Time to Publish!

You are unlikely to find publishers who are interested in short stories or short novels; they tend to be interested in the longer length novels only. What you are going to have to do is self-publish or send it to a journal or magazine.

So, where would you be able to publish a short story? You could try Amazon Short Reads or Smashwords for starters. Your manuscript must be formatted – again, you could hire someone or you could just do it yourself; it’s not too difficult.

Also check out the Smashwords Style Guide, a comprehensive guide that tells you all you need to know about how to format for online retailers that take MS Word documents.

And don’t forget that your book needs a cover.

It’s easy to create a book cover but not if you want an attractive one that is going to do your selling for you. There are some online apps that help though, including Canva and Amazon’s Cover Creator. The best bet is to hire someone to help you but, if not, at least get a friend in to lend a hand. If you use a Mac, try Pixelmator or you can use a free software called Gimp, very similar to Photoshop.

Formatted, a great cover, you are ready to publish!

Please keep in mind that this series of articles is about short stories or novels, not full-length ones. Of course, your short story could eventually be expanded into a full novel but that’s for another day.

In terms of hours spent creating your book, well, that is down to you and how much time you have spare. If you are planning a short story of 10-20,000 words plus, you will need to dedicate more hours per day than if you were writing one of just a couple of thousand words. Bear in mind that your time needs to include the editing, revisions, search, copyediting, proofreading, the cover and so on.

How long it takes will also depend on what your writing style is, whether you do it all alone or bring in others to help, how detailed your cover design is, and how much work and detail actually goes into the story.

The cover is the easy bit; writing the story isn’t too hard either. What is going to take your time is preparation. Do it right and it will take time but it will take a lot of the strain out of writing the full story.  Yes, you will most likely revise your outline as you go along but that’s fine; the important thing is, you have that outline to start with.

If you opt to go down the self-publishing route, do your homework thoroughly; each has their own guidelines on the format, book length and so on – if you don’t follow them, you may not get your book published after all your hard work.

The most important thing is to have fun and a lot of it. Don’t worry if you don’t make it within the 30 days; practice really does make perfect.