A friend recently asked me, “I’ve written a short story! Now what? How do I sell it?”
There is so much to that question, so many things to learn the hard way. Selling a story is a different process from writing one. Let me see if I can make this a list.
- Identify your genre.
What genre are you writing? Literary? Science Fiction? Romance? Different genres have slightly different expectations for story length, submission process, and pay rate. I can’t talk about anything other than science fiction, fantasy, and literary, but as you’ll see below, what genre you are writing is going to affect all the other steps.
Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines (generally) expect that you will send your story to one place at a time and wait for a reply before trying elsewhere or submitting to that magazine again. Because they know you are waiting on them, these magazines tend to get back relatively quickly, and with few exceptions they always let you know what their decision is. The Science Fiction Writers of America lobby for higher author pay-rate, so spec fic tends to pay consistently. (Currently six cents a word, looking to increase to eight.)
Literary magazines (generally) allow you to simultaneously submit (vocabulary term!) your story to every literary magazine on the planet if you want, on the understanding that you’ll write them if you sell the story somewhere else… however because this increases the intake of prospective stories, these magazines take forever to get back to you, if they get back at all. There are markets that simply say “if we don’t respond in six months, your story is rejected.” And all that for maybe no money! There are magazines that pay only in copies of the issue you are in, though some literary markets pay very well indeed.
Every magazine has its quirks, and a few of them do things completely different! They will have submission guidelines to tell you their rules. More on that below.
Identifying your genre is also identifying where you want to sell this story. Ellery Queen isn’t going to buy my robots fighting aliens story, and Analog isn’t going to waste time looking at a story that has nothing science-related in it.
2. Find the markets you want to submit to.
Vocabulary term! A market is any place that buys fiction. So when I say “market” I mean magazines, anthologies, book publishers.
Now that you know your genre, you can Google magazines with the words “submission guidelines” to get their rules. Example: “Science Fiction Magazines” or “Urban Fantasy Short Fiction Magazine”. Don’t google “places to sell my story” because oh child, there are predators out there hoping to get money from your dream.
It’s best to start looking like a reader–visit the magazine stand, google “Short Fiction Magazines.” Imagine you are looking for your story to read it. Where do you go?
If you are comfortable, there are services that help identify markets. I use The Submission Grinder, a free online database of speculative and general fiction markets as my one-stop shop for this, but you might want to start out slow with just your top markets.
3. Put that list in an order.
My friend Mary told me when I was very young to send to the top markets first… you don’t want to sell the story to Joe Bob’s Story Emporium when it could have sold to the New Yorker. I modify this with impatience. I order the markets (thanks to the grinder) in the order of who responds fastest, first.
I think it’s important when you’re starting out to have a list of NEXT PLACES for the inevitable rejection. When I started sending out my fiction, I’d trunk a story for a year after a rejection, sometimes I’d stop WRITING for a year after a rejection. The emotional impact is tough. It helps to have a next step all lined up.
4. Read the submission guidelines for each market, in entirety.
Take notes. Some of those guidelines aren’t well written. If you find yourself getting lost in the prose, look specifically for “pay rate” “response time” “story length” “simultaneous submissions” or “multiple submissions.”
Pay Rate: It’s okay if you want to start out with low-paying markets, but like Mary said, you may want to submit to the higher-paying places first. If the market mentions anything about YOU paying THEM… just bounce.
Response Time: This is where you may find that the market won’t alert you on rejection. Most places offer a time at which you can write them to see if your submission was lost. For example, “Query after five months.” Whatever you do, don’t contact the market before that query time passes! It’s harassing. Remember, you are one of countless thousands.
Length: If your story is 10,000 words long and they only take up to 7,500 words — don’t submit there. Some online markets don’t have length limits, but most markets have hard limits and if they say “1000 words max” and you send something 1001 words long, you’ve just wasted both your time. That said, most places are okay with just going off the MS Word length calculation and rounding to the nearest 100. It’s the flash (under 1000 word stories) markets that are really angsty about exact counts, which makes sense, they are catering to an audience that wants very brief stories.
Length Standards: Most people who are uninitiated in the business who ask me about their stories don’t know if they have a story or a novella or a novel. They always say something like, “It’s fifteen pages long.” Pages mean nothing in publishing. Think about it. You can change font size, tweak margins… bam, you added a page or subtracted one. Publishing is (generally) done by word count. A speculative fiction short story is usually 1,000 to 7,500 words long. The “Sweet Spot” for most markets is 3,000 to 5,000 words. I shoot for this length in my stories.
And again… that’s just talking about spec fic standards. I once looked to sell a short erotica piece and found the market defined “short story” as a minimum of 20,000 words! Different genre.
(Related Note: When novel agents ask for pages (ex:”send first 10″) they mean Times 12 point, double spaced, one inch margins, generally.)
Simultaneous Submission: explained above, if they say they take simultaneous submissions they mean you can send this story to them and simultaneously to another market. If they don’t, DON’T. This is where it’s handy to keep track of where a story is!
Multiple Submissions: Some markets let you send more than one story at a time. Be careful. Some mean that you can send three all at once, others that you are allowed to send again after rejection during their open submission window.
Obey the guidelines as if they were set in stone by a vengeful demon. If they only take stories with a snowman in them and your story doesn’t have a snowman — don’t submit there. Seriously. There is no such thing as a story so great they will ignore their own guidelines. Remember, you are one of countless thousands and that first round reader gets to stop reading when they reach a guideline failure.
Some places require completely reformatting your manuscript. Do it. I spent years fussing over ‘wasting’ electronic paper making a copy as an .rtf and a copy as plain text and a copy in Zapf Chancery for that weird place that only wanted stories set in Zapf Chancery… whatever. It feels like a lot of extra work, but it’s worth it to show the first readers you respect their time. To keep it neat: I save specially-formatted submission copies in my Downloads folder, keeping the “pure” formatted story in my Documents folder.
Yes, this is all “generally.” I re-read the submission guidelines for every market, every time. It doesn’t matter if I’ve had six stories in Analog already, I still check their word count and format guidelines becuase I might be mis-remembering.
Some standards exist, like the Shunn manuscript format that almost all spec fic magazines use… but read the guidelines. As a first reader, when I see a manuscript in a fancy font with colored borders and a slick title page… I don’t think “Wow how nice,” I think “ugh another newbie who doesn’t read the guidelines.”
OK OK now you’re sick of me telling you to read and follow the guidelines, but it’s the most important part. The second most important part is:
5. Try, fail, try again
Don’t give up because you got rejected. My stories average ten to twenty rejections per sale. I have stories I have been sending around for a decade that haven’t sold. Not every story will sell, and not every rejected story will stay that way. The only way to succeed is to keep trying.
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
And the ONLY cure for that sting of rejection is to send the story out again, so be prepared to do that.
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