STORIES FOR SALE—NEW & USED

by John M. Floyd

There are two tasks you must perform if you’re to be a published author. Obviously, one of them is to write the manuscript. The other is to sell what you write. The marketing phase can’t be done without the writing, and published writing can’t be done without the marketing.

I already know I’m weird, but I actually enjoy the process of trying to find markets for my short stories. It’s not as much fun as writing them (I’m not that weird), but it’s also not something I dread doing. The only part I don’t like is the actual packaging and mailing of a manuscript. But even that has become easier, since many magazines and anthologies now allow the use of electronic submissions, which saves time, paper, printer ink, money for stamps, and trips to the P.O.

Mining for gold

I use two different ways to locate homes for my stories. One is the annual Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market (WD Books, $30) and the other is the Internet. N&SSWM, with its hundreds of listings handily organized by category, has everything a writer needs to know, but even when I find a possible market there I still check it out online before submitting. If I take the Internet route first, I just Google something like “short mystery markets” or click on a site like duotrope’s digest or Storypilot or Ralan’s Webstravaganza and go from there. Once I find what looks like paydirt, I check out that market’s individual site for submission guidelines, sample content, payment terms, etc., and if/when I’m satisfied I write a cover letter and send my story out the door and let it fend for itself. Sometimes it’s accepted and sometimes it comes limping back home again.

Does all this prospecting sometimes produce fool’s gold? Sure it does. I’ve published stories in some places that I’d rather forget about, and quite a few stories in places that shortly afterward keeled over and put all four feet in the air. (Sometimes they died even before my accepted submissions had a chance to get published.) But none of those sales were wasted. In submitting to those editors and dealing with them I feel that I learned more about the process and the business, and besides, I’ve since been able to submit and sell most of those published stories as reprints to other markets.

Often dissed, seldom kissed

I don’t mean to imply by all this that I don’t receive more rejections than acceptances. I still do. The difference is, I get more acceptances than I used to, and the rejections don’t bother me as much. The thick skin everyone says you must develop to be a published writer happens quickly if you submit a lot of stories, and pretty soon you stop taking rejection so personally. As I think I’ve said before, it’s important to remember that good stories get rejected every day. To make it as a writer—at least as a short story writer—you have to keep reading, keep writing, and keep submitting. And for God’s sake don’t pay too much attention to the odds; if you do, you might never try to submit anything.

To paraphrase something Lawrence Block once said, “A rejection slip is your membership card into the universal fellowship of writers.” All of us get them. Writers who say they don’t are still writers, but they’re also liars.

Bonus material

An additional benefit of researching possible story markets is that it’s made me familiar with a lot of publications that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about. Some of them that have never even accepted one of my stories have become places that I now go to in order to read stories written by others.

Another plus: As a result of all these submissions over the past years, I have come to know (or at least I feel that I know) certain editors fairly well. Four of my favorites in the short-mystery world are Linda Landrigan at AHMM, Janet Hutchings at EQMM, Johnene Granger at Woman’s World, and Andrew Gulli at The Strand. These are kind and delightful people in real life and are incredibly good at their jobs. I hope they’ll stay at their posts forever.

NO LOITERING

A quick word about output. All of us who are writers know about setting goals for the number of words or pages you complete during writing sessions. Well, the same kind of quota system can apply to your marketing efforts. For example, many writers say it’s helpful to try to have a certain number of manuscripts in the mail and under consideration at any one point in time.

For the first ten of the sixteen years I’ve been submitting stories for publication, I made sure I always kept a minimum of thirty stories out there and circulating at any one time. If one got rejected, I sent another one out to that market and sent the rejected story someplace else. I don’t do that anymore—over the past five or six years I’ve tried to be more selective in targeting my submissions, and I tend to concentrate more on paying markets—but I still try to keep a dozen or so stories in the mail (or zooming around in cyberspace) at a time. There’s no rule of thumb here, and there was nothing magic about the number thirty; I just figured if I kept that many stories circulating, I’d be getting regular replies in my mailbox—and I did.

Everybody’s a salesman

The bottom line is, if you’re a writer it’s not enough to merely write. Now and then you also have to put on your plaid sportcoat and white shoes and trudge out to the lot or the showroom and make your pitch to customers.

Most of them won’t buy a thing—but some will. And when they do, that makes it all worthwhile.