#on publishing

[aquitainequeen]

Alarm bells being rung by Maureen Johnson on AI and the Big Publishers

[himluv]

On Writing & Publishing Short Fiction, pt.3

or; what HIMluv has learned in the past 15 years of publishing short stories!

This series is full of lessons I've learned in my writing career. As such, it can be rather specific in some ways. I write predominantly Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror short stories, so my advice pertains to those genre expectations, and those publishing experiences. As with ALL writing advice, your mileage may vary. Try it all, keep what works and lose the rest.

It's also worth noting that nothing I say here is revolutionary. There are a ton of amazing books about writing, revision, publishing, and leading a creative life. I'll share some of my personal favorites at the end of each post :)

Read Part 1

Read Part 2

Part 3: Publishing

The most important thing you MUST accept about publishing short fiction is this: YOU DO NOT CONTROL WHETHER OR NOT YOUR WORK GETS PUBLISHED.

You don't. As shitty as that feels, you simply do not control the outcome of any submission. Once you've sent your work off to be read and assessed by another, it is out of your control. It is no longer up to you and there is nothing more you can do to affect the outcome. PERIOD. The sooner you accept this, the easier the submitting process will become.

I've been submitting and publishing short fiction since 2011, and in that time I've placed stories in a broad spectrum of markets–from Non-Paying "Literary" magazines to Pro-Paying print anthologies and every type-of-paying online "zine" in-between. There's a lot of moving pieces to the short fiction publishing machine, and when you're just starting out it can be really opaque and intimidating. So, how does it work?

In the broadest sense, you write a story, revise it into the best possible version it can be, and then you send it out for editors to read and hopefully publish. But, how to begin? First, let's talk about the different kind of Markets for short stories (that's what we call places that publish short stories, markets).

There are small, online zines that are run by a single person or a small team and publish on all kinds of different schedules. Some pay, some don't, and pay ranges for these types of Markets are broad. ergot. is one example of such a zine. Luna Station Quarterly, Wyldblood, and Taco Bell Quarterly are some others that started online, but now offer print versions as well.

Then there are the big, pro-rate (meaning they pays $.08/word+) markets like Clarkesworld, Uncanny Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Apex Magazine, and the brand new @othersidespec. These sorts of markets often have recurring submission windows–specific times when they are Open for Submissions and actively seeking work. Other markets might have Open or Rolling Submissions, meaning they are always reading and seeking new stories.

And then there are Anthologies. These are usually limited calls for stories that fit or speak on a certain theme, and are then released in an actual book. Pay-rates vary by Publisher, but tend to be on the higher side. Some recent examples are Never Whistle at Night, Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic, Life Beyond Us, and Out Here Screaming.

Regardless of size or type of market, it should always have clearly stated SUBMISSION GUIDELINES where they list what they do and don't want, and how they want it sent to them. ALWAYS FOLLOW THE GUIDELINES. I recently saw an editor say that, by following the guidelines, "you put your story above 90% of submissions." Meaning that a lot of submissions don't follow the guidelines and thus get rejected. Make your story standout by FOLLOWING THE GUIDELINES!

Before you go leaping into the slush pile, here's some advice and strategies I've developed over the years:

You need to know some things about your story. You need to think about and know your story's genre (SF, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Horror, Speculative, Slip-stream, on and on and on-if there's a story, there's a market, I promise), word count, and audience. You also need to make sure that your story document is in something like Shunn Manuscript Format. PRO TIP: Save different versions of your finished story–.doc, .docx, and .rtf are popular file formats–as well as a version with your name and contact details on the front page and one without (called Anonymous submissions).

You will need some kind of Cover Letter. YOU DON'T HAVE TO OVERTHINK THIS! Keep it simple, professional, and straightforward. "Dear [Magazine] Team, Please consider [story title] (genre, word count)." Then list out any recent publication credits if you have them, or any personal details that are relevant to the story (i.e. mention you're a librarian if your story takes place in libraries), then thank them and sign off. That's it. That's all it has to be. You can address it to the specific editors, especially if it's an anthology call, but you can leave it broad for a larger magazine with rolling/open submissions that likely have several First Readers. PRO TIP: Start writing short, third person bios now. Editors will often ask for one when they accept your story. I have a single document that collects my current cover letter, a 50-word bio, a 100-word bio, and a single sentence bio, all of which I update or tweak as needed.

Make an account on The Submission Grinder. This volunteer operated website is INDESCRIBABLY VALUABLE to writers. All that stuff toward the top of this post about the different kinds of markets and their submissions guidelines? The Submission Grinder is a massive, SEARCHABLE database of markets. It lets you track your submissions, responses, and payments. I have a dedicated tab open at all times for The Submission Grinder. If you're submitting short fiction, I advise you do the same.

Accept it, You Will Be Rejected. It doesn't matter who you are, where you've been published, or what awards you've won. Everyone gets rejected, at every stage of their career. You MUST get used to rejection. It sucks, especially early on, but it does get easier the more you submit and the more rejections you receive, I promise.

There are different kinds of rejection–Form, Tiered Form, and Personal. Form is the standard boilerplate, "No, thanks." It is usually brief, vague, and says something along the lines of "Thanks for submitting to [Magazine]. Unfortunately we've decided to pass on [story title]. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere." Tiered Form adds a little encouraging flavor to the above form rejection, something like: "We hope you'll submit more work in the future" or "please try us again" or "we look forward to considering your work again". Basically, this is a way for the magazine to say, "we liked your writing, but this particular piece wasn't for us, for whatever reason, so please try again." And then there's the Personal Rejection, which is increasingly rare. In my experience you are most likely to receive a personal rejection when a story has been Held for Consideration (which means the story made it through the first rounds of editors and into the final consideration pile). This rejection usually includes a specific detail about your work, perhaps something they liked about it or why they ultimately chose not to accept your story. Personal rejections sting the worst (especially when you get them on Christmas Eve *stares at Jason Sizemore*), but are also the best kind of rejection. They give you hope. NOTE: I have a personal rule I've developed over the years: if a story is Held for Consideration, then it is worth publishing and I am not allowed to give up on it until it finds a home.

What happens when they say, "yes"? You get an email, expecting the billionth rejection, except... wait. It says, they loved your story and want to publish it! First order of business? freak. the fuck. out. Seriously! Scream, cry, do a cartwheel, take a shot of that bourbon you've been saving for a special occasion. Whatever will help you celebrate this achievement. You absolutely deserve to revel in this moment. Once that's done, you need to read the acceptance email carefully, and follow any instructions they've provided. Usually, there's some sort of "reply to this email to confirm the story is still available and we can publish it" and then mentions of a contract and *maybe* a note about forthcoming edits. Contract formats and details vary wildly between markets, and I personally read through them all carefully. Similarly, editor's have different editorial styles–some are very "Editorial" and will request/suggest changes, others might ask you for a proofread for lingering typos and then publish it. You never know who you'll get, so be prepared for anything. PRO TIP: Do not post about or otherwise publicly celebrate a story acceptance until you have signed the contract. Before then, anything can happen (and honestly, plenty can still happen AFTER you've signed the contract, too) and you don't want to have to retract your good news. It's difficult, but wait to scream it from the rooftops until the legalities are official.

You sold your first short story, now what? My advice is to come up with a quick 1-2 sentence pitch/synopsis of your story. When you share your good news, people will inevitably ask you what the story is about. You want to be able to tell them quickly and confidently, and then encourage them to check it out once it's available. Once the story is out, help spread the word for yourself and the other authors in the Table of Contents by posting links and reviews on your socials or, if it's an anthology, submitting purchase requests to your library. Do your best to make it easy for folks to find your story once it's published.

And after that? KEEP WRITING! Seriously! Keep writing and submitting. It is an endless process, full of rejection, but the rare acceptances are so, so worth it. At least, I think they are.

I'll be honest, there's a lot more I could have touched on (contracts, payments, exclusivity, different types of publishing rights, reprints, etc.,) but ultimately, those are topics you can look up and learn more about as you get more rejections and acceptances under your belt.

There also aren't as many great books about this side of publishing, unfortunately. Some I would recommend are geared more toward building up your career as a writer, like The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman and Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum. Publishing Rodeo and Print Run are two great podcasts about the publishing industry as well, although both are geared toward books, not short fiction.

Publishing your originals fiction is a long, slow process. It is an exercise in patience and fortitude, with lots of hard work and only brief bursts of reward. Remember to only set goals for the things you can control, to celebrate every little win, and to build up a community along the way. These are the real secrets to having a long and established career as a writer.

I hope this series was helpful. I genuinely wish you all the luck on this journey, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. I'm happy to talk more in depth about writing craft, revision strategies, and all things publishing.

[duckprintspress]

Was in a Barnes & Noble this weekend for the first time in ages, and was a little shocked by how many special editions I saw with sprayed edges, gilded covers, etc., of basically mass market books.

Like, special editions feel a whole lot less special when they're everywhere.

And I know that makes it sound like I hate fun, but on the contrary, it's a major concern for those of us who publish. Those luxury editions are very expensive to produce, and major industry folks can make them affordable for buyers and profitable for their companies because they are printing huge numbers of them.

But when "luxury" features become "standard," smaller publishers really can't...do them. Like, there's absolutely no affordable way for a publisher the size of Duck Prints Press to produce editions like that. The more people expect them and come to think they're not special and luxury, the harder it will be to sell something any less fancy to them.

It's. a very frustrating cycle.

I don't know what I'm accomplishing by writing this or what action I think anyone reading it on Tumblr could possibly take, but I just felt like I had to say it. Please remember that big corporations fuck all of us, including the "small fish" businesses just trying to survive in the same sea.

[olivieblake]

I, the phantom existence of my dagger, and my potentially record-breaking delay return to chat in reply to asks/reviews/comments in a series of boldly shameless rambles wherein I, Olivie Blake, am not writing. Today's topics include books I've recently enjoyed (1:07), some publishing ins and outs (3:13), rehashing creative anxiety (16:01), on whether I regret not finishing law school (22:34, THE ATLAS COMPLEX spoilers from 24:42-27:42), who is the most fight-worthy sibling from GIFTED & TALENTED (28:13), a bit about my 2026 book, DREAMLAND (30:40), and how to??? make??? friends??? (33:29).

[ girl dinner tour events here ]

[malcolmschmitz]

The people who think @drchucktingle is Doing A Bit and are Big Mad about it ... don't really understand how author platforms work. Part of being A Person Who Makes Things On The Internet is deciding what parts of yourself to show your audience; what to conceal and what to reveal.

Concrete example: I spent an Alarming amount of time while making this post debating on whether I should keep my habit of Capitalizing Random Letters. (What can I say, I read too much Winnie the Pooh as a very small child.) I decided to keep the capitalization, because I think it helps me be more easily understood-- but it also gets certain people to think you're cringe and make fun of you. I think it's worth it, but another writer might not.

And every Internet Maker Person has to deal with a series of tradeoffs like this. Do you talk about your political opinions? What about those political opinions, the ones that would definitely tick off part of your audience or get you doxxed by the Horrible Old Men of the internet? Do you talk about your childhood? What about the parts you don't want to talk about, or the parts that someone could weaponize against you if they wanted?

Do you just post links to your work and run? If so, are you willing to forgo the kind of intimate connection with your audience that Posting can help you build up? Do you meme and try to build a community? Are you willing to do the kind of work you need to do to welcome new readers/followers into that community, and if not, are you willing to let your work become completely inscrutable to anyone but your audience?

Dr. Tingle has publically spoken about why he* chooses to talk the way he does online, to wear the mask, and so on-- she's consciously choosing to play up aspects of himself that don't play nicely with society's consensus on Acceptable Behaviour. It lets her express those sides of himself, and brings in the audience she wants to bring in-- weird buckaroos who believe Love Is Real. It's an authentic expression of who he is. It is also, on some level, a curated performance. We're not seeing the full buckaroo behind the mask.

But the reason I made this post, and the reason I've been wanting to make it for a while, is that I don't think most readers know:

Every writer wears a mask.

Yes, even the Queer Vulnerability Folks who talk a lot about their trauma-- they've taken parts of themselves that most people hide and turned them into their mask. Even the folks who seem completely mundane and anodyne, or the folks who give chatty updates about their lives-- they're not wearing a very thick mask; it's a COVID mask and not a Halloween mask.

But they're wearing a mask, and as a reader? You don't actually have the right to see behind it. Because writers kinda have to keep a separation between who they are when they're performing for you, and who they are when they're alone, or they go a bit mad. Most writers will do you the courtesy of giving you what you expect-- they give you a persona that is very closely based on who they are in their workaday lives, that matches what you'd expect them to be from their writing, and that is passably 'normal' enough that you can fool yourself into thinking that the persona is the person.

I think people get big mad at Dr. Tingle because he makes the mask very obvious and literal. She doesn't let you sit confident that you Know Dr. Chuck Tingle (TM); he's making it very very clear that this is a persona he is choosing to use to interact with her audience. 'These are the parts of me that I want you to see, they're the parts of me that are the most important and the least palatable to society, they're the big loud queer autistic parts that ride off into the sunset, and that's what you get to see. No more, no less.'

So people get big mad and go "oh, this has to be a group of people Doing A Bit, Cynically", because that's the only way they can conceptualize a Writer Mask. But... no. Everyone does this. Even the people you don't think do this, do this. And the sooner you can accept that, the sooner you can take people's work on its merits instead of trying to judge it based on your idea of the person who created it.

*(I am alternating pronouns for Dr. Tingle because he's expressed that 'he' and 'she' are both her preferred pronouns; if he wants, I can edit the post to use one or the other.)

[theleafpile]

I got a printed version of my book, which is extremely exciting! But faced with the reality of the object, I'm in a bit of a dilemma. I know part of it is due to the formatting, but this sucker is huge—at 140k words, it clocks in at about 630 pages. For what I'm aiming to be a debut novel in an urban fantasy series, I know that's over budget as far as word count agents tend to like.

Which leaves me with a couple choices.

The first is to go through it and slash as much as possible. I've already been through the editing trenches with this one, for literally years at this point, so I don't know what I could possibly cut. I'd need outside help to guide me but professional editors are way out of my price range. As this is setting up a series, I don't want to cut what is important in terms of character and plot development, but I'm so close to the damn thing that I can't see the forest for the trees.

Another option is to go the radical route and attempt to split this into two, shorter, books. It would require a ton of restructuring and I would have to rethink arcs and climaxes. This would fit my genre better, as it tends to have short books but long series. The problem with this option is—and you'll never believe this—I've already done this. This version is the cut in half version! Which is insane! Why am I such an overwriter 😭

The last option I can think of is to leave it as-is (or tinker with it mildly) and send it out to agents. If they reject me for length, then I'll know that and have a better understanding of what they want. But if someone loves it, then I won't have to do any kind of radical surgery to it. The only thing I would lose at that point is time, which is not of concern to me, as I'm diligently working on the sequels.

If anyone has any advice, I'm completely open to ideas.

[tarysande]

Can I ask, how does one go about becoming an editor? Like, where do you apply for jobs?? What kinda training do you do?? Are there companies that hire out editors to writers? Im just so confused about it. Ive always been interested in editing, and am considering doing it as a job

Editing is a weird career.

Really, I started as a writer. Like, when I was eleven. In jr. high and high school, I was in a writing critique group and I wrote a lot. I graduated from university with a degree in theatre, film, and creative writing. I was often the person my friends came to when they needed help with a paper (or the correct placement of a semicolon). I've been involved in fandom since I was about 17, and I was very fortunate to fall in with a group of excellent writers who were also excellent betas and editors. I learned a TON from them without realizing how much I was learning.

I started editing by accident, really. Sometimes, that's how it happens. I mostly got gigs here and there through friends or word of mouth. About ten years ago, I got more serious about it. I worked for companies that paid horribly. Then I did an editing test for a company that paid less horribly, and they hired me. After a couple of years editing countless academic papers, ESL academic papers, novels, emails, business documents, etc., I decided to branch out on my own (mostly so I could work on more fiction; I was burned out on academic papers).

I joined Editors Canada, started volunteering with them, got a lot more experience, and took a few continuing ed courses to gauge where my skills were at and to determine if I needed to upgrade my education. I decided I didn't need to do that, because I already knew the things I was being taught.

I read a lot of books on editing, writing, and craft. I familiarized myself with the Chicago Manual of Style, APA, MLA, and a couple of other style guides. I learned the differences in spelling, punctuation, and style between US, UK, and Canadian English. I went to webinars, conferences, and courses (all the major editing associations offer these, usually cheaper or free for members; they are a great way to determine what kinds of editing you actually LIKE). I learned the difference between rules and preferences, and when to apply them to a text.

I work freelance, which means I have my own business as a sole proprietor. I'm a contractor with a couple of companies who sometimes send work my way, but most of my clients are individual writers planning to either self-publish or polish their work before seeking traditional publication via the agent/tradpub route.

Freelancing has many perks but is not particularly secure. Especially if you're American and need an employer to provide health insurance, or if you're single and don't have another income to lean on when contracts are scarce. These days, most of my work comes via referrals, my website, or the listing I have in the Editors Canada directory. I follow a couple of editing-related Facebook groups; I've learned a lot there, and I've also picked up the occasional client. A couple of people have found me through LinkedIn. A couple of people have found me through here!

I've never worked in-house for a publisher--mostly because having control over how many hours I work and when I work them is my top priority. In-house is a whole different ballgame; I know a bit about it from my peers, but I don't have firsthand experience to pass on. These jobs are supposedly more secure--and they tend to be salaried, with benefits, etc.

"Editing" is a GIANT umbrella term. There are SO many types of editing out there. People tend to think of book publishing first, but that's only one avenue. There are also different kinds of editors who tackle different types of problems. I've done enough of everything to recognize that I am much happier when I'm working on big picture stuff--coaching, developmental editing, manuscript critique. Others specialize in the nitty gritty mechanical details that make proofreading or copy editing a better fit.

Right now, the bulk of my work life is actually spent ghostwriting. The client's business-materials editor posted that his client was looking for someone to help with characterization in a novel. I ended up winning that contract. He came to me with one monster book. I helped him realize it needed to be at least a trilogy, and now he has plans for a ten-book series--and I'm helping write it. But I got the job because of the work I've done on the development side of editing--and because I've spent SO MUCH TIME learning about characterization (via acting, fandom/writing fanfic, reading, etc.). So. It all feeds into the same place.

The tl;dr is that my experience has been a bizarre mix of being in the right place at the right time, ongoing professional development, and learning the value of volunteering with an association. If I were starting down this career path right now, I'd probably do an editing certificate (there are many out there, depending on country). I'd definitely join an association sooner (even as a student member) and volunteer.

Actually, the ultimate tl;dr is ... this industry IS CONFUSING. So, don't feel bad about being confused. It's actually probably about eight different kinds of job wearing a trench-coat and pretending it's something called "Editing."