that, if you just jump into indie and send your stories out into the world, put them up on retail sites, quite frankly, it's probably not going to be a very good piece of writing. It's hard to develop a craft.

One of the complaints I have with a lot of the indie writers out there is, and you see it if you go to convention, all they focus on is, “I've written a book. Now, how can I market it? Please tell me the secret to beating an algorithm.”

There are good marketing approaches. The problem is, if you come up with a good marketing approach for your novel, your first novel, it's probably going to do you more harm than good. Because if you get a lot of people to read it, and they read it and say, this is not very good, they're never going to come back to your writing.

As opposed to if you've taught yourself the craft of writing, and you become a competent writer, and you get to the point where professional publishers are willing to give you money for your short stories, your writing has reached that point.

So when you move to a novel, it's going to be a different beast than short stories, but you're going to have a lot of the skills already in place that you've honed over the time you've been writing short fiction.

So that's my main argument for writing short stories, is that it teaches you how to be a writer.

One more thing is, the example I love to give is, you can try a lot more points of view: first person, third person. Different story structures, things you want to try. Genres: horror, science fiction, fantasy, mainstream.

You can try more of those over 25,000-word short stories than you can in one 100,000-word novel.

You've written the same number of words, but you're going to come out at the end of those 20 short stories being much more knowledgeable and a better writer than writing that first 100,000 word novel.

Joanna: I mean, I totally agree with you there in terms of the potential for doing shorter stories. I mean, you said 5000 words.

What is a short story range, in terms of word count?

Because people often get obsessed with this.

Douglas: Yes, and the definitions I'll give are from the Science Fiction Fantasy Writers Association. So a short story is anything up to, I think it's 7500 words. Then a novelette is above that, up to 17,750 or 17,500, I can't remember which.

Then a novella is above that, up to 40,000 words. Then flash, it varies. Anything typically up to 1000 words is called flash.

Your typical short story, if you look at markets out there, they will want something in the range of 3000 to 5000 words. If you write above that, the other tip I'll give is, the longer the story is, the harder it will be to sell.

If you've got a 10,000-word story, and an editor loves your story, but they also love two 5000-word stories from two other writers, they're probably going to buy those two stories as opposed to your one big one. They're taking a bigger chance on your single story.

Joanna: Okay, well, let's talk about those markets then, because you mentioned the traditional short story markets, but that there are a lot more of them these days.

Give us an overview of what you mean by short story markets.

Obviously, just so everyone knows, in the book you go through this extensively. So I highly recommend people get the book for more detail, but just give us an overview.

Douglas: Well, generally speaking, your markets for any story that you write—and we're going to have to get into the rights that you'll be dealing with when you're trying to market a short story—but simply, it's a magazine.

There are lots of magazine markets out there, and those are ones that come up with a different issue—not too many do it monthly anymore—but four times a year, three times a year. They are either in print format and/or electronic edition. So they're called serial publications.

Then the other main market is an anthology, the anthology markets. Those are books that contain stories from different authors. So those are your two main options.

Anthologies typically are themed, so they have the advantage of, if you've got a very strange story, you may luck out and find that there is an anthology coming out of radioactive chickens from space or something. You haven't been able to sell that story of yours, and now you probably have a higher probability.

So anthologies and magazines. The other major market would be audio markets.

Again, there can be audio anthologies or audio zines as well, and they will be producing essentially a podcast version of your story. They will have a narrator that will read your story and dramatize it. That's the third type.

Joanna: Let's talk about the different rights.

Because it is quite different, isn't it, to long form fiction and nonfiction.

Douglas: In many ways, it's very similar. The main thing that if you're going to start writing at all is understand that you have rights.

As soon as you finished a story or a novel, you have rights associated with that creation.

So for short stories, when a publisher that you've submitted to comes back to you and says, “Hey, I love this story, I want to publish it,” we typically say, “Hey, I sold a short story.” You actually haven't sold anything. What you're going to be doing is licensing a very particular set of rights to that publisher.

They're going to have a number of dimensions. The first dimension I deal with in the book is, I call it the Media Dimension, and we just talked about the three different types of markets.

So if you're selling to a print magazine, they're going to want to license print rights. If they're only in electronic format, then they'll want electronic rights. If they're an audiobook publisher, they'll want audio rights.

So there's that, there's the three dimensions of types of media, and that's combined with whether they're an anthologist or a magazine. So for example, if I sold a story to a magazine that only has print editions, they would want to license serial print rights.

Serial means they're a magazine, and they need print rights to legally publish my story, because that's the format they're in. If they also have an ebook edition, then they'd ask for print and electronic serial rights.

The other dimension is language. So, I mean, most of your listeners are going to be writing in English.

Then the other dimension is geography. Some publishers, short fiction publishers, are still restricted to a particular geography, and that is usually only for print publishers. So if a magazine publishes in Canada only, and distributes in Canada only, for example, they would ask for first Canadian print serial rights.

So all these things in English, all these things, as you see, get combined into a collection of rights that they'll be licensing from you.

Joanna: You mentioned first serial rights there, and this is what's quite different.

With short stories, you might have first rights and then reprint rights.

Douglas: I call them old currents rights. The very first time you sell a story, they will be licensing first rights from you. It'll be first—whatever those other rights were—first print rights, first audio rights, etc.

After that, there's a time period associated with rights, and it's called the reversion period. After your story has been published, the rights will revert to you. Meaning that the publisher will say, “Hey, the story is yours again. You can do whatever you want with it.”

Typically, if it's a magazine, they will ask for a reversion period that will be somewhere around where the following issue comes out. So if they publish four times a year, they'll probably ask for about a six-month reversion period, and that's very fair.

Anthologists will ask for anything from a year to two years after the publication date.

So let's say that reversion period has passed, the rights come back to you. Those rights come back as second rights, not first rights. You only get to sell license first rights once.

When you do have those rights come back to you though, you can now, what we call, sell a reprint. In other words, you can market to another publication that accepts reprints and sell the story over and over and over again. No matter how many times you sell a reprint, you're always licensing second right.

So there's no such thing as third rights or fourth rights or anything. It's one time for first rights, and after that, you can license second rights as many times as you can find a market who wants to publish your reprint.

Joanna: I feel like that is one of the big differences with rights for a novel. I mean, I see a lot of authors getting term of copyright contracts, or really, really long time limits. Whereas, as you say with shorts, they're maybe six months or up to two years, but then you can keep selling it over and over again. I'm sure you have sold some of your shorts multiple times over decades.

Douglas: Yes, for sure. I've got stories that I've sold 30-plus times.

Joanna: Wow. So, well, then for people listening, 30-plus times—

How much money can writers expect to get for a short story for the premium traditional markets?

Douglas: So that's a good question, and it leads into what my strategy is for short fiction that I recommend to writers. It's that you're only going to get the top rates from a short fiction market if it's a pro market.

Pro markets only license first rights, they don't take reprints.

So I'll eventually answer your question, but the main point I want to make is my strong recommendation is that when you're sending your stories out, when you try to sell them for the first time, you only submit to the top professional markets.

That's the only time you'll ever get a chance to get into an Asimov, or a Fantasy and Science Fiction, or a Lightspeed, etc, because once you've sold that story, they're never going to be interested in it.

So you need to, as I say in the book, start at the top. Start at your most desired markets, the ones that have the most cachet. Those are also the ones that pay the top pro rates, and also the ones that get the most awards, press, and nods, etc.

After you get the rights back from that, you can market it to any market that takes a reprint. You'll find anything. You'll find markets that will simply publish your story and not give you any money.

You can find markets that will pay you up to five, six cents a word for a reprint. Whereas pro rates, I think, they're still at eight cents a word for SFWA. So it really ranges. So how much money you can make from a story kind of depends on what you want to sell your reprint at.

I personally warn authors that if you sell a story anytime, it's going to involve work and time on your part. So you should set sort of a minimum dollar amount that you're willing to accept to pay you for your time to work with the editor, go over the print copy before it's published, etc.

Joanna: So on that, eight cents a word, it'd be around $400 then for a 5000-word story at premium market.

Douglas: Yes. At US dollar rates, yes.

Joanna: US dollar rates. Then, let's say, in six months, you get that story back, and then you can do what you like with it. As you said, you can license it over and over again.

It's so interesting. I've written now a few short stories and have been in a few anthologies, but basically, I've never submitted to any traditional markets. Mainly because of my lack of patience and the fact that, I guess, I know that if I publish it myself and put it out right now, then I'm going to get some money.

Especially if I'm selling direct, I'm going to make more than that $400 from my own audience. So it's a very different definition of success, I guess, in terms of cachet and awards versus money in your pocket now.

I noticed that you also sell direct. How do you balance that side as well?

Douglas: Sure, so one comment on that. I mean, you have a name, and you have a huge audience and platform, so it's more conceivable that you're going to be able to indie publish a piece of short fiction and get more money than a beginner.

So my comments are focused at the beginning writer, and if you want to get the most mileage out of your short story that comes from selling it to a top pro market. It helps you build your resume. You can also build up a backlist.

You can attract fans and subscribers to a newsletter, using some of your short stories as reader magnets, etc.

So it helps you build up your own network. So, you know, you're in a position where you already have that. If I'm a beginning writer, my advice to them is I would still start with short fiction.

So, yes, probably about two dozen of my early short stories are available in ebook format. So those are all stories that I sold first rights for to a traditional market. So in other words, when I did an ebook for those stories, the rights had already reverted back to me. The story had been out.

A lot of them were award winners or award finalists. I did it at the time because I was sort of just getting into looking at indie publishing. I didn't have any novels, so I thought I'd try just putting out some of my short stories as individual ebooks, use them as reader magnets, etc.

I got a great artist who gave me a great deal on producing covers for them, so they all have the same cover. It was a price that made it sensible to try that experiment.

So, yes, if you go to Amazon, any of the retailers, if you go to the bookstore on my website, you'll be able to buy my short stories individually. That's not how I started, and I would never put out a new short story that way. I'd still go to a traditional market for it.

Joanna: Okay, I think that's really interesting. I do want to point out to everyone that I grew my audience, and that everyone has to grow their own audience over a long, long time.

You've obviously done the same thing, I think starting at different times. I started a decade after you, so 2007 was my first book that I self-published. So it's kind of interesting how things change over time.

I do want to just ask about collections because, obviously, you have collections. Here I'm saying a collection as a single author, as opposed to an anthology with multiple authors with shorts.

What are your tips around doing a collection, since I am thinking of doing this myself?

Douglas: The first step is to make sure that you have enough quality stories. So enough means, you know, minimum 80,000 words. I think a dozen stories that is at least that length would be reasonable.

The main point is that those stories all have to be good. A collection, it's like a chain is strong as the weakest length. It's going to be judged on the worst story in the book. So as soon as the reader hits a weak one, sadly, they're probably going to remember that one.

So you really need your 12, whatever, best stories. So you need to have written more than 12 stories because probably the 12 that you've written aren't the best. They all should have appeared in a top market because that is one of the ways you can tell it's a good story. Someone paid you pro rates for it.

If you have any award winners or award finalists or stories that appeared in annual best of anthologies, they go in as well. So that's the main thing. They have to be quality stories because this collection is going to be a calling card for you.

After that, it depends. The next piece, let's say you've picked your great stories that you want to put in the collection, he next thing is, what order do you put them in? The rule for doing collections or anthologies pretty much has stayed the same since I started writing, anyway.

Figure out what your best three or four stories are. You put the best one first, and another really good one last, and you put another strong one second.

So the idea is you want to pull the reader in with two really good stories and then leave them with a positive memory the collection when they read the last one.

If you have another really good one, you should put it in the middle as sort of a tent pole in case things are flagging. So that's the quality criteria for sorting through what order you want to put your stories in.

After that, it comes down to, as I say in the book, trying to craft a reader experience. You have to sit down and think, “Okay, they just finished this story. What should come next?” There's so many ways to do that.

I write in science fiction, and fantasy, and horror, and some Slipstream, etc. So do I mix all those? Do I put one section for all my science fiction? Do I put one section for my fantasy, etc.? The questions I put out, I alternate, but I also look at the tone. You have to look at the length too.

By tone, I mean, if you have a really, really downer story, you might want to follow that with something more upbeat. The reverse is true too.

If you have a couple that are like novel at length, you probably don't want to put them back to back. You want to have a shorter story following a long story.

It's crafting the reader experience.

Joanna: I read a lot of short story collections and anthologies, and it's more that I dip in, and I never, ever read them in order. I usually only read like one story at a time. It's something I do before I go to sleep, like just before bed.

So it's very weird because I feel like different readers have different experiences. So we can try our best, but readers might just decide to do what the hell they want. I do have two other points on this.

What about including exclusive short stories?

So I'm going to do a Kickstarter for my collection, and I'm thinking of including a couple of short stories that have not been seen anywhere else, so they're real exclusives.

Then also, I was wondering about extra material. So I always do an author's note as to what inspired the story. I was thinking of expanding those sort of into interstitial pieces. So any thoughts on those two things?

Douglas: Yes, both good points. One is if you have a story that has not been published anywhere else, you should include one of those.

One, it's a bit of a teaser. If you have a fan who's a completist and they just want to read everything that you write, the only way they're going to be able to read that story is if they buy the collection. So it is a good policy to include one previously unpublished short story in a collection.

The additional material, the author notes around stories, I personally love, and I'd recommend it. I mentioned Roger Zelazny is one of my favorite writers, and he had a lot of collections.

What I enjoyed about his collections were his either forwards or afterwards where he talks about the story and how the idea arrived, and maybe how it ties into other stories he'd written, etc. I love that.

I know I had a couple of comments on my collections where people were saying they didn't like it. They just want to read the short stories. So, I mean, you can't please everybody.

I would say, in general, most of the feedback I've received on my short stories, my collections, has been that the reader enjoys learning more about the story. Either how you wrote it, or why you wrote it, or whatever. So I'd recommend putting that in.

Sometimes I've done it as forwards, sometimes afterwards. Depends if there's any spoilers. Sometimes both.

Joanna: Yes, I think that's really good. I mean, I'm thinking in my special edition for the Kickstarter, I'll include photos if I can, as to some of the things that sparked the idea or a thing to make it a special, special collection. Which I feel is possible now with the print possibilities we can do.

I also wondered just on the audio, so at the moment, I narrate my own short stories and just release them as individuals. With a collection, again, I will narrate the whole thing and release that separately.

I wondered if you had any thoughts on audiobook collections for short stories?

Douglas: Interesting. I'm not sure I have the patience to do my own narration, so I think it's a personal thing. I certainly don't have the expertise to talk about producing audiobooks. I've had a lot of my short stories produced as audio plays, but that's because I've submitted them to audio markets.

There are good productions and bad productions. I've sort of found the ones that I absolutely love and who will actually cast a story, and they'll have different voice actors for the different characters. I find that just so awesome.

I think if you're an indie writer and you're thinking of doing your audiobooks, I know I would say, first of all, am I willing to invest in the necessary audio setup? Do I have the patience to do the narration and do the editing, etc.? I think it's a personal choice. Audio is a growing market.

Joanna: Yes, and it's really interesting because I talked to Spotify at Author Nation last year, and they said what they're often now doing is audio that's under an hour.

Generally, an hour of audio is about 9000 words, so pretty much all short stories are going to be under their range of an hour. So they're kind of serving those in their discovery thing for people's commute because that's the average commute.

So just a tip for people listening, creating playlists on Spotify of short story collections or anthologies, just with other people. You don't have to publish them. You can just link to them in a playlist.

[Here's a playlist of my short stories on Spotify, most narrated by me.]

I think that's actually a really good discoverability mechanism for things like Spotify, which is now trying to get more and more people into audio fiction and audio nonfiction.

Douglas: Yes, especially if it leads listeners to your other work.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. You can do cross promotion that way. So I can link one of my horror short stories, to one of yours, to one of Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s. So we can make these playlists mixing stories that we like, just as a more discoverability mechanism, as I mentioned.

So I think that's something new that's really only emerged in the last couple of years. Anything else on short stories? Because I do have one other question before we finish.

Douglas: I'm making notes here because that's going to go into the next edition, in terms of audio versions and Spotify.

I mean, there's so much to talk about. One of the reasons I put out the second edition is, well, one, it had been 10 years since the first one. Then, two, when I looked at my notes, there had been so many things that had changed over the past decade.

Joanna: Well, that is my last question. I've also just done a second edition of my How To Write Non-Fiction, which now includes memoir and all of this. I know a second edition can be a right pain.

So I wondered if you had any thoughts for nonfiction authors who are listening—

When do you do another edition? When is it worth it for you? Also, what is the difference in marketing it?

Since many people, including me, also have your first edition.

Douglas: What I did when I put out the first one, my email is in the back, and people would get in touch with me via the website. I encouraged writers to reach out to me because it was sort of my way of paying forward to new writers to write that book.

If they had any questions interpreting what I'd written, or something I didn't cover, I encouraged them to please reach out to me, and a lot of writers did. Sometimes it was just clarifying what I had in the book.

Other times it was, “Wow, that's a really good question. I didn't think of that scenario,” and I would just start to keep a file of things to add to the second edition.

So when I realized it had been a decade, and I started coming across things like Ralland.com, which was my go to market list, and he stopped updating his website. So I realized that there's probably a lot of other changes. I looked at that file and said, yup, there's ever so much I can put into a new edition. So it was that.

When is the right time? I think when you start to look at the first version and say, “Wow, no, that's actually not right anymore,” or, “I should say more about that particular topic.”

Joanna: What about the challenges marketing a second edition?

Douglas: I'm not big on marketing, I guess. I don't do a lot around that, and probably should do more. For this one, I told my newsletter subscribers. Most of them are readers, not writers, but there is some overlap.

The retailer sites help because the first edition sold pretty, pretty consistently. So, now if you go to Amazon and look for this, you're only going to find the second edition. So linking the first edition to, “Hey, there's a new edition,” things like that, but honestly, that was it.

Joanna: Well, I must say, you didn't pitch me for this. I pitched you because I saw it in, I think it was a StoryBundle last year.

Douglas: Yes, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She will do these wonderful reader bundles. She does at least one a year, etc.

I communicate with Kris and Dean fairly regularly, and she reached out to me and said, “I see you're putting out a second edition. I've got a StoryBundle that's coming out in two months. Would you have an ebook edition ready for that time frame?”

I said, “Yes, sure. Can you write a new introduction for it?”

Joanna: So I think that's important because —

People think marketing is just like paying for Facebook ads, but it's also your network, and you've been growing your network for a really long time.

Obviously, Kris is an amazing writer. She was also an editor in short story markets and all that.

So that's part of your network giving you opportunities, which is just as important.

Douglas: Yes, for sure. I know Jason, who runs StoryBundle, so it all helps. There's different ways to market.

I know Kris and Dean because I went to their workshop a couple of decades ago. The first one I went to was How to Write Short Fiction.

Joanna: Amazing.

Douglas: Led by Kris and Gardner Dozois, the late Gardner Dozois. I think Kris is the only person who beat Gardner for a Hugo for Best Editor.

Joanna: Wow. I've been on Dean and Kris's workshops and things like that, and that's kind of how I've ended up discovering your work. So just for people listening, again, sometimes these things take decades to come around, but that's okay.

Where can people find you, and your books, and your stories online?

Douglas: Sure. The best starting point is my website, which is SmithWriter.com. You can find links to my own bookstore or to all the retailer sites.

I just completed an urban fantasy trilogy called The Dream Rider Saga, and the books are The Hollow Boys, The Crystal Key and The Lost Expedition. The Hollow Boys won two awards when it came out. The third book, The Lost Expedition, just came out last year, and I had an earlier novel as well.

You can find links to those and all my collections on the website.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Doug. That was great.

Douglas: Okay, thanks for having me on again, Joanna.

The post Writing And Selling Short Stories With Douglas Smith first appeared on The Creative Penn.