Submitting Short Stories

[The_Cosmic_Quest]

Anyone who has a short story published, your advice would be greatly appreciated here. I want to know what would give me a better chance to get published - submitting short stories to a magazine, one by one. Or trying to get a collection of them published as one short story book. Thanks.

 

[Marky Lazer]

I'm not a published short story writer, but why not both? A lot of collections are just stories published in mags earlier...

 

[Mark Robson]

Anyone who has a short story published, your advice would be greatly appreciated here. I want to know what would give me a better chance to get published - submitting short stories to a magazine, one by one. Or trying to get a collection of them published as one short story book. Thanks.

You might want to re-submit this question on the K D Wentworth thread.

http://www.chronicles-network.com/forum/10003-writing-and-submitting-your-stories-questions-for-k-d-wentworth.html

Kathy has had a plethora of short stories published and is currently paying regular visits to answer just such questions as this. It's not often in life that such experts make their expertise and advice available for free, so make the most of it. Professional advice can be an expensive commodity.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

It's hard enough for an unpublished writer to sell that first short story. Trying to get an editor interested in a whole book of them would multiply that difficulty by the number of stories in the collection -- and then you have to factor in that story collections aren't that popular to begin with and really need a familiar name on the cover to get readers to pick one up.

Selling such a book would be much harder than selling a first novel.

Mark is right, though -- if you want advice from someone who knows a lot about writing and submitting short stories (someone who has had dozens of them published) follow the link he's given you.

 

[the_faery_queen]

i didn't find it hard to get my first story sold. i think it depends where you aim for really. if you go for a big mag like interzone, then yes, its harder, because they have more criteria and are looking for a specific type of story to fit their format. but if you go for a small-medium press magazine, then its not so hard. its just about writing the best story you can, editing it to the best you can (then getting some people to have another look) and submitting it really.

fewer places take anthologies than single stories, but there are small print places interested in that sort of thing.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I used to work as an editor at a small press magazine -- we turned down plenty of stories.

The thing about someone selling their first story or novel is that it only happens once, it's a single data point. If you go by faery_queen selling her first story easily, or by me selling my first novel to the second editor who saw it, you could be misled. Sometimes someone, by a trick of timing, gets lucky, but the experience of dozens of writers that I know is that selling your first story or novel is usually quite difficult.

Also, in SF/Fantasy the number of places you can sell a short story are fewer than the places you can sell a novel, and there are more people submitting short stories. You can work out the logic of that yourself. For books, anthologies are less commonly published than novels -- and a large number of those are reprint anthologies -- single author collections are even more rare, and single author collections by previously unpublished writers so rare that I have never seen one. Which is not to say that they don't exist, just that their rarity would indicate they are many times harder to sell than single stories or novels.

If I were in your position and had my heart set on selling a collection right out of the gate, I'd strongly consider self-publishing, or a publishing house that asks the author to share the expense.