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

[hairmonger.livejournal.com]

Does your unconscious mind think you get a discount for batch processing? (I tend to fall for the "I'll do it all at once" fallacy with housework.)

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[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...

[tychist.livejournal.com]

My apologies, I somehow missed the announcement of your sale. Congratulations. Are there a *lot* of different markets for short stories (I don't write short stories so I'm entirely ignorant of the matter)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Maybe it does. I'm not sure. Maybe I think if I send out a load all at once I have a better percentage chance of hitting hime with one of them!

[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.

[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.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

yay on the sale!