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The Submission Trap

by Tom Dillon

Last year, I wrote Drones, a SciFi zombie story. At about 2,400 words, it had a visceral feel, and after a few drafts, my test readers were quite happy with it (as was I). So I submitted it. And seven times it was rejected. No big deal, seven isn't a particularly high number of rejections, and I have no grudges against the markets or editors. What bothered me, however, was how long all this took, and more importantly, what the process was doing to my other writing. Over the course of the ten months that the story was meandering its way through the submission process, I got very little writing done.

By February 2010 it was clear that something had to give. As much as I loved Drones, it is not so important that I was willing to put every other story on an indefinite hold. So I posted it on this site, and did a few minutes of guerilla advertising. The story did not become a smash hit that would propel me to fame and fortune, unfortunately, but I was under no delusion that it would. It did go over well, though, with a reasonable number of upvotes and no downvotes. Most importantly, I could write again. That week I managed to finish a rough draft of a short story that I had been struggling with for more than two years.

The whole experience prompted me to do some thinking about the whole process. First of all, let me state that I believe that we are going to see a resurgence of short fiction due to a combination of technological (digital delivery to cell phones) and social (increased public transportation due to fuel costs) factors, although that is a topic for another post. At the moment, I have no expectation of being able to make a living off of short fiction, but nonetheless it is what I plan on writing. So how do magazines fit into this picture?

Magazines provide three things to someone like me:

The most obvious thing that magazines provide is money, but the fact is that even the highest paying ones don't pay a whole lot. If a magazine buys a 5,000 word story at, say, $0.06/word you are talking about $300. Suppose you are some sort of writing/editing/submitting superhero and you manage to sell two stories per month, you are talking about $7,200 a year. A good chunk of change, but not enough to live on, certainly. So money can't be the primary reason to sell to magazines.

The next thing that you get when you sell to a magazine is legitimacy in proportion to the quality of the publication. The value of this cannot be understated, especially as it is something that sprouting authors crave more than just about anything (trust me, there is nothing quite like having a little validation). But while validation is good, excellent even, most of us want something more once they get that first taste of it.

Which brings us to publicity. Magazines bring it to the table in the form of a dedicated readership, and not necessarily in proportion to their pay rates. And for anyone who doubts the importance of publicity, let me just say that while being able to sell this story is great, being able to sell the next story is even better.

Self-publishing is a lot less cut and dried. If done poorly, it is a terrible idea. If done well, it can work out. As for the money, it doesn't fare very well when compared with a large market like Asimov's but if you are looking at a token payment, then there is definitely a possibility of breaking even (through donations or if something like Flattr takes off). The legitimacy and publicity factors are also more difficult, but doable, provided you spend the time to put out quality work and promote it properly.

An advantage of self-publishing is that you have to worry less about what niche your work fits into. When I read through the big speculative fiction magazines these days, I don't see a whole lot that I like. The fantasy is often dominated by urban fantasy, which isn't my thing, and the SciFi just isn't what I'm looking for. Since your best chances are to submit to markets that you like to read, it puts me in a tight spot: I can either write what I like and have it not fit in, or try to write what the markets want to publish, which seems to defy the whole point of the endeavor.

Finally, the submission process keeps me from creating new material whereas self-publishing provides motivation for me to write more stuff (there is nothing quite as motivating as having a reader say that they want to read more of you work). I realize that there are people out there who do not suffer from the same issues as I do, or who get around it by having an agent take care of that side of things, but I suspect that for the majority of writers, this is not the case.

In conclusion, selling stories to magazines is a good thing, and definitely something to pursue. On the other hand, the cost of selling to magazines, in my case lost productivity, needs to be balanced with the benefits. For me, the best way of doing so is to submit to a limited number of markets or for a set period of time, and after that, put it out there. You have very little to lose.


Tom Dillon can be reached at tom@pawnstorm.net

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