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

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I don't write many short stories, but I do write a few and try to keep my hand in (and keep the few I have written circulating in the hope that someone will appreciate them). I've now sold a grand total of seven, the most recent was 'The Oracle is Never Wrong' a flash-fiction to an e-magazine, AlienSkin. Most of my sales have been to print anthologies. I've had four published in DAW anthologies in the USA and sold one to the Fabulous Whitby anthology and another to the much-missed (small-press) Scheherezade magazine.

There are a lot of potential markets but if you winnow them down to the ones that pay pro-rates or even semipro then the list shrinks. You can get an idea of what there is at www.ralan.com. You'll see there are a lot of '4theluv' markets which pay nothing but maybe a contributor's copy. I'm not against submitting to those, but not until I've tried every paying market first.

Unfortunately there seems to be a growing market for horror and a shrinking market for fantasy - especially with the loss of Realms of Fantasy recently - though Warren Lapine will be resurrecting Fantastic Stories soon, which is good news.

There are more an more online instead of print markets and some do pay.

Ireally should pay more attention to marketing.