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Sell Your Story
Author: Stephen D. Rogers
You've completed your story. Congratulate yourself and celebrate.
Okay, back to work. Now that the story is done, it's time to sell it.
Writing and submitting are two very different activities.
Writing is creative. You could ignore every piece of advice I've shared and still produce a saleable manuscript.
Submitting is a business transaction. Ignore industry guidelines, and your masterwork will never see print.
Whether or not you wrote your story with a market in mind, you need to learn how to research markets because―believe it or not―the market you wrote the story for might decide to pass on it.
If you regularly read the type of story you've written, you know where those types of stories are published.
Alternately, you can go through the annual market books to find publications that buy the type of story you've written.
There are free online market listings, such as:
There are online writing communities and groups that often discuss new markets. Sometimes editors take part, and can give valuable tips and immediate needs.
To discover untapped resources, plug "fiction, "submission," and "guidelines" into your favorite search engine to find opportunities that might not be listed elsewhere.
Familiarize yourself with the markets where it makes sense to submit. Although a publication might publish stories similar to yours, what are that publication's specific needs and wants? Is your story a match?
Narrow the field. What does the publication pay if anything? What does the publication ask for in return? (First-time rights? All rights?)
Does it matter to you whether the publication is an anthology, a print magazine, or online?
After you've weighed all the possible markets, pick your first choice for where you'd like the story to appear.
Now study that publication's guidelines.
Does the publication want online submissions? If so, how do they want them formatted? Do they want them attached to an email, imbedded within the message, or pasted into an online form? What email address do you send to, and what should appear in the subject line? What's the editor's name?
Does the publication want hardcopy submissions? Follow the industry standards (printed in a 12-point black font on one side of the paper with one-inch margins) but check for any other specific requirements. Does the editor want a SASE large enough to return the manuscript or only a #10 for the reply? What's the mailing address? What's the editor's name?
If you don't bother reading the guidelines, why should the editor who wrote them bother reading your story?
Double-check the editor's name and the email address.
Send off the story and start working on the next.
While the guidelines might state average response times, don't bother crossing off the days on a wall calendar. That said, you can always query if you haven't heard back long past the stated response time, just in case your submission was lost.
You'll either hear nothing (even if you included a SASE) or get a response. Responses range from form rejections to personalized rejections to requests for rewrites to acceptances.
If you receive an acceptance, congratulate yourself. Celebrate. Email me.
If you receive anything else, send the story back out.
Stop submitting only when you run out of suitable markets. Ignore comments explaining why the story was rejected unless you keep seeing the same comments again and again. If so, rewrite.
Write. Submit. Repeat.
See you in the table of contents.
This column first appeared on DM in 2008, but we think you'll agree that it still has some good information!
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