Another Story Sale!

[jacey]

Third short story sale in a month.
Djinn Bottle (5,000 words) to Buzzy Magazine.
A genie in the bottle story with all the usual trickery and a slghtly unusual ending

I can't believe it. I'm still walking round with a big silly grin on my face from the Nature Magazine sale last week and this morning a lovely email drops into my mailbox from Buzzy Mag.

After a very fallow year in 2010 I'm over the moon about three in a row. To be honest, sending more out is a really good way of making sales. I hardly submitted anything last year, so I can't grumble about not selling anything. I took a day off from the big revision I'm in the middle of to sub a lot of stories still in circulation and it has had great results.

Comments

[charlieallery.livejournal.com]

Woohoo!! Congratulations! Great stuff. :)

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Congrats!

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Oh, well done!

Of course it's a bit obvious really that sending stuff out will result in more sales -- no editor is going to break into my house and rifle my hard drive for completed stories! -- but it's so easy to get sidetracked into other things. Also, if you're focusing on novels, the time interval between having another new thing to submit can run into years.

Of course you've been doing both, so let's hope that this success with shorts rubs off onto the novels.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Helen. I've always been rubbish at sending out stories regularly. When I check my file I find some stories have sat for two years between being rejected and being sent out again. It's frighteningly easy to let time slip past.

Last year at Milford one of the writers, D, was sending out twenty stories a month, which meant that at any time she had approximately 50 stories out there. She was getting terrific results. It gave the rest of us a real kick up the office-chair. You can't sell what you don't send out! Obvious really.

Because I've been concentrating on novels I've only written one short in the last year or more (the one I sold to Nature last week) but I have a lot of back catalogue - some of which I've revised in the light of more writing experience. I'm finding that I _can_ trim overlong stories into shorter distillations without losing anything. Stories that were 10k words are now 7k. 7.5k stories are now 5k or even shorter. Though story length isn't everything, you do stand a much better chance of selling ones that are under 5k because more markets have more openings for stories of that length and below.

[tychist.livejournal.com]

Good for you. Congrats. :)

[caper-est.livejournal.com]

Rats they do the conga!

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! You're on a roll!

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Well done!

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Thanks, everyone.
:-)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Congrats! You're making me want to go back to shorts again. It's nice to be able to get something finished in under a year...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

To be fair I'm in the middle of a novel revision, so I'm not writing shorts at the moment, but I have a few in circulation, so I'm trying to keep them in play because I've been rubbish at marketing up to now. I've been promising myself that I will write a couple of shorts as soon as this revision is delivered.

[tina-anghelatos.livejournal.com]

Great stuff, Jacey. So pleased it's going well!

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

Whoo-hoo!!!!!! I'm so pleased for you! :D Now you just need a movie contract...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I know several writers who say that the ideal is to have a story optioned for a movie (because you get paid for the option and it's generally renewed annually), but the filmmakers don't actually ever get to ruin your darling.
:-)