Okay, so this is going to be a post of advice for new(ish) writers. I’m not sure if anybody’s stupid enough to look up to me as a writer, since there are slices of toast with better bibliographies than mine. However, if you do think I have useful shit to say, I’m perfectly happy to cram your head with my useless opinions.

If you ask a professional writer where you should send your shit, they’re going to tell you something like, "Start at the top and work your way down" or "Don’t self-reject!" Gee, thanks Einstein. The general thinking is: you can’t control whether or not someone will buy your story, so making it a goal to get rejections instead allows you to pretend you’re making progress until you start selling. If you’re still sitting on your hands and not sending anything out, then this is probably good advice. However, I don’t write that many stories, and I’m an impatient jerkface, so I prefer to minimize the number of rejections I get per story.

I’m pretty good at placing my stories. (Except for the one that I’m sure everybody in the entire industry has read and rejected by now but that I just. can’t. quite. bring myself. to. trunk. Rrrrggghggghgh wangst.)

By "pretty good," I mean that I have a disproportionately low number of rejections for the number of stories I’ve sold. IF I get to assume THE UNPLACEABLE STORY is an outlier (I think this is fair, since 25% of ALL my rejections have been on this one story), I’ve averaged 2 rejections per story before a sale. Older/weirder stories have more rejections for obvious reasons. Quite a few have sold on the first submission.

Here’s what I consider:

Word count limits
Payment
Prestige
Readership
Slush pile wait
Is the slush pile open?
Which magazines have published stories similar to what I’ve just finished?
When was the last time I submitted to this magazine (if ever)?
How BADLY do I want to be in the magazine?
What do I know about the editor’s tastes?
Rejectomantic bullshit
How I feel about the story (to trunk or not to trunk)

Some of these things are more important than others. Knowing what’s important to you is step one. It’s pretty obvious, but… if you REALLY REALLY REALLY love Asimov’s and you REALLY REALLY REALLY want to sell a story to Sheila Williams, then you should send all your best stories there first. You do NOT have to sell stories to other magazines first to be taken seriously or "work your way up" from semi-pro, or whatever the current stupid fucking rumor is. If you want to be in a magazine, send them some good stories.

Duotrope or the submission guidelines will have a lot of this information – payment rate, word-count limits, average length of time before response, whether or not the magazine is currently reading slush, and what types of stories the magazine is looking for.

Note! Even though I know the payrates, word count limits, average response times, required/preferred submission method and what most of the professionally paying SF markets are looking for, I still check guidelines & duotrope before I send. (Please tell me that I don’t have to tell you this.) Things change all the time, and a magazine that usually gets back to you in a week could be backed up.

I’ve tried to choose a particular order for what I consider, but it doesn’t work. It’s just never the same from one story to another, or one month to another. I’ll sometimes take lower pay rates if I like the magazine more, or if the submission-to-publication time is shorter. Sometimes there are magazines that I would really like to be published in, but the story I have in hand is a closer fit to the tastes of a different editor.

I could make a List Of Magazines for science fiction, and one for fantasy, and then one for weird stuff that’s vaguely not-so-genre, but I enjoy looking at a fresh story and trying to figure out where I should send it. Also, if I tried to do that, then I’d just sit around rearranging my list and never submitting anything.

Because I’m wordy as fuck, here are a few thoughts on some of these things.

How do I tell if something is prestigious?

Were stories from that magazine nominated for major awards or chosen for best-of collections? Are there a lot of stories from this magazine listed in the honorable mentions? Does the magazine get reviewed regularly in places like Locus? Do people talk about it often? Do stories from the magazine get linked around your Twitter feed?

Award nominations and honorable mentions/best of picks are not necessarily an indicator of quality, but they do indicate how highly the magazines are regarded. (If that matters to you.)

A few words on slush pile waits:

Oh boy, do writers ever BAWWW about this one. Let’s all just agree that rejections are disappointing and nobody likes them. Okay? Fast rejection? Wah. Slooooow rejection? Wah. They’re both rejections.

Places that give fast rejections are good for when you’ve just finished a story and you’re excited about it. YEAH. Hit up the places that are going to give you a decision quick-quick-quick! I tend to find that after a few rejections, I’m tired of getting the story back. I want to trunk the fucking thing. I want to make it into 30 paper airplanes and fly it off the Deception Pass bridge. When that happens, unless it’s a story that really needs to descend into eternal midnight of my hard drive, I send it to a magazine with a really slow response time (6-18 months) and forget about it. If I don’t want to look at the story again for six months, it might as well be waiting in line somewhere.

Duotrope’s magical world of stats is much more useful than whatever the magazine guidelines say about this, by the way. You can see the average length of time people wait before they get their lovely rejections. Of course, if you’re a particularly good writer, you may discover that your slush pile waits get longer and eventually bear no resemblance to the average. That’s because you’re being held for further consideration because your story doesn’t suck. If you’ve been waiting a super long time before hearing back (and here is when checking guidelines is useful, since many magazines will tell you how long you ought to wait before querying) then send a query to politely ask if the story is still under consideration. Oh, and quit whining.

Editorial tastes:

This is useless if you know nothing about the magazines you’re sending to. (See also: getting back issues is a good way to see what the magazine publishes, except that you should make sure the fiction editor hasn’t changed since those back issues were published…) You get this information gradually by paying attention to who sells to which magazine, and by reading the stories.

Yes, I consider this when I send stories. If I have a story that I think really belongs in a particular magazine, I will send it there first even if there are other venues that pay more, etc, (I typically use it to sift between magazines on the same basic level, as when deciding between professional publications). NOTE! I roll my eyes really hard when people send stories to Shimmer and the cover letter actually says that the author thinks the story a good fit. You don’t need to say it... (Although, if you have done/do this, just stop. Or don't. Whatever. Don’t freak out about it. Nobody rejects based on the cover letter unless you’re threatening to kill their children, or worse, their cats.)

HOWEVER. I recommend only considering what you know (or think you know) about the editor’s tastes when you’re choosing between magazines. If you have a story that’s publication-worthy but didn’t sell, DO send it to the magazines that you don’t think buy stories quite like that! I was later told that the first story I ever sold was not the type of thing that magazine usually publishes, but they bought it anyway. So! While it’s a useful thing to consider, don’t let it stop you.


This is just how I do it. Other people have their own methods (and some people do find that making their own personal list to work down is effective). Just like writing, figuring out how to sell stories is a work-in-progress.

PS: Also, it's a completely useless exercise unless you can write well, so make sure you're still improving and writing awesome stories that claw their way out of you like happy little chest bursters.

Thoughts?