Playing the Short Game: University of Toronto course

Submitted by Douglas Smith on Wed, 2014/05/21 - 4:47pm

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be teaching a course this fall at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. The course is called "Playing the Short Game: How to Market and Sell Short Fiction" and is part of the certificate program that the U of T offers in their Creative Writing program.

The course is based on the popular blog series of the same name that I did in 2013 for Amazing Stories. My upcoming book, also titled Playing the Short Game, will be released later this summer and will form the textbook for the course.

If you live in Toronto and are interested, here’s the registration link for the course.

Also, if you know of a short story writer in the Toronto area who might be interested, please feel free to forward this information to them.

The course will run for ten weeks on Wednesdays, from October 1 to December 3. Details are as follows:

Course Description

A wealth of courses and books exist to teach you how to write stories. But what happens when you've finished writing? Do you know how to sell what you've written?

In this course, you will learn everything you need to know to sell your short stories to professional markets and to build a career as a short fiction writer.

Learner Outcomes

This course teaches you the business side of short fiction. By the end of the course, you will understand the benefits of short fiction for a writing career, rights and licensing for short fiction, how to find the right professional markets for a story, how to submit and sell to those markets, mistakes to avoid in submitting your work, how editors work and why they choose or reject stories, what to look (and look out) for in short fiction contracts, how to work with an editor, and how to handle rejections and reviews. Most importantly, this course will teach you how to use your short stories to build a career as a writer.

Prerequisites

Students should have at least one story completed and ready to send out to market.

And here again is the registration link.