Post by jeannerené on Jun 2, 2007 17:37:59 GMT -8
SHORT STORY:PUBLISHING PREPARATION AND PUBLISHERS
Members, feel free to add to this thread any worthy sites or personal advice/experience.
**************************************************************************
WEBSITE:
So You Wanna Get a Short Story Published
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www.soyouwanna.com/site/syws/shortstory/shortstoryfull.html
* 1. Make sure that the story is publishable
* 2. Decide what market you want to publish in
* 3. Make a detailed list of publications to which you will submit
* 4. Prepare your submissions packets
* 5. Understand your rights
Short stories are much better than novels for one reason: they're short. Bad stories end quicker, and good stories get right to the point. In fact, writing a short story is a great way to get your foot in the door of the writing industry; you can experiment with different narrative styles and play with characters, situations, and tone. A short story can be as short as a paragraph or as long as 50 pages, so you have tons of freedom with which to work.
So you've written a story and your mom says that it's super. But you want more than motherly compliments, right? You'd rather break into the pages of The New Yorker and get offered a cushy teaching job at a liberal arts school in Maine. Slow down, bucko. Let's get that first story published, shall we?
Despite the fact that assistant editors and interns at literary magazines are regularly drowned in mailbags full of submissions (commonly referred to as a "slushpile"), getting your short story published is easier than you think.
One quick note: this SYW is not about how to get an idea for and write a short story; this is about how to publish a story you've already written. So don't send us hate mail.
1. MAKE SURE THAT THE STORY IS PUBLISHABLE
Hate to break it to you, but you're going to need a story. Sure, that anecdote about your 6-day escapade with Charles Manson is great material, but it's not a short story until you've written it down. Once you've got your story on paper-or saved to disk-you've got to make sure it's not a piece of garbage. Here's how:
* Check spelling, punctuation and grammar meticulously. Having stupid typos and mistakes is the easiest way to get your story thrown in the recycling bin. The only exception to this is if you want to get crazy and creative, such as writing a story in the first person from the perspective of someone who has incorrect grammar (check out The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for an example of this) The rule of thumb is: if you've got a well-thought out idea behind that spelling mistake or lack of punctuation, then you're fine. For more help with this, check out our meticulously-written article SYW avoid common writing errors?
* Make sure that it makes sense. A good test for this one is to hand your story to a friend, roommate, Eskimo, or family member. If they ask you why the gorilla was in the bathtub and you thought you wrote a story about horseback riding in Montana, you may want to do a little revising. It's really important that the reader can clearly follow everything that's going on.
* Determine whether it is actually a short story. Admittedly, this is rather a mushy criterion. One method of figuring out if it's a short story is to get a PhD in comparative literature with a focus on postmodern deconstructivism. On the other hand, we merely recommend that you use your best judgment.
2. DECIDE WHAT MARKET YOU WANT TO PUBLISH IN
There are thousands of magazines and websites that publish short stories. Submitting to all of them would be expensive, time-consuming, and futile. You MUST narrow the field and send your story to the publications that are most likely to publish it. In other words, you have to find a "fit." To narrow the field, ask yourself these questions:
1. Is this your first time submitting a story for publication? If so, you probably want to stick to smaller magazines or those that specifically try to help out novice writers.
2. Do you want to make money from getting the story published? OK, so that's a stupid question. But do you need to get paid? If so, good luck. Even the most highly respected literary journals won't pay for stories. To make serious cash, shoot for big glossy publications with a hefty bankroll. Either that, or try to publish a book of a collection of your own short stories. To do that, check out our article SYW publish a book? However, for your first short story, you should really just be satisfied with getting it published in an unpaid journal.
3. Is it crucial to see your story printed on paper? If not, then online literary sites might be your best bet. There are a lot of them and it still counts as a legitimate publication. The downside is that there's no guarantee that the story will get read.
4. Is it crucial that a lot of people read your story? Again, there are a number of microscopically small journals with circulations in the dozens that may consent to publish your story if you're not particularly worried about being known to readers coast-to-coast.
5. Does your story have a particular ideological/cultural background that others may identify with? This is the question that many first-time writers forget to think about. There are dozens of magazines out there for all conceivable ethnic, cultural and religious groups, as well as lifestyle magazines for people with particular hobbies or occupations as well as magazines for geographic regions. Figure out the target audience for your story and you'll improve your chances of catching an appropriate editor's eye.
6. Are you willing to pay to have your story read? This is a question that even successful and established writers often struggle with. There are hundreds of short fiction contests across the country with prizes ranging anywhere from $50 to a couple grand. If you think your story can win, you can shell out the $10 - $15 per entry. Just make sure that the contests are reputable: find out who last year's winners were, and make sure these are real people, and that your story will get read. Many smaller magazines have required reading fees, but every submitter gets a free subscription to the magazine - if you're interested in reading short stories as well as writing them, this is a good way to feel like you're not getting bilked out of your reading fees.
7. Do you have any connections that might be able to help you? This doesn't just apply to you if your dad edits Harper's. Almost every college and most towns have a literary magazine, and if you're interested in being published you might want to get to know some editors. They'll be able to give you inside tips on what the magazine is looking for, and if they like you they'll probably read your stuff first.
3. MAKE A DETAILED LIST OF PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH YOU WILL SUBMIT
There are two main ways to find publications for your story:
* If publishing your short story were your religion, then the annually updated 2000 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market could very well be your bible. It lists thousands of magazines, with short descriptions of each that should be enough for you to know whether you're interested in submitting there. Because you figured out in step two exactly what kind of magazine you want to publish in, you should be able to use the Writer's Market with no problems. Just flip open to the section on Small Circulation Magazines and start finding the ones that sound right for you.
* You can find print and online magazines on the web; Yahoo's magazine listing is a fairly comprehensive and well-maintained list of magazines with websites. Again, they are broken up into categories, and knowing what kind of magazine you're looking for will help you wade through the endless possibilities.
Writer's guidelines
Most of these magazines will make available a set of writer's guidelines that will let you know both what they're looking for and what format requirements they demand. They use these guidelines so that they have to do as little work as possible. Some of the guidelines are industry-wide:
* Don't send your only copy of the story
* Double-space your manuscript
* Print on one side of the page in a clear and simple font (e.g., Times New Roman)
* Include a brief cover letter (more about that in step 4)
Some magazines can be incredibly picky about some of the specifications (e.g., demanding paperclips rather than staples, or that your name not appear anywhere on the manuscript), so it's important that you get your hands on guidelines for every publication to which you submit your story.
Here are some other things to look out for:
* One of the most common requests made in these guideline pages is for "No simultaneous submissions." That means that if you submit your story to that magazine, you're not allowed to send it to any other magazine until you get a response. Unlike the other guidelines, you can almost certainly ignore this. The odds of you getting published in even a single magazine are fairly low; two at once would be uncanny. If you do simultaneously submit to magazines that ask you not to, you risk blowing your relationship with the magazine (that is, the very special bond between an editorial assistant and the 438th story he's read this week). In the rare case that your story is accepted at two publications, just call or write all the other magazines considering your story and tell them not to bother. You probably won't encounter too much resentment. We recommend that you send to 10 to 20 magazines.
* It's very important to look at the publication at least once before you send it in. Editors like to say that the number one thing they look for is familiarity with their magazine. Don't bother trying to read through 15 previous issues, though: as long as you have a decent idea of the kind of fiction that they print, you'll be fine.
* Finally, we recommend that you remain realistic, but still only submit to publications that you respect. It's better to not publish a story at all than to see it in a crappy publication.
4. PREPARE YOUR SUBMISSIONS PACKETS
Get your supplies
You've got your story, you've got a list of magazines, and now you have to roll up your sleeves and make sure the former arrives at the latter. This is going to cost you a few bucks, but writers are usually dirt-poor anyway. Think of this as practice. Take a trip to an office supply store and get yourself the following items:
* Page-size manilla envelopes (8.5 x 11 or bigger; one per magazine on your list)
* Letter-size envelopes (one per magazine on your list)
* A lot of stamps (at least three per magazine on your list)
You should also make many photocopies of your story. If you're seriously invested in getting published, your expenses for a single story should run between $15 and $50. Add to this figure if you're entering contests with significant entry fees.
Write a cover letter
The discussions of cover letters in our articles SYW publish a book? or SYW write a children's book? are great starts, but we have some more advice for you:
* Remember that your cover letter is one of thousands written by people who want to get stories published just like you. So keep it short. Editors say that just a few sentences usually suffice.
* If you have been published before at all, you definitely want to let the editor know, and you might get some sympathy points if you make it clear that you're a novice willing to take any kind of constructive criticism.
* Throw in a line of sincere praise for the magazine that explains why you want to be published in its pages.
* Do not try to explain or contextualize the story. Just give your brief description of it.
* Don't write a lot of personal biographical information.
* Definitely do not beg.
Long story short (what a pun!): make your cover letter quick and let the editor get to the story, which should speak for itself.
Send 'em out
* Address your story to the editor who will be reading it, by name if possible (e.g., the fiction editor in the case of a large magazine) or To Whom It May Concern.
* Definitely mention the name of the publication, but feel free to cut and paste in your word processor and send out ten or twenty nearly identical letters.
* Next, make out a pile of Self Addressed, Stamped Envelopes (SASEs) for each one of your submission packets. You should include these so that the magazine can respond to you with an acceptance or rejection, and hopefully some editorial advice, without shelling out for a stamp.
* Sit down and label all your manilla envelopes and collate all the copies of the story with all the cover letters and SASEs.
* Before you dump all these into the mail, double-check to make sure you have an accurate list of exactly what magazines you submitted to, and when you sent out the envelopes.
* Keep a detailed list of what you sent to whom and on what date. That way, you won't mistakenly deluge a single magazine with multiple submissions at the same time (which they find annoying) and you'll also be able to track which magazines have gotten back to you and which haven't.
* Usually magazines will state their response times along with their writer's guidelines, and these will range from two weeks to six months.
5. UNDERSTAND YOUR RIGHTS
We hate to bring you down, but don't be disappointed if the first couple - or first couple dozen - are rejections. If you are rejected by all of the magazines to which you submitted, you should either go back to step two and re-evaluate your goals of publication or go back to the beginning and try the whole process with a different story.
If an acceptance letter does come, after you've taken a few minutes to savor the feeling of self-fulfillment, remember that you are entering into a business deal like any other, and you need to protect your own rights. These come in two categories: 1) how the story will be presented and 2) what happens to the story after it's published.
How the story is presented
It's easy to forget that your story is really your story when an authoritative editor tells you that you have to edit out the talking donkey character. Of course, there's no law against caving in to the editor's every whim, but even the most domineering editor will be disappointed if you don't stand up for your own work. When an editor suggests changes, they are almost always sincere suggestions and not commands. So make sure you're satisfied with the final text. Most respectable magazines should also let you see an advance copy of any illustrations that will accompany your story; if this is important to you, make it clear to the editor.
What happens to the story after it's published
The legal status of your story after it is published depends on what rights you end up selling to the magazine. Though you automatically own anything you write when you write it, there are several categories of copyrights and publication rights that can be sold for any piece of text.
The most commonly sold rights are first serial rights, which give a magazine the right to publish the story first and once. If you sell first serial rights, ownership of the story remains with you, and after it is published you can sell it to other publications (provided that they don't demand first-time rights) or to book anthologies, or to anybody who wants to buy it.
If you are selling the magazine or website anything other than first serial rights, it's important to communicate with the editor and make certain that both sides understand exactly what the other side plans to do with the story following publication. Other categories of rights include one-time rights, second serial rights and the lucrative category of TV and movie rights. These can make you a fortune, but it is unusual for anyone to purchase these rights to a previously unpublished short story. There is one notable exception: Francis Ford Coppola's fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, buys the motion picture rights to every story it publishes. Outside of such special cases, though, you'll probably just want to sell the first serial rights.
Then, all you have to do is relax for a couple weeks/months while the employees of the magazine lay out the issue. Soon enough, your personal story of love and betrayal will no longer be a source of comedy just for your close friends and family, but for the wider literary world.
* 2. Decide what market you want to publish in
* 3. Make a detailed list of publications to which you will submit
* 4. Prepare your submissions packets
* 5. Understand your rights
Short stories are much better than novels for one reason: they're short. Bad stories end quicker, and good stories get right to the point. In fact, writing a short story is a great way to get your foot in the door of the writing industry; you can experiment with different narrative styles and play with characters, situations, and tone. A short story can be as short as a paragraph or as long as 50 pages, so you have tons of freedom with which to work.
So you've written a story and your mom says that it's super. But you want more than motherly compliments, right? You'd rather break into the pages of The New Yorker and get offered a cushy teaching job at a liberal arts school in Maine. Slow down, bucko. Let's get that first story published, shall we?
Despite the fact that assistant editors and interns at literary magazines are regularly drowned in mailbags full of submissions (commonly referred to as a "slushpile"), getting your short story published is easier than you think.
One quick note: this SYW is not about how to get an idea for and write a short story; this is about how to publish a story you've already written. So don't send us hate mail.
1. MAKE SURE THAT THE STORY IS PUBLISHABLE
Hate to break it to you, but you're going to need a story. Sure, that anecdote about your 6-day escapade with Charles Manson is great material, but it's not a short story until you've written it down. Once you've got your story on paper-or saved to disk-you've got to make sure it's not a piece of garbage. Here's how:
* Check spelling, punctuation and grammar meticulously. Having stupid typos and mistakes is the easiest way to get your story thrown in the recycling bin. The only exception to this is if you want to get crazy and creative, such as writing a story in the first person from the perspective of someone who has incorrect grammar (check out The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for an example of this) The rule of thumb is: if you've got a well-thought out idea behind that spelling mistake or lack of punctuation, then you're fine. For more help with this, check out our meticulously-written article SYW avoid common writing errors?
* Make sure that it makes sense. A good test for this one is to hand your story to a friend, roommate, Eskimo, or family member. If they ask you why the gorilla was in the bathtub and you thought you wrote a story about horseback riding in Montana, you may want to do a little revising. It's really important that the reader can clearly follow everything that's going on.
* Determine whether it is actually a short story. Admittedly, this is rather a mushy criterion. One method of figuring out if it's a short story is to get a PhD in comparative literature with a focus on postmodern deconstructivism. On the other hand, we merely recommend that you use your best judgment.
2. DECIDE WHAT MARKET YOU WANT TO PUBLISH IN
There are thousands of magazines and websites that publish short stories. Submitting to all of them would be expensive, time-consuming, and futile. You MUST narrow the field and send your story to the publications that are most likely to publish it. In other words, you have to find a "fit." To narrow the field, ask yourself these questions:
1. Is this your first time submitting a story for publication? If so, you probably want to stick to smaller magazines or those that specifically try to help out novice writers.
2. Do you want to make money from getting the story published? OK, so that's a stupid question. But do you need to get paid? If so, good luck. Even the most highly respected literary journals won't pay for stories. To make serious cash, shoot for big glossy publications with a hefty bankroll. Either that, or try to publish a book of a collection of your own short stories. To do that, check out our article SYW publish a book? However, for your first short story, you should really just be satisfied with getting it published in an unpaid journal.
3. Is it crucial to see your story printed on paper? If not, then online literary sites might be your best bet. There are a lot of them and it still counts as a legitimate publication. The downside is that there's no guarantee that the story will get read.
4. Is it crucial that a lot of people read your story? Again, there are a number of microscopically small journals with circulations in the dozens that may consent to publish your story if you're not particularly worried about being known to readers coast-to-coast.
5. Does your story have a particular ideological/cultural background that others may identify with? This is the question that many first-time writers forget to think about. There are dozens of magazines out there for all conceivable ethnic, cultural and religious groups, as well as lifestyle magazines for people with particular hobbies or occupations as well as magazines for geographic regions. Figure out the target audience for your story and you'll improve your chances of catching an appropriate editor's eye.
6. Are you willing to pay to have your story read? This is a question that even successful and established writers often struggle with. There are hundreds of short fiction contests across the country with prizes ranging anywhere from $50 to a couple grand. If you think your story can win, you can shell out the $10 - $15 per entry. Just make sure that the contests are reputable: find out who last year's winners were, and make sure these are real people, and that your story will get read. Many smaller magazines have required reading fees, but every submitter gets a free subscription to the magazine - if you're interested in reading short stories as well as writing them, this is a good way to feel like you're not getting bilked out of your reading fees.
7. Do you have any connections that might be able to help you? This doesn't just apply to you if your dad edits Harper's. Almost every college and most towns have a literary magazine, and if you're interested in being published you might want to get to know some editors. They'll be able to give you inside tips on what the magazine is looking for, and if they like you they'll probably read your stuff first.
3. MAKE A DETAILED LIST OF PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH YOU WILL SUBMIT
There are two main ways to find publications for your story:
* If publishing your short story were your religion, then the annually updated 2000 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market could very well be your bible. It lists thousands of magazines, with short descriptions of each that should be enough for you to know whether you're interested in submitting there. Because you figured out in step two exactly what kind of magazine you want to publish in, you should be able to use the Writer's Market with no problems. Just flip open to the section on Small Circulation Magazines and start finding the ones that sound right for you.
* You can find print and online magazines on the web; Yahoo's magazine listing is a fairly comprehensive and well-maintained list of magazines with websites. Again, they are broken up into categories, and knowing what kind of magazine you're looking for will help you wade through the endless possibilities.
Writer's guidelines
Most of these magazines will make available a set of writer's guidelines that will let you know both what they're looking for and what format requirements they demand. They use these guidelines so that they have to do as little work as possible. Some of the guidelines are industry-wide:
* Don't send your only copy of the story
* Double-space your manuscript
* Print on one side of the page in a clear and simple font (e.g., Times New Roman)
* Include a brief cover letter (more about that in step 4)
Some magazines can be incredibly picky about some of the specifications (e.g., demanding paperclips rather than staples, or that your name not appear anywhere on the manuscript), so it's important that you get your hands on guidelines for every publication to which you submit your story.
Here are some other things to look out for:
* One of the most common requests made in these guideline pages is for "No simultaneous submissions." That means that if you submit your story to that magazine, you're not allowed to send it to any other magazine until you get a response. Unlike the other guidelines, you can almost certainly ignore this. The odds of you getting published in even a single magazine are fairly low; two at once would be uncanny. If you do simultaneously submit to magazines that ask you not to, you risk blowing your relationship with the magazine (that is, the very special bond between an editorial assistant and the 438th story he's read this week). In the rare case that your story is accepted at two publications, just call or write all the other magazines considering your story and tell them not to bother. You probably won't encounter too much resentment. We recommend that you send to 10 to 20 magazines.
* It's very important to look at the publication at least once before you send it in. Editors like to say that the number one thing they look for is familiarity with their magazine. Don't bother trying to read through 15 previous issues, though: as long as you have a decent idea of the kind of fiction that they print, you'll be fine.
* Finally, we recommend that you remain realistic, but still only submit to publications that you respect. It's better to not publish a story at all than to see it in a crappy publication.
4. PREPARE YOUR SUBMISSIONS PACKETS
Get your supplies
You've got your story, you've got a list of magazines, and now you have to roll up your sleeves and make sure the former arrives at the latter. This is going to cost you a few bucks, but writers are usually dirt-poor anyway. Think of this as practice. Take a trip to an office supply store and get yourself the following items:
* Page-size manilla envelopes (8.5 x 11 or bigger; one per magazine on your list)
* Letter-size envelopes (one per magazine on your list)
* A lot of stamps (at least three per magazine on your list)
You should also make many photocopies of your story. If you're seriously invested in getting published, your expenses for a single story should run between $15 and $50. Add to this figure if you're entering contests with significant entry fees.
Write a cover letter
The discussions of cover letters in our articles SYW publish a book? or SYW write a children's book? are great starts, but we have some more advice for you:
* Remember that your cover letter is one of thousands written by people who want to get stories published just like you. So keep it short. Editors say that just a few sentences usually suffice.
* If you have been published before at all, you definitely want to let the editor know, and you might get some sympathy points if you make it clear that you're a novice willing to take any kind of constructive criticism.
* Throw in a line of sincere praise for the magazine that explains why you want to be published in its pages.
* Do not try to explain or contextualize the story. Just give your brief description of it.
* Don't write a lot of personal biographical information.
* Definitely do not beg.
Long story short (what a pun!): make your cover letter quick and let the editor get to the story, which should speak for itself.
Send 'em out
* Address your story to the editor who will be reading it, by name if possible (e.g., the fiction editor in the case of a large magazine) or To Whom It May Concern.
* Definitely mention the name of the publication, but feel free to cut and paste in your word processor and send out ten or twenty nearly identical letters.
* Next, make out a pile of Self Addressed, Stamped Envelopes (SASEs) for each one of your submission packets. You should include these so that the magazine can respond to you with an acceptance or rejection, and hopefully some editorial advice, without shelling out for a stamp.
* Sit down and label all your manilla envelopes and collate all the copies of the story with all the cover letters and SASEs.
* Before you dump all these into the mail, double-check to make sure you have an accurate list of exactly what magazines you submitted to, and when you sent out the envelopes.
* Keep a detailed list of what you sent to whom and on what date. That way, you won't mistakenly deluge a single magazine with multiple submissions at the same time (which they find annoying) and you'll also be able to track which magazines have gotten back to you and which haven't.
* Usually magazines will state their response times along with their writer's guidelines, and these will range from two weeks to six months.
5. UNDERSTAND YOUR RIGHTS
We hate to bring you down, but don't be disappointed if the first couple - or first couple dozen - are rejections. If you are rejected by all of the magazines to which you submitted, you should either go back to step two and re-evaluate your goals of publication or go back to the beginning and try the whole process with a different story.
If an acceptance letter does come, after you've taken a few minutes to savor the feeling of self-fulfillment, remember that you are entering into a business deal like any other, and you need to protect your own rights. These come in two categories: 1) how the story will be presented and 2) what happens to the story after it's published.
How the story is presented
It's easy to forget that your story is really your story when an authoritative editor tells you that you have to edit out the talking donkey character. Of course, there's no law against caving in to the editor's every whim, but even the most domineering editor will be disappointed if you don't stand up for your own work. When an editor suggests changes, they are almost always sincere suggestions and not commands. So make sure you're satisfied with the final text. Most respectable magazines should also let you see an advance copy of any illustrations that will accompany your story; if this is important to you, make it clear to the editor.
What happens to the story after it's published
The legal status of your story after it is published depends on what rights you end up selling to the magazine. Though you automatically own anything you write when you write it, there are several categories of copyrights and publication rights that can be sold for any piece of text.
The most commonly sold rights are first serial rights, which give a magazine the right to publish the story first and once. If you sell first serial rights, ownership of the story remains with you, and after it is published you can sell it to other publications (provided that they don't demand first-time rights) or to book anthologies, or to anybody who wants to buy it.
If you are selling the magazine or website anything other than first serial rights, it's important to communicate with the editor and make certain that both sides understand exactly what the other side plans to do with the story following publication. Other categories of rights include one-time rights, second serial rights and the lucrative category of TV and movie rights. These can make you a fortune, but it is unusual for anyone to purchase these rights to a previously unpublished short story. There is one notable exception: Francis Ford Coppola's fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, buys the motion picture rights to every story it publishes. Outside of such special cases, though, you'll probably just want to sell the first serial rights.
Then, all you have to do is relax for a couple weeks/months while the employees of the magazine lay out the issue. Soon enough, your personal story of love and betrayal will no longer be a source of comedy just for your close friends and family, but for the wider literary world.
