Indie Publishing & Short Fiction, with Matty Dalrymple

In this heartwarming and insightful episode, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Matty Dalrymple—thriller author, podcaster, speaker, and indie publishing pro. 

Matty’s not only the writer behind the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels and Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, but also a passionate advocate for the power of short fiction—and trust me, she has so much wisdom to share.

We kick things off with Matty’s love of all things nautical (yes, even boat-watching on vacation!), and quickly dive into how she first began writing short fiction. What started as a way to keep her readers engaged between novels quickly turned into a cornerstone of her writing life. 

Matty’s “snippets” from the Ann Kinnear universe are fan favorites—and she now has a growing collection of suspenseful short reads that offer bite-sized thrills and deep character moments.

Matty walks us through the practical side of indie publishing short fiction, sharing tips on affordable cover design, working with beta readers, and even bringing her stories to life through audio narration. 

Her approach is smart, approachable, and encouraging—perfect for writers who want to do more without burning out or breaking the bank.

One of my favorite parts of our conversation? Hearing how short fiction can act as a creative refresh. Whether she’s exploring a quirky character like Garak Mazur (Ann’s ghostly, curmudgeonly mentor) or experimenting with settings and ideas that don’t quite fit a full novel, Matty embraces short stories as a playful way to stay inspired—and sometimes, they even lead to new books she hadn’t planned on writing!

And if you’ve ever wondered whether there’s a real market for short fiction? Matty’s answer is a resounding yes. Her short stories continue to sell (even with minimal promotion!), and they’ve become an unexpected income stream as well as a way to keep her readers excited and engaged.

We wrap up with encouragement for any writer who’s curious about short fiction but unsure where to start. Matty’s advice? Don’t overthink it—just try it out. A short story can be a creative experiment, a reader gift, or even a new path forward in your writing career.

Tune in and fall in love with the possibilities of short fiction, all over again

Transcript

Intro:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.

Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state.

Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.

Rhonda:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm here today with Matty Dalrymple. She is a podcaster, a writer, a speaker, and a consultant on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as the indie author. She's written books on the business of short fiction, podcasting, and how to succeed as an author speaker. And her articles have appeared in Writers Digest Magazine. She's also the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, beginning with Rock Paper Scissors, the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels beginning with The Sense of Death, and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime, and she lives with her husband and their dogs in Chester County, Pennsylvania. And I think you're also someone who likes to go sailing, if I remember, Matty.

Matty:

Yes, well, I love all things nautical.

Rhonda:

Love it.

Matty:

I think that there's nothing about the writing craft or the publishing voyage that you can't describe with a lovely nautical metaphor. I haven't been able to go sailing as much as I used to go sailing much more. I kind of fell out of the situation where I had that opportunity, but I still love looking at pictures of old boats and when we go on vacation, I love watching boats. We are usually near the water when we go on vacation. So yeah, I'm a big boating fan.

Rhonda:

So good. Listen, I'm so excited for this conversation today because you think about, talk about, and share resources related to indie publishing short fiction. And you know, I don't think this gets talked about enough because I think when people think about indie publishing, they automatically think novels, memoirs, you know, like it's got to be 350 to 400 pages to even bother. So can you tell me a little bit about your own journey publishing shorter works?

Matty:

Yeah. I started publishing my short fiction because I had written the two Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, The Sense of Death and The Sense of Reckoning and the Ann Kinnear Novels about a woman who has the ability to communicate with spirits and so that leads, she has a business based on that. I try to treat it in a very business-like way. She has basically a consulting business. Her brother runs it. He's her business manager. She has contracts. She has clients. 

And I had written two of those books and I enjoyed that topic because I love the idea of what happens when an extraordinary ability transforms an ordinary life. That idea where everything is perfectly normal, but there's just like, you just tweak one thing. In this case, what happens if you were able to talk with dead people.

And so I had another idea for a story that was sort of along those lines. What happens when an extraordinary ability transforms an ordinary life, but it was not one that fit into the Ann Kinnear world. And so, I thought, well, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna take a pause from Ann for a moment. I'm gonna write this other book, which became Rock Paper Scissors. 

And at the time, as I think many people will empathize with. I thought it was a standalone and I got done and I realized it was and I realized it was going to be a series and that became Lizzy Ballard Thrillers. And so, I kind of felt as if I needed to give the Ann’s fans something to tide them over while I worked on the Lizzy books because I ended up writing three Lizzy books during that time period.

And so I thought, oh, you know, short fiction is going to be great. Just as like a favor to my readers. And so we were talking about being near the water. My husband and I love to vacation on Mount Desert Island, Maine. And normally we're there in the fall, but for whatever reason, I decided I was going to go in January. 

And I wrote a story called Close These Eyes, which is about Ann Kinnear going to MDI in January and sees, she's sitting in a restaurant. She's looking out the window. She sees a group of three people and something about the grouping, you know, attracts her attention and her concern and she follows the people down to the town dock and stuff ensues.

And so that was the first short story. It was just kind of a snippet in Ann's life. It had, you know, the required beginning, middle, and end of any story, but it was just a snippet and I put that up on the retail platforms and in e-book format only and the rest was history. I now, I think, have um, eight Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts and then one story that I use as a reader magnet for my email newsletter.

Rhonda:

Wow. So, I definitely, I think many folks will be familiar with, you know, using a short story as a reader magnet, but not publishing them as e-books and having, you know, so many of them like little bite size, enjoyable, you know, if you enjoy these books, you'll also enjoy this kind of you know, snack really.

Matty:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Rhonda:

And so they sold obviously, or you wouldn't continue to do them. Like people enjoy them.

Matty:

Yeah. The great thing about a short fiction is it's short, so it takes less time. Um, it's also, uh, because you're, you're charging less, obviously unless you're some huge name. Originally, I was selling my shorts for 99 cents and at the beginning of 2024, I raised the price to a dollar 99 and, um, but so you put them out there for a lower price, but then of course you have to accommodate the fact that you can't maybe spend the same amount of money for cover design, for example, as you would for a novel. And so, I found ways to economically approach that.

For the shorts, for example, for my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, all the books have an element that's like a design element. So, for The Sense Of Death, it's a brass door knocker in the shape of a hand. For The Sense Of Reckoning, it's a doorknob. It's kind of like an architectural element that serves as a design feature. And so I have a professional cover designer who does all my novels.

But what I did for the shorts is I had the cover, I always have the cover designer give me the background of the cover. So, I just have that plain without any text on it. And then I found out what the fonts of the cover were. And so, I was able to purchase stock photography that had that same kind of gestalt of an architectural element as a design element, mimicked what the professional designer had done with the cover in terms of the placement of the author name and subtitle and the title and the fonts and the size and everything like that.

I did this all with the cover designer's understanding. I wasn't trying to like sneak one by her. And it meant that aside from my time, and we never wanted to discount the value of our time, but aside from my time, I was able to make these basically for the cost of the stock photography that I purchased. And so that made the cover design easy. Currently, I'm only publishing them in e-books, so that's all I needed. Although I did expand later to audio, we can talk about that. So, I just modified it. So I had a square version of that for the audio.

Um, and then for editing, feel like I'm really catering to the readers at the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels now. And so that pool of people provides an automatic beta reader pool.  And I feel as if with the input of my beta readers, I'm able to get the editorial input I need. So again, this is something you can get for free so you can put them out for, uh, quite inexpensively.

Rhonda:

Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. But I, but I also love, I just love the whole idea of, you know, a novel is quite a commitment. So writing something that's shorter. And again, it's great that once you've got a series started, and so people are vested, you know, like I can think off top of my head of several authors that I wish did little shorts, you know, like it's great, I would love it.

So, those are standalones. Have you ever done anything in terms of because otherwise you could publish a collection of shorts, you can publish an anthologies. Have you ever done that kind of thing as well with shorts?

Matty:

Yes, I've had one of I guess two of my stories published in an anthology that was put out by the Delaware Valley Sisters in Crime. There was another anthology that was put out called The Oxford Files that was an anthology in support of the Oxford Pennsylvania Public Library. And so one of my stories is part of that. My goal is that once I have 12 stories, and I'm intentionally setting one in each month of the year, I'm going to put out something called A Year of Kinnear, which is going to be 12 Shorts of Ann Kinnear.

Rhonda:

Oh, great. I love that title so much.

Matty:

Yeah. So yeah, there are all sorts of fun things you can do both for your own work as a collection or working with other members of the writer community to put out anthologies.

Rhonda:

Wow. And so Matty, why did you end up deciding to do audiobooks of the shorts as well?

Matty:

Well, one is just that there's really nothing more fun than listening to a professional audiobook narrator narrate one of your works. I've worked with a couple of audiobook narrators. I had another narrator for my first Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, a wonderful person, very easy to work with, did a great job, beautiful voice.

But what I found was, so that was back, I don't know, maybe 2015 or something like that. What I found was that the audiobook market was really going much more away from a straight read to more of a performance. And those books were really more of a straight read, a beautiful read, but a straight read. And so, I wanted someone who would bring a little more drama to it. 

And so, I did some research. Found an audiobook narrator named Victoria Matlock and he has done my later Anne Kinnear Suspense Novels and all the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers. I actually listened to all the Lizzy Ballard thrillers not that long ago because I had done those three I talked about. I had a long break for then I went back to Ann and then I was getting back to Lizzy and I was like I really kind of need to remind myself of what's going on in Lizzy’s world and so I listened to the audiobooks on a long trip as a way of catching myself up and it was super fun. 

Enough time had gone by that I was kind of able to listen to it as a listener and not as the author of it. And I found myself saying, oh my God, I wrote myself into a corner here. I'm going to have to go back and fix something. And then a couple of minutes later, it would turn out that no, I had done that intentionally. There was a reason. I was like, oh, that's so cool.

But I think audio is so popular now. Anything that's sort of on-the-go content, things that we can do, ways that we can consume stories while we're doing other things in our busy lives is so great. As Victoria's time is available, I've been having her narrate some of the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts and I also a number of years ago found out about a man named Eric Brian Moore who had a podcast called the Pocket Paul podcast and Eric was and probably still is an audiobook narrator and he was looking for ways to put together a portfolio of work that he could advertise to people.

And so the idea he came up with which I think is brilliant is he started this podcast and he solicited um he solicited short fiction from people and he said if you let me read your story and put it out there as part of my podcast then I'll give you the audio and you can do anything you want with it and so it was really a win-win for him building his portfolio and for the author now they had um audio of his uh of his reading of it which was lovely and so I also have an audio of  one of my books that I use also as a reader magnet for my email newsletter.

Rhonda:

Gosh, I love that too. I don't think we, you know, we, so many just kind of stop at the e-book or maybe they do e-book and print. But there are, there's so much opportunity with audio books these days. What platforms are you  published on for your audio?

Matty:

I am on ACX for Amazon, Apple, and Audible. And then I'm on Findaway Voices for so many other platforms like Andy for Ruthless Hall.

Rhonda:

Right.

Matty:

Also Google Play. I've experimented a little bit with this. I do do audio via Google Play, AI narrated audio for my nonfiction, which is fine. I like consuming content like that. There are so many nonfiction books that I wish had any kind of audio because that's just how I like to absorb non-fiction. I like to hear it in audio.

I somehow pay much more attention if I'm listening to it than if I'm reading it for non-fictions. So I've been very happy with the Google Play AI generated audio. Every couple of months I go back and I try it with the fiction. I'm just like, it's just not the same. It's not the same. It's getting better every day but I still want to hear Victoria's lovely voice and performance doing my fictional audio.

Rhonda:

Yeah. And I love that distinction too, between a straight read versus the performance, because I definitely prefer an audio book to be slightly performed. You know, it's one person doing all the voices, but to kind of inject that little bit of drama into it, you know? Yeah.

Matty:

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Rhonda:

So, can we talk a little bit about how you use short fiction to connect with readers? I mean, obviously you're sort of, you know, with the Ann Kinnear, you're connecting with readers by providing them with another moment in Ann's life, right? To stay connected to this character that they've grown to love. But in what other ways do you use short fiction in your publishing career?

Matty:

Well, sometimes it can just be a nice palate cleanser. So, I actually just encountered this situation. Months ago on the Indie Author podcast, interviewed Todd Gelley, who had just started up a new app called Storiaverse. And it's a platform where people submit their stories. And if your short story is chosen, then Todd and his team work with animators to animate the story and then send that out via their app.

Rhonda:

So cool.

Matty:

Yeah, it was a super cool idea. So of course, anytime I talk to a guest on the Indie Author podcast, they also always have to try whatever they have on offer. I wrote a short story that features a secondary character in the Ann Kinnear world named Garak Mazur and Garak is Ann's curmudgeonly irritable, can only take him in small doses, sometimes mentor, sometimes competitor.

And so I was thinking about from an animation point of view and also from a character point of view. I think a book of Garak like I have a lot of fans who love Garak, like they almost read the books for Garak as much as they read them for Ann. But I thought a whole book of Garak would be a lot. It would just be a lot.

So, I thought, oh, but he'd be perfect for a short story. And I also thought that Garak’s physical nature would lend itself more to animation because he's very tall, he's very thin, he's very pale. He's sort of, because Garak also is someone who has a business that involves communicating with dead people, he sort of  puts that, his brand is this sort of like skeletal, gaunt look. So, I thought that..

Rhonda:

Ghostly man talking to ghosts.

Matty:

Exactly, exactly. And so, I wrote the story, sent it in. This was probably a year ago, didn't hear back. So, it was getting to the point where I thought, you know, maybe I should just like put out a Garak Mazur short story. So I opened up the story and started reading through it. And it was very clear right away that what I had been trying to do at the time, which was write something short with short that was animatable didn't really translate effectively into a story that was mainly going to be read or listened to.

And so, I started adjusting it and the more I adjusted it, the more it wasn't, first of all, it wasn't really feeling like Garak was going to carry the whole short story through as he would need to. But I also started getting an idea. I thought, oh, well, why don't I just make it an Anne story? This is going to be pretty easy to transfer what happens to Garak to something that happens to Ann.

And then the more I worked on it, the more I realized that I got very interested in each of the characters. There were only two characters in the original Garak story, but I thought, oh, but you know, it would be interesting to bring in this other character that one of the characters talks about. And so now I'm several thousand words into what will probably be the seventh Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel, because it like it took places.

Rhonda:

Just took off. Thought you were doing a short and it just surprise you. Wow.

Matty:

And I had kind of gone to that because I was a little stuck on the current Lizzy Ballard book. So, I was thinking of it as a palate cleanser, but as it turned out, it led into something longer. But then some of my other stories really have just been palate cleansers and stayed palate cleansers. And a lot of my short fiction is based on a like an event or a setting that I think will be interesting for me and my readers to explore a little more, but it doesn't have a whole thematic background.

Like several years ago my husband and I went on a cruise. We went from Hawaii to Vancouver and I just found the whole cruising experience so fascinating and being a crime thriller writer I got fascinated with the idea of falling overboard. What happens when you fall overboard? How many people fall overboard?

I did all that research and so there is just I thought that would be so obvious that if a cruise, so the scenario is a cruise ship has somebody jump off their, stateroom balcony and then on the next cruise, the same person in that same stateroom jumps off their balcony and they're like, whoa, we have to do something about this.

Like once might be explainable by personal circumstances twice that of two people who knew nothing about each other. was weird. And so they hire Ann to stay in that room and see if she can find anything out. And then that was it. I thought that was a really nice sort of heavily, what's the word I want, kind of dense story to tell. But I didn't feel necessary to expand into larger questions about what would drive somebody to consider taking their own life and things like that.

Rhonda:

Right, right. So it didn't warn a novel. But I love the idea of being able just to explore something, you know, just for fun, right? Like, be able to say, what if I put my character in this situation? Let's just have a good time for, you know, 25 pages or 20 pages or whatever. Yeah.

Matty:

Yeah. And it can also be great if you're thinking about something like a genre change.

Rhonda:

Right.

Matty:

You know, I write crime fiction. What if I decide I want to write a romance? I'll never do that, but let's just say. And so, I could embark on an 80,000, 90,000 or romance and 80,000 words into it realize that I'm not interested or finish it and share it with my readers and find out my readers aren't interested in it. Much better to spend four or five, six, 10,000 words with something, find out if it's going to hold your interest and then share it with your readers and say, this something that you'd be willing to follow me into and get their input? It can be great, cheap market research.

Rhonda:

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like you can use it as market research. You can just kind of drop something relatively short and see what the response is.  Do you have a readership of crime and thriller lovers who actually kind of would like to read a Christmas romance every now and again?

Matty:

Yeah.

Rhonda:

Yeah, that's great. What a good idea that is. Wow. Are you, is this something you're planning to do with basically every series? I love that you have two series going and you just kind of move between them. That must, that must really be great. Like if you feel like you're not either in the mood or not making progress on one, you can just move to the other. So have you done them for the Lizzy, Lizzy Ballard series as well?

Matty:

I have not, and I don't really see an opportunity to do this with Lizzy because the Ann Kinnear setup is so easy for a short story. So, Ann is getting clients of her spirit sensing business. And so every time there's an interaction with a client, that's an opportunity for a short story. Every time, you know, and it doesn't have to be an interaction with a client, it could just be something that happens to her as with that first story that I described on Mount Sirt Island in January. Just the nature of the setup of that world, that she has these sort of discrete events in her life related to communicating with dead people, makes it super easy to work that into a short story.

With the current Lizzy books, I can't really see a good way of making Lizzy the primary character of a short story, not that maybe I won't in the future, but it's not striking me yet. But there is a character within the Lizzy books who has, early in the series he has he works in, his name is Philip Castillo, he works in Sedona, Arizona, and he has a business basically targeted at tourists that he frames up as psychic counselling. And he doesn't have any extraordinary abilities at that point other than being an empathetic listener who, you know, sort of like a Psychiatrists or psychologists can offer people advice based on what he senses from them in a perfectly normal human-to-human way.

But Philip's character has evolved over time, just like Garak. He's become one of my favorites in the Lizzy world. And that scenario of him speaking to individual tourists walking into his office in Sedona would be perfect for short stories. So, I can definitely see opportunities there.

Rhonda:

Yeah, for sure. I'm just back from that area. Phoenix Sedona kind of area. I feel like that's so great. So do you have any advice for folks who might be thinking, oh, you know, I'm one or two books into a series and I wouldn't mind trying the path of, you know, adding in some shorts. Any advice to someone deciding to do this for the first time?

Matty:

Well, I'd say just jump into it. Follow the general rules of short fiction, which are limited number of characters, limited number of settings, limited number of themes. If it takes you further, then that's great. You know, maybe you really do have a novel like I found with my experimental story that was going to be with Garak. But yeah, I think it's one of those things that you don't have to put much thought into because it is a short investment. And so give it a whirl. There are lots of great craft books on short fiction out there, just, you know, go on to Google and Google short fiction tips or short fiction courses if you want to delve into it in a little more detail on the craft side before you tackle it. But I would say just give it a shot.

You can even do things like I interviewed Ran Walker for the Indie Author podcast and he writes drabbles, which are 100-word stories, exactly 100 words, not including the title, exactly 100 words. And that is super fun exercise even if you're never going to publish them, that's a super fun just craft, know, exercising your craft muscles. But Rand has actually published his, you know, through various platforms. But one of the things he did, which just makes my mind boggle is he wrote a story that was 100, 100 words, short stories that as a whole formed a larger story arc.

Rhonda:

Wow, I can't even imagine. That's a real puzzle.

Matty:

Yeah, it is a puzzle. If that kind of craft puzzle intrigues you, that can be fun. And I guess the other two things I mentioned that sort of related to some of the things we talked about earlier is that if this is something you enjoy, it can be a moneymaker. I've made over $600 from my Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, $35 or $66 cents at a time, you know. But you know, those stories are going to be out there forever. And I'm doing hardly any promotion of them. But what I find is that based on the sales, I think what happens is people read through the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, they get to the end and they then they find the shorts. And they buy all of them at once. Which is an incentive for me to hurry up and get my collection put together.

And also, don't discount the print option. I haven't done it myself, but I think that the minimum page count for print on KDP and IngramSpark is like 24 pages. And so, a short story that meets that requirement could be really fun to offer in print, either to sell it or it be a giveaway at like readers events. It could be an extra that you put in a bag if you're selling novels and you might say, you buy two novels. So, you know, you'll get this nice print copy of the short story for free. 

Rhonda:

So fun. What a great idea. 

Matty:

Yeah, I would tell people just jump in and whether or not you end up taking it that route of having of monetizing it or even publishing it, it's still well worth pursuing.

Rhonda:

That's so great. Thank you so much for sharing this today, Matty.

Matty:

Sure.

Rhonda:

It's just, you know, I know a lot of writers of short fiction, but I don't think that writers of short fiction think that it's possible to indie publish short fiction. So I love that you've, you've brought this forward and so many creative ways for folks to dive into it. Thanks so much for this.

Matty:

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for the invitation. This has been fun.

Outro:

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.

Your ratings and reviews tell the podcast algorithm gods that yes, this is a great show, definitely recommend it to other writers. And that will help us reach new listeners who might need a boost in their writing lives today as well. So please take a moment and leave a review. I'd really appreciate it. And I promise to read every single one. Thank you so much.