Using Short Works to Grow Your Author Business

BAIPA monthly meetings are now exclusively on Zoom. The Zoom links will be provided to you via email on the Friday evening before, around 9 PM.
Therefore, all non-members MUST register in advance in order to participate. However, all current BAIPA members will get the Zoom info for the morning session automatically.

Please scroll down to the bottom of this page if you need a non-member ticket.

The general meeting begins at 9 am, the speaker presentation is at 11 am, after Q&A, networking time, introductions & announcements.

(Click here for the schedule for the day)

MORNING PRESENTATION:

Using Short Works to Grow Your Author Business

Matty Dalrymple, The Indy Author

Matty Dalrymple discusses Using Short Works to Grow Your Author Business, including using non-fiction books as calling cards to other income streams and using short fiction to interest readers in longer works.

On the non-fiction front, Matty uses her own experience with her short non-fiction works (Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction and The Indy Author’s Guide to Podcasting for Authors) to illustrate how the opportunities these open—consulting, speaking engagements, articles, contest judging—provide far greater income than the sales of the books themselves. She shares tips on how authors can best position themselves to capitalize on their short non-fiction as a “business card” for their other offerings.

On the fiction front, based on the material from Taking the Short Tack, she discusses how authors can connect with readers using short fiction, including using it as a reader magnet, as audio offerings, and as promotional material. She discusses how to use short fiction to create income, focusing on the opportunities offered by indie publishing. And she discusses how short fiction can indirectly support a creative business by enabling authors to market test new characters, worlds, or genres, or to re-start the engine of their (longer) creative work.

On both fronts, Matty discusses how authors can find, nurture, and capitalize on these opportunities by building a community of fellow creators in the writing and publishing worlds.

Key Takeaways include:

• Understand how a work of short non-fiction can be used as a “business card” to other opportunities such as consulting, speaking engagements, and for-pay articles, and how authors can best position themselves to capitalize on these opportunities.
• Understand how a work of short fiction can be used to create income (especially via indie publishing), connect with readers (e.g., as a reader magnet), and as market research.
• Understand the vital role that building a community of fellow creators in the writing and publishing worlds plays in optimizing the opportunities offered by both non-fiction and fiction short works.

About Our Speaker: Matty Dalrymple

Matty Dalrymple podcasts, writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as The Indy Author. She is the host of The Indy Author Podcast and the author of The Indy Author’s Guide to Podcasting for Authors. She is also the co-author, along with Mark Leslie Lefebvre, of Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction. Matty is a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors.
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Matty is also the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers (Rock Paper Scissors, Snakes and Ladders and The Iron Ring); the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels (The Sense of Death, The Sense of Reckoning, The Falcon and the Owl, ​A Furnace for Your Foe, and A Serpent’s Tooth); and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, including Close These Eyes and Write In Water. Matty is a member of International Thriller Writers, Sisters in Crime, and the Brandywine Valley Writers Group.

​Matty lives with her husband, Wade Walton, and their dogs in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

Connect with Matty:

TheIndyAuthor.com | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube