Title: Writing Short Stories to Promote Your Novel by Rayne Hall
Genre: Writing, non-fiction
Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
TL;DR: A good resource for how short stories can boost sales that comes with exercises for idea generation.
As with most of Rayne Hall’s works on Amazon, Writing Short Stories to Promote Your Novel is meant to help authors who already know how to write and are just trying to hone their skills and learn some new techniques.
Writing Short Stories provides the reader with an exercise where they can generate ideas for short stories that can tie into their existing series or books. Following Hall’s method, the reader can figure out how to tie short stories into their existing works by creating works of a similar flavor using side characters. I don’t want to go too in depth because the book is short and the exercises in it are much more useful than my paraphrasing.
In the future, I’m hoping to apply this to my teaching (if I ever get to teach creative writing), and I’m planning on writing some short stories over the summer using Hall’s method. It’s simple, straight-forward and uses something similar to the pomodoro method, which I’m all for. Hall also provides ways to publish these short stories in a way than can benefit the author and give them the most exposure.
The only thing I didn’t like about Writing Short Stories to Promote Your Novels was that she included a lot of her short stories in the back of the book. It seemed more like free publicity than a way to help the reader. Also, Hall suggests the stories generated should be about 2,000 words long, but I don’t think word count is really an issue in the long-run.
Kara Jorgensen 
hahaha: The only thing I didn’t like about Writing Short Stories to Promote Your Novels was that she included a lot of her short stories in the back of the book.
Yeah, it stunk of shameless self-promotion. Pretty sure we all know what a short story is or looks like.
Sounds actually shameful; me, I’m pretty much more the shameless sort: I just lay my cards out open on the table and say, “All right. I’m dealin.’ Let’s play!” 😉