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| Themes of Creation. Leonid Pasternak. |
Louis Shalako
To submit or not to submit?
That might not even be the right question these days.
What to submit, and what not to submit, might be a better way of putting it.
So far this year I’ve been focusing on short stories, an art form
in their own right.
The only way to master something is to do it, and
when I run out of steam, only then will I worry about my next novel, (or novel
#13.)
Other than blog posts, a poem, something unfinished,
something ready to begin, (another blog post,) it looks like the one I just
started working on is story number seventeen for 2014.
So here’s the question: should I submit it and keep
on submitting it until it is sold, (according to Heinlein’s Rules) or should I just
go ahead and publish it myself?
It’s not strictly an either-or question.
There is always a chance, right?
But think about it first. If there are fifty-one pro markets
listed on Ralan.com, then those fifty-one markets probably get anything up to
ten or twenty thousand submissions a month
between them. It might be more—a lot more.
Do the math. Calculate the odds. I’ve got one new story,
and maybe a dozen worth submitting. They’re already out there and many markets
won’t accept multiple submissions. They don’t want to see the same story twice,
either.
Right now, I have a handful of stories under
submission. When I submit a story, it could result in a sale, although it is a hit-and-miss thing. It’s not even a question of quality or competence at some
level. I just have to put the right story in front of the right editor, in the
right genre, just when they’re looking for just that certain kind of thing. The
right time and place sort of thing.
But I do submit stories in the Pro, Semi-Pro,
(fifteen listings at time of writing) and Pay,
(35 listings, mostly closed to submissions right now) as well as checking out
token markets, looking for other markets and finding new lists independently.
I’ve also checked out Mature
markets, etc.
But here’s the thing.
Let’s say you’re not making any pro or big-bucks
sales. Never mind if they’re listed with the SFWA or not.
You need some pro
sales to get into the SFWA, right?
How important is
that? What does it actually do for
you? Those have to be pro sales.
Are you going to let a good story go for five, ten
or twenty dollars? Will you give it up for free and some kind of validation?
Are you looking for mere justification?
What does that get you? Publication, yes. Your story
is even kind of safe for awhile—it’s
safe from being published on the blog or being lost if the computer goes down.
People can read it if it’s accepted, and maybe you really will be discovered.
But that story might not appear for a few months.
When it does appear, they have a license for a stipulated period of time. Afterwards,
your story might be archived on
their site in perpetuity.
You might give all that up for five, ten or twenty
dollars and the chance to say you got published.
And it doesn’t even help you get into the SFWA,
either. Assuming that’s important to you.
So we have to make the comparison.
Let’s take a story I just wrote. It was 10,200
words. In that particular genre, there was nowhere to submit it, even to a
minimal pay or token market. There wasn’t even any place to submit it for
exposure, although, there is at least one historical fiction market listed on
Ralan. But my word count was way over their limit. No point in submitting it there...
Part of the challenge was the nature of the
material.
So, being too short for a book, and with nowhere to
submit it, what was I supposed to do with it?
Answer: publish it. That even sort of follows
Heinlein’s Rules, in the here and now—the Brave
New World of Publishing.
Think about it.
Say it costs five or ten bucks for a cover. It took
four and a half days to write, edit, format, find an image and make a cover,
get an ISBN, etc. You need a blurb, right? It probably took a minimum of ten or
twelve hours just in the writing time—it’s 10,200 words after all.
A story which would otherwise be useless is now in
the store.
If it sells for $2.99 and ten or twenty of them
leave the store per year, then that, honestly, sounds like peanuts. I admit
that.
It is also something like twenty or forty bucks a
year for a story that might have gone for even smaller peanuts. Over ten years that’s two hundred to four hundred
bucks, for a nice little story that might have gone for exactly that much (once) in a professional sale at two to four
cents a word.
And, I write a lot of stories. Do the math.
Calculate the odds.
But consider those odds over the long term—the next ten to twenty years, when, arguably, I
should be submitting that story, over and over again until it is sold.
But there's nowhere to fucking submit it.
Reprints are admittedly worth fifty percent of the
original sale price. This holds true at four hundred dollars. It also holds
true if you sell your story for five or ten bucks. There is a judgment call
here, and you have to decide before publishing it yourself, just exactly what
it is that you are risking.
Mike
Resnick or Robert J. Sawyer can sell any story they write.
So far, I have not learned how to do that in that
traditional sense—I have to rely on what few readers I can get!
It’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax.
I have never claimed that this is any easier than
the traditional path.
It is merely the path that seems to be open right now,
in this Brave New World of Publishing.
In the very early days of a long and distinguished
career, we’re not risking that much, right? It depends on where you’re at and
what you hope to achieve. It depends how
much time you have left.
Now, assuming I have a story in science fiction,
fantasy, horror, or mystery, maybe a little something in the romance or erotica
line, then of course I would know where to submit it.
There are also ways of finding more markets.
Even then
there is some kind of judgment call. If it’s talking cats, then one editor
doesn’t want it, and if it’s vampires or werewolves, some other editor doesn’t like that. You might have already
submitted a story or a book to all the markets that you can find in a genre.
Or maybe you just don’t care to keep looking.
Now, my next
story, or number whatever for this year, has the sort of material that’s
not going to make it into iTunes. There are themes of non-consensual sex in the
story. If you read the submissions guidelines, you will see that in some
markets they have very specific guidelines as to what they will and will not
accept. Many magazines would not want to
see this story.
So, again, write it, edit, format it…make a cover.
Stir and repeat, right? And now another pen-name, has another new product, this
one in an edgy, erotica-for-hetero-males sort of a way. It’s 5,000 words, took
a couple of days to produce, and I had total creative control over something
that has social redeeming value, but might
be offensive to some readers.
Essentially.
And I can mark it at $2.99, give discount coupons on
Smashwords, set it for free sometimes, whatever it takes to move a few copies
of that story on the long list of bookselling platforms…a list that will grow
over time.
Some other story might be a good candidate for the
blog ( or, an unpublished book of dubious nature could be published as a
serial.) Or as a free promotional book or short story. It still only costs five
or ten bucks for the cover.
At some point down the road you get to set a price
on it and set up your next freebie.
Once you’ve paid for the cover image, it’s all
gravy, folks.
If I write three or four stories for one pen-name,
then at some point I write one specifically
for a free giveaway. When I’m working in a specific genre, I generally
know, or soon figure out, who I’m writing it for, whether it’s for the blog, my lady-erotica writer or my
thriller guy. Sooner or later they’ll all have pretty long lists of titles.
Everything involves a judgment call and some
assessment of the benefits, the rewards and the costs.
Other than that, you put in the time, you do the
work.
Have fun doing it and you’ve got the world by the
ass.
That’s what it’s all about, ladies and gentlemen.
It's all about writing things and putting them out there into the world.
END
