Short Story Marketing

[jacey]

Enthused by last week's story sale I managed to send out four shorts at the weekend.

I do admit that I'm very bad at marketing. My persistence is intermittent. I know as soon as a story comes back in I should turn it round and send it out again to a different market, but I tend to attack marketing by sending out batches of stories and then hanging on until most of them have dribbled back (which may be months) and then sending out another batch again.

I'm going to try and be more systematic about it this year.

It's not as if I write many short stories - I'm mostly too busy working on the next great unsold novel.

Which reminds me... the great agent hunt continues...

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I tend to work in bursts, regardless of what the task is. It can be more efficient because it takes a certain amount of time to get my head into the right place and all the necessary stuff organised. I've discovered that multi-tasking isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I suppose the trick would be to have a list worked out so that when a story comes back, there's no thinking involved and it just automatically gets sent to the next place on the list. Wasn't it Pat Wrede who suggested that approach?

Not that I've ever been organised enough to try it myself...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that gets buggered by the differential speeds of return from some places and the fact that some mags don't like taking more than one submission at once. It's complicated if the next place on your list still has one of your other stories. Bottleneck! So you attempt to move things up and down your list - which affects the submission-list order that you'd planned for a different piece and before you know it you've thrown all your lists out of the window and you're back where you started.