Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

Another year is in the books as my adventure in speculative writing, translation, and publishing continues. It has been a somewhat quieter year, with fewer short stories written and sold, but there have been new exciting opportunities and new successes I’m proud of. Some of the highlights for me:

* I’ve had two new anthologies published, Unidentified Funny Objects 6 and Funny Horror. And The Cackle of Cthulhu is coming out next week.
* I was nominated for the Canopus award for the second time, for “Whom He May Devour” published in Nautil.us. Winners will likely be announced in January and although I don’t expect to win (there’s tremendous competition in my category, and I predict the award will go to Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds) I’m thrilled to be recognized.
* I’ve translated and sold a number of Russian language speculative stories. I also recently helped judge a Russian science fiction short story contest, which was great fun, and will be translating the winning story into English soon.
* I was involved in a best-selling book! I got to write a story for Monster Hunter Files, edited by Larry Correia and Bryan Thomas Schmidt. It was by far the most high-profile anthology I’ve had my fiction appear in to date and it was great fun to play in the urban fantasy universe I immensely enjoy reading.
* I broke into some new-for-me markets, including the stories Analog magazine (with a story co-written with Alvaro Zinos-Amaro.)

Not all of my plans for 2017 worked out as planned. Let’s take a look at my list of goals for the year I posted twelve months ago:

• Sell Eridani’s Crown (my first novel).

Didn’t happen. Publishing, it appears, is a slow-moving beast. I only got two rejection slips for my book, and the other couple of editors my agent sent it to haven’t responded at all. I remain optimistic and look forward to a better result next year!

• Write and finish my second novel within the 2017 calendar year.

Didn’t happen either. I’m a bit more than half-way through writing The Middling Affliction. I’m rather disappointed in this, but there were good reasons for the delays and I will keep plugging away at it until the book is done.

• Sell at least one new anthology to a major publisher.

I haven’t actually tried. I plan on pitching Baen some more ideas, but I think it’ll work better if they see strong sales numbers for Cackle, and that took longer to publish than I anticipated. I do have other editing projects in the pipeline and other exciting editing-related stuff that I hope to announce soon.

• Publish UFO6 and Funny Horror.

Done, and done.

• Sell or crowdfund my second short story collection, aiming to be published in 2018.

The book is funded, written, and sent off to the copy editor. It should be releasing in May.

In 2017 I also write eleven new short stories, totaling over 33,000 words of fiction. I wrote over 40,000 words for my second novel. And it’s not til I just looked it up that I realized I actually wrote more words of fiction than I did last year. Yay! Eight of the newly-written stories are already sold, which is a really good ratio. (It helps that four of my new stories were commissioned or written for invitation anthologies.)

I earned $3341 from direct short fiction sales (not counting translations, anthology royalties, etc.) which is a nice bump from 2016’s $2170. As before, aggressive marketing of reprints has been hugely helpful toward this number. According to my spreadsheet I sent out a total of 123 submissions this year, which resulted in 27 acceptances. (These numbers do include translations.) Interestingly, this is the exact same number of submissions as last year, but those only resulted in 20 acceptances.

Here is the list of the original stories and first-run translations of mine that were published in 2017:

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2017 at 11:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.