Earlier this week, I got a rejection letter from a professional magazine; the first in twenty five years. It was very polite, the editor saying the story didn’t quite work for him, but he wished me well in placing the story elsewhere and thanked me for showing it to him. A couple of hours after I got the rejection letter, I’d found a new market for the story and sent it out again. I’m still waiting for a response but I expect that response to arrive in a couple of weeks.
I’ve since come to appreciate just how much has changed for fiction writers and markets in the twenty five years since I last submitted stories.
Twenty five years ago – the late 1990s – I knew of only a few sci-fi short fiction markets, and generally only the bigger ones whose magazines made it to Fredericton. Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to be specific. I’d heard of others but getting access to them was more problematic. All accepted postal submissions only, which meant printing out several dozen pages, making sure they were all in the proper format and order, and mailing them off along with a SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) to the editor. Cover letters were generally not recommended. Wait times were measured in months.
Not so, now! All of the above listed magazines now have electronic submission options, and have been joined by a host of other magazines, some digital only, some with physical issues in addition to digital. Clarkesworld and Lightspeed have become some of the better magazines I’ve read. Wait times can still be months for the busier magazines, but that’s more due to the volume of submissions sent in than the speed (or lack thereof) of the postal service. The online submission systems are quite painless to use, and in some cases even let you track where your submission is in the queue. So much better!
There are also so many more resources available to writers today. In the 1990s, I often had to hunt down a thick book called Writer’s Market (insert year here), which had magazine contact information and all-too-brief guidelines. That resource is still around, but I’ve found The Submission Grinder to be a much better resource, not only for finding story markets, but also for keeping track of my own submissions. Signup is free, though they do accept donations to help keep the site running. You can search markets by genre, pay rate, story size, average response time, etc. Each market entry has its own dedicated page, with a section for guidelines (plus a link to the market’s website, for more details) as well as their preferences re: simultaneous submissions and multiple submissions and a breakdown of tracked submissions and responses. By adding your own submissions into their database you can help keep track of where you’ve sent a story as well as helping to refine the Grinder’s data on those markets.
Educational resources also abound. I’m currently going through some online classes courtesy of The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. Courses are relatively cheap (and there are end-of-year sales where some course are offered for as little as US$5), and can be worked through at your own pace, and you have access to them for as long as the website is available. Cat Rambo is a veteran writer of science fiction and fantasy, as well as a former president of SFWA, and she’s also attracted a number of other accomplished writers to teach courses. Some of the courses depend on videos, while others are text-only, but most are a mix. I’ve found the “Rewriting, Revising, and Fine-Tuning” course to be of special assistance, as polishing my stories has always been one of my stumbling blocks.
One “resource” that is available but which I do not recommend is AI. ChatGPT has recently become a bane to short fiction markets thanks to snake-oil salespeople pushing it as a means to “make money writing.” Oh, no: it’s more a means to get yourself blacklisted, as more than a few markets are now rejecting AI-generated works. AI “writing” tends to plagarize more than not, and still delivers stories of poor quality. For good stories, the human brain remains the best generator out there, and there is no shortcut to getting published, much less making “good money”. Do yourself a favour: avoid ChatGPT and its companions and put in the time to write yourself.
So much has changed in the past twenty five years, but sadly one thing that hasn’t changed (much) is the pay. Twenty five years ago, the professional rate was 7 cents US per word. Today, it’s 8 cents US per word, though a few markets pay more, and most pay far less. There’s a reason most published writers have other jobs.
And the other thing that hasn’t changed has been the need to keep putting out words. Good words or bad words, the constant flow of writing is the only way to get better at it. Which reminds me; I should close off here and get back to writing my next story.