I’m having a story reprinted!
I have exciting news. My flash fiction story, ‘”‘Interview with the Vampire Hunter’, is going to be reprinted in Metastellar. This will be my first reprint and I’m very excited for this story to have a new and additional home and for new readers to discover it (or readers to rediscover it).
It’s a light-hearted contemporary fantasy story about a vampire masquerading as a journalist so she can interview a fabled vampire hunter over dinner. Her motives for doing so are, as you can imagine, not pure, and while it would usually be risky for confronting one of her kind’s mortal enemies, this vampire figures, ‘How hard can it be to kill a vampire hunter called Malcolm?’
Where and when can you read it?
‘Interview with the Vampire Hunter’ will be published on 4 November 2026 by Metastellar, and you’ll be able to read it by pressing the button below (but note the website page will only be active from 4 November 2026).
Metastellar is a great market for flash fiction and I’m over the moon to join their ranks of contributing authors. I hope you’ll take a moment to give it a read, as well as some of the other fantastic stories on their site.
What are ‘reprints’?
You may be wondering, ‘what is a reprint?’. Well, typically, when an author sells a short story, the author retains the copyright to it (it is still ‘their story’), but they grant the publisher an exclusive licence period within which only they can publish it, which can range from the date after it is published to, more typically, 12 months. There are some exceptions that usually apply, such as allowing the story to be included in a “Best of…” type anthology.
Once that period of exclusivity expires, then the right to grant a licence to publish the story revert back to the author (or, at least, they should). This means the author is free to seek a new market for the story, although most publishers pay either nothing or a token amount for reprints. The reason being, what most publishers want is the ‘first rights’ to publish the story.
However, there are quite a few markets for reprints, especially flash fiction (generally, stories that are less than 1,000 words). This is for a number of reasons. From an author’s perspective, it’s great to see old stories back out in the world in new markets and it maintains or provides visibility to their work. And from a publisher’s perspective, especially markets that have frequent publications (perhaps a weekly story, or monthly), it provides them a lower cost option to fill their monthly quota / target.
Publication history
‘Interview with the Vampire Hunter’ was originally published in Every Day Fiction in October 2021.
I happened to re-read it the other day and it made me smile, which got me wondering whether another market would be interested in reprinting it. I had not explored reprints before but thought this story might be a good candidate.
I’m pleased that I did, and even more delighted that Metastellar said yes!