Write and publish your short story

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Did you know? Over half of Brits would like to write a book! Luckily for them, and all other aspiring writers, it has never been easier to write, self-publish, and share your literary creations thanks to digital publishing platforms like Calaméo. Today, we will share our quick guide on how to write and publish your first short story with Calaméo.

How to write a short story

Often less intimidating than writing a novel, many aspiring authors choose to start by writing short stories. Far from being easy, however, short stories have genre-specific requirements which differentiate them from novels.

The main steps for writing your short story

To write your short story, you need to follow a few major steps. As you will see, it’s not the writing that will take the most time, but rather the preparation and proofreading that will be the most time-consuming tasks.

Preparation

  • Deciding the type of short story (crime, historical, fantasy, etc.)
  • Choosing the length (from a few paragraphs to a hundred pages)
  • Choosing the major themes
  • Defining the characters and locations
  • Outlining events scene by scene

Writing

  • Writing each scene

Proofreading

  • Corrections
  • Rewriting scenes
  • Final proofreading

Our tips

The short story is a specific genre with its own constraints. Here are our tips to make writing a short story easier:

  • Focus on your main characters and limit the number of secondary characters
  • Don’t have too many different locations
  • Be succinct in your descriptions
  • There should only be one main action, or a short sequence of actions
  • Think carefully about the message of your story before you start writing it

How to self-publish your novel with Calaméo

Publishing your content on Calaméo requires only a few steps and offers many advantages.

Page layout

In your word processor, make sure you choose a layout that is comfortable for your readers to read. Think of your design as a real book: the font must be legible. Avoid serif fonts and ensure that the font size is large enough to read on a screen (including mobile!).

💡 TIP: Make sure you export your document in a format accepted by Calameo.

Uploading to Calaméo

Putting your short story online is quick and easy on Calameo: it’s just one click away! Thanks to our unique technology, your documents are transformed in just a few seconds into superb flipbooks suitable for reading everywhere.

Enrichments

Our Editor tool enables you to enrich your publications with multimedia. Easily add videos, audio tracks, images, and both internal and external links to turn your short story into a unique reading experience!

Sharing

Once your short story is published on Calaméo, you can share it with the entire world. Embed it in your website or blog, create a digital library, share it on your social media pages, send it via email…you have so many choices!

💡 TIP: Don’t have an idea for a story to tell? Start with the writing exercise we suggested in Calaméo Magazine #8: the Space issue.

Share all your literary creations with the world today by creating your free Calaméo account!

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