Artist’s Representation of My Literary Career
It’s December—which is kind of amazing, as it was March just yesterday—which means its time to soberly contemplate my life and lifestyle choices, assessing how much good I’ve done in this world. Just kidding. I don’t do anything “soberly.”
No, it’s time to contemplate our short story submission game. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I love writing short stories. And, having written them, I love selling short stories, which ain’t easy. Just about every year I hear that short stories are making a comeback, and this past year the signs do seem optimistic. I have stories in four anthologies in 2015-2017 (Hanzai Japan, Urban Allies, and the upcoming Mech: Age of Steel and Urban Enemies), my story Howling on for More appeared over at Black Denim Lit as well, and Great Jones Street bought a reprint of my story Ringing the Changes (that appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2006). Not too shabby.
The four antho sales and the reprint were solicited, meaning someone actually contacted me and asked for the story/rights. It’s easy to sell a story when someone has already decided to buy one from you. How did I do with the submission process?
Hell is for Short Story Writers
Last year I submitted 33 stories, and sold 1. This year I will have submitted 51 stories by the time the end of the year comes around, and I have 2 “maybes” to show for it—meaning two markets contacted me and said hey, we like this story, but we’re not sure yet, we’ll hit you up later.
That might seem like a grim statistic, but for me it’s pretty normal. Maybe some writers are more careful with their submissions, or simply better at choosing markets, or, of course, are better writers in general. For me, the most short stories I ever sold in one year is 4, which I accomplished twice, in 2002 and 2006. And in 2002 I submitted a whopping 107 stories in order to sell those 4.
What can I say, short stories is a tough market. I’m told that they’re coming up in the world, as the success of adapting stories into TV and even films is a-booming. And there does seem to be more markets paying a decent per-word rate for fiction. And submitting stories is pretty easy, these days; everyone takes them via submittable or email or similarly simple mechanism—it’s a long way from the days when I had to buy double postage and stuff envelopes. Man, those days sucked.
The Trouble with Tribbles
Of course, I wrote 14 new short stories this year; I manage at least 12 a year. Most aren’t that great, but there’s usually one I like well enough to submit, so I have a steady batch of stories cluttering my hard drive. So I don’t mind submitting. And submitting. And submitting. Because what else am I gonna do with these stories? Aside from give them away, of course.
What about y’all? Do you write/read short stories? Are you happy to pay for magazines/websites/anthos that publish them?