2011 Writing Statistics and The Secret Formula for Getting Published

January 2, 2012

What a difference a year makes.

At the onset of 2011 I had two stories published in token-paying ‘zines. I set myself a nearly-unattainable goal of making ten more story sales by the end of the year. Not even in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I’d make pro-paying sales, join SFWA, and have a story of mine selected for use in a state-wide aptitude test by the NJ Board of Education. Meanwhile, I have friends whose imagination and writing ability blow me away — yet they still haven’t made their first sale.

So what’s my secret, you ask? I figured out and implemented an amazing strategy that resulted in the total of 19 story sales in 2011 (including stories submitted in late 2010). My secret formula is this:

1. Write lots of stories.

2. Submit them like crazy.

That’s it. That’s the big secret. Let’s go over that in detail:

1. Write lots of stories.

You must keep writing whether you feel like it or not, at the time. You must tinker with drafts you aren’t satisfied with and outline new ideas. You must add words to a story you’ve been slowly working on for months — even if you’re half-convinced at that point that your underlying idea is terrible and the writing is worse. By the time you’re finished, that might end up being one of the best stories you’ve ever written.

Writing on a regular basis makes you better at it. I look back at the stories I wrote a year ago, and I can see tangible improvement. I’m sure that will continue to be the case for a long time to come. Like any other craft, you hone your skills by practicing for hundreds of hours. You also tend to get rusty when you stop.

One good method for maintaining your creative output is to set yourself a daily writing goal. 500 words works for many people. That’s 500 new words — doing revisions and tinkering with your older manuscripts doesn’t count. If you’re an organized person with a stable schedule, you’ll be able to maintain a daily writing routine. You’ll also quickly discover a number that works for you. Some lucky souls can plug away at their keyboards and produce 1000 or even 2000 quality words a day. Others find 500 to be too challenging. If you are in the latter category, don’t despair. Even at 250 words written every day you can have an entire novel draft finished by the end of the year.

This works great if you’re in control of your schedule. Others have day jobs, family commitments, and other important stuff in their lives that may preclude them from writing daily. I belong firmly in this category. In this case, an initiative like Write1Sub1 may be an excellent substitute.

I joined W1S1 as it was being launched in late 2010, committing to write and submit a new story *every week* in 2011. While I have not always stuck to this schedule, it did constantly push me to increase my output. I made up for some skipped weeks with bursts of productivity and managed to finished an impressive number of stories in the past year — far more than I would have written without this self-imposed metric. Needless to say, I will continue to participate in Write1Sub1 in 2012, and you should consider it too.

2. Submit them like crazy.

As I wrote above, coming up with new material is the hard part. Submitting is easy. At least that’s the case for me. Other writers I know of have no problem writing new tales, but getting them to consistently submit their work for publication is more difficult than herding cats.

Some people have a hard time dealing with rejection (and there’s LOTS of rejection to be had, even if you’re a pro). Others struggle under the mountain of their creative inventory, uncertain of the status of their submissions, which stories have been to which markets, and which are idling in the dark corners of their hard drive.

Over the course of the previous year I’ve learned (or am still learning) the following facts about submissions:

* Never self-reject. If you think that your story might not be good enough for a specific magazine and you choose not to send it in, your end result is an equivalent of a rejection. If you *do* submit your story there, rejection becomes only a worst-case scenario.

* Submit your story to the best markets and continue to submit it until you run out places you can possibly stick it. Given the breadth of speculative fiction markets cataloged on sites like duotrope.com and ralan.com this shouldn’t happen for years. In the 18 months or so since I began writing, I have yet to retire a story (though I’ve tinkered with them plenty, to make sure that the level of writing in each story is the best I can currently manage)

* Don’t let a harsh personal rejection faze you. In 2011 I’ve had two separate instances where an editor rejected a story and ripped it to shreds in their comments — and then the story sold to the very next market I sent it to, with *zero* changes made. Just like with anything else in life, one editor’s trash is another editor’s treasure.

* Don’t be mad at the editors for “not getting” your story. You may disagree with them on the specific feedback they provide, but recognize that they took the time to make the comments in the first place. Every decent editor is inundated with hundreds of submissions. The fact that they offered you feedback instead of a form rejection is a gift, and should be treated as such.

* Don’t let the story languish on your hard drive. Send it out there. If you get a rejection, try to resubmit it somewhere else within 24 hours.

* New markets open all the time. If there isn’t a suitable market open for a particular story you have, chances are one will pop up in the next month or two. However, it’s even more likely that you haven’t looked hard enough. After a year and a half, I’m still discovering “new” places to submit to, all of which have been around far longer than I’ve been writing.

* Maintain a database tracking your submissions, so you always have a clear idea of where they’ve already been, and what isn’t out on submission at the moment.

So yeah — I’ve been submitting like crazy. In the past year I’ve made a total of 150 submissions (including reprints). Here are my annual statistics:

Submitted: 150

Currently out on submission: 18

Lost / Never responded: 2

Rejected: 114

Accepted: 16

The breakdown of accepted stories by market type:

Pro Pay ($0.05+/word): 5

Semi-pro ($0.01 – $0.05/word): 7

Token (under $0.01/word or royalty pay): 4

I sold a total of 19 stories in 2011. Of those, 17 were original stories and 2 were reprints. Two were micro stories (one Twitter length and one 100-word), 8 were flash (under 1000 words) and the rest ranged between 1200 and 5000 words.

In 2012 I’ll continue to write lots of stories and bombard editors with my submissions. I’m confident I can break my record of 150 subs. In fact, I think I’ll break 200.

If you want to see your fiction published in 2012, then so should you.

5 Comments | Craft of Writing | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

A few end-of-year updates

December 29, 2011

The time between Christmas and New Years is typically a lull, with few writerly news to report, good or bad. This year my holiday week has been a busy one:

* I received word that my space opera adventure story “The Dragon Ships of Tycho” has been accepted into an anthology it was written for. This was the first time I was invited by an editor to submit something for an upcoming project. I was flattered, and did my best to come up with a quality story that would suit the anthology theme. I submitted in October and received a positive response this week. I can’t share the details, as this anthology has not been officially announced yet by the publisher – but it will be a physical book and it will likely be released in 2012.

* “The Skeptic” will be reprinted in the January issue of Bent Masses. This was the first story I wrote once I decided to take up fiction, and my first story accepted for publication. Originally it appeared at Absent Willow Review – an online magazine that recently closed its doors. They took down all their content, so “The Skeptic” isn’t currently available online. Bent Masses will kindly fix that on January 15.

* Christine Amsden, author of  SF novel “The Immortality Virus” and other speculative works, published a mini-review of my DSF story “Spidersong” on her blog.  She called Spidersong “satisfyingly creepy.” You can read her blog post here.

* I’m very nearly done with “Requiem for a Druid” – my second Conrad Brent yarn. At 6300 words, it’s the longest story I’ve written to date. This is an urban fantasy featuring lots of action, magic, plot twists and horrible puns I shouldn’t be able to get away with. At one point I actually have Conrad utter the phrase “These aren’t the druids you’re looking for.” With the wavy hand motion, and everything. Special thanks to authors Ken Liu, Michael Haynes and Victoria Jakes, as well as a number of my non-writing friends, who all pitched in offering critiques on the story and catching my many embarrassing typos.  I hope to send “Requiem” out on submission by early next week. It should be my first W1S1 submission of 2012!

The year is almost out and I’m planning to do a blog post analyzing my annual submission statistics, but every one of the remaining few days counts and 2011 isn’t over quite yet. There are approximately 20 stories out on submission at the moment, and it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that I will still hear back about one or more of them before January 1st.

 

 

 

1 Comment | Acceptances & Publications | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Interview at Rick Novy’s Blog

December 15, 2011

Rick Novy was kind enough to interview me on his blog.

Rick is an excellent writer in his own right, with short stories appearing at places like Scott Orson Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show and Flash Fiction Online.  His novel, “Neanderthal Swan Song,” is available for the Kindle at Amazon.com:

Comments Off on Interview at Rick Novy’s Blog | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

“The Getaway” sold to Earthbound Fiction

December 9, 2011

Today I signed the contract for and can officially announce the sale of “The Getaway” to Earthbound Fiction.

Earthbound Fiction is a new publisher, soliciting short stories for their SF and Fantasy anthologies. They’re also running a monthly contest, with the winning story posted on their site. Although my story did not win the November contest, they enjoyed it enough to pick up for their forthcoming flash fiction anthology.

“The Getaway” is a tiny flash fiction story and its genre is somewhere between humor and suspense – so it doesn’t fit into either of their current anthologies, so I must assume they’ll be publishing it in a Flash antho sometime later next year. Either way, this is an odd duck of the story that I really like, and I was happy that it found a good home.

This month’s contest is themed. Earthbound is looking for holiday stories under 500 words – so if you have something appropriate, consider sending it their way. After all, the more great stories they buy, the sooner an anthology that includes “The Getaway” can be published 🙂

 

 

 

Comments Off on “The Getaway” sold to Earthbound Fiction | Acceptances & Publications | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Plan of Attack

December 8, 2011

I like to set myself ambitious goals. When I began writing fiction in the summer of 2010 I had a straightforward yet difficult first target: to sell a story that year. Many freshman writers struggle for years before they accomplish that first sale, but I’m not patient enough to wait that long. Luckily I didn’t have to. I managed to get not one, but two stories published in 2010. Both sold to relatively modest markets, but nothing to be embarrassed by.

I wrote about my 2011 goals over here. I joined Write1Sub1, committing to write one short story every week in 2011. The goal was 10 story sales.  To date, I’ve had a total of 17 short story sales this year, including three to professional markets and a sole reprint to the NJ Board of Education. And the year isn’t even over yet.  I also joined SFWA, which was originally one of my goals for 2012.

So what is it I want to accomplish next year? Here’s a list:

Write longer stuff. I will probably write less stories next year, but they will hopefully be better, longer stories. Flash fiction has become my comfort zone, so I will push myself to write longer fiction until I feel as comfortable in the 3-5K word range as I do in under 1000.

To accomplish this, I will spend more time outlining and plotting each story before sitting down to write it. This is contrary to what I’ve done to date, which is to write mostly by the seat of my pants. I will also continue to participate in Write1Sub1, but at the rate of one story per month instead of one per week.

Be consistent. I will try to write at least 500 new words every day. That’s all-new content – editing previously written manuscripts doesn’t count. My biggest problem this year has been falling off the writing wagon for a few days or even a few weeks at a time. Training myself to write a little daily is a good start to accomplishing all of the other goals.

Upgrade SFWA membership  – I’m currently an associate member. Full membership requires 3+ pro sales totaling $250+. I’m at 2 qualifying sales and around $150 – so a single short story sale or a couple of flash sales to pro markets will put me over the top.

Socialize. I have never attended a science fiction convention, nor met many of my fellow writers in person. Next year I will strive to fix that. We are planning a special launch event for an anthology I’m in (more details on that in January) so I will get to meet folks there, but I also hope to attend at least one major SF con in 2012.

Blog. Now that I have this spiffy WordPress blog, I am resolved to update it regularly. The goal is at least once a week, but possibly even more often if I have something interesting to talk about.

Novel! The above goals aren’t particularly ambitious. But this one is, for me. I’m completely lost and intimidated when it comes to undertaking a novel. As I continue to work on short fiction, I will research, outline and begin writing a novel. I don’t necessarily expect to finish it in 2012. In fact, I probably won’t start on it till later in the year. Until then I will continue to work on improving my writing, read books and articles on the craft, and maybe even attend a workshop.

This post is part of a W1S1 blog chain where a number of Absolute Write regulars talk about their writing goals for 2012 and how they plan to accomplish them.  Samuel Mae started the chain on his blog this morning. Next up is A. G. Carpenter.  Please check out their blogs, and those of all the other excellent people who hang out at the Absolute Write W1S1 sub-forum.

 

6 Comments | Craft of Writing | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Writing What You Don’t Know or In the Footsteps of Jules Verne

December 5, 2011

Jules Verne, a science fiction pioneer

Some of the most basic writing advice out there is “show, don’t tell,” “avoid adverbs like the plague” and “write what you know.” While the former two adages are more or less universal, it’s a lot harder for a speculative fiction author to follow the third. After all, what writer could have the first-hand experience navigating a faster-than-light starship, traveling back in time, or casting magic spells?

In most cases a healthy amount of research will do the trick. Jules Verne, renowned for his lush descriptions of exotic and faraway places, hardly ever left his armchair. He learned about Africa, India and other settings outside of Europe by reading books and studying maps. One can only imagine what kind of adventures the grandmaster would have thought up if he had access to the Internet. Or perhaps his productivity would have been stunted by World of Warcraft and Words With Friends – just like the rest of us… Or is that just me? But I digress.

Research is how I cope with writing about stuff I don’t necessarily know much about. I don’t have to become an expert in every field — I just learn enough to fake sounding like one on paper. After all,  if I can’t fake a little knowledge, how can I write convincing accounts of telepathic alien spiders or bad-ass magic wielders on the streets of Brooklyn?

A good portion of my allotted writing time is spent on Wikipedia, looking up various subjects. And the subjects are only getting stranger. Recently some of the stuff I had to look up online for my stories included:

* Manhattan Municipal Building
* Mose the Fireboy
* Persimmons
* Variations of Shakespeare’s “To Be or not to Be” soliloquy in “Hamlet”
* Kaballah and Jewish mysticism
* Sunset Park waterfront
* Sumatra
* Year the JFK airport was renamed as such
* Common Greek names
* Volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii.

These aren’t all for the same story (although, if they were, it’d be a doozie!). On second thought, I looked at the list again and SIX of the ten examples I listed are all research for just one story – a sequel to “A Shard Glows in Brooklyn” titled “Requiem for a Druid.” I really doubt anyone would be able to figure out which six, but feel free to give it your best shot in the comments.

2 Comments | Craft of Writing | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Moving On Up

December 2, 2011

Welcome to my new and much improved home on the web.

I finally overcame my inertia and spent a few hours setting up a WordPress blog. After a year+ of putting up with the geriatric dinosaur that is LiveJournal, I feel like Robin Williams’ character in “Moscow on the Hudson” when he gets his first taste of freedom. WordPress is a far more powerful platform. In fact, it can do way more cool stuff than I even know how to use at this time.  As you can see, all the content from the previous blog has been ported over. I also spent a few bucks and registered alexshvartsman.com – so no more clunky web addresses. If you can remember how to spell my surname – which in itself is no small feat – you can find your way over to this page.

Over the next few days I plan to play with my shiny new toy. I’ll check out all the bells and whistles WP has to offer. Who knows, I might even manage to update this blog a little more often. Stay tuned!

 

3 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Spidersong

October 16, 2011

"Spidersong" will be published at Daily Science Fiction tomorrow. Or a week from now, depending on how you look at it.

DSF offers an e-mail subscription service. They'll send a shiny new story to your mailbox 5 times a week. Four of these are flash stories, short enough to read on your cell phone or during a lunch break. On Friday you get a longer story to enjoy over the weekend. If you don't subscribe to their mailing list (and there's really no reason not to, it's free and the fiction is of excellent quality), you can read the same stories on their web site. The only catch is that they are posted online a week later. So if you want to read "Spidersong" it'll be in your inbox on October 17 and then posted on their front page on October 24.

"Spidersong" was originally written for a flash fiction contest sponsored by the Shock Totem magazine. The prompt for their contest was a number of photos of trees shrouded in spiderwebs, like this one:

This surreal image is a result of heavy flooding in Pakistan. Thousands of spiders escaped the rising water into the trees, and made a home there. You can see more photos over at National Geographic or read about it at Gizmodo.

So, of course, after looking at the photos what immediately came to my twisted mind was giant alien spiders. Giant alien *telepathic* spiders. Who sing.

I had a lot of fun with this story along the way. I chose to write it in plural first person AND in present tense, which is a very unusual format in which to frame fiction. Hope you like the end result!

Comments Off on Spidersong | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Paying Back

October 14, 2011

This has been a very good month for me. A number of payments for the stories I've sold earlier this year are coming in, and I'm rolling in the dough. Well, more like skating on the very thin layer of the dough that can be generated from selling very short stories for anywhere between one shiny penny and eight shiny pennies per word. Still, it's sweet.

I promised myself that once I began earning income from my fiction, I would pump some of it back into our notoriously cash-starved little industry. I'm already a consumer – I buy all the books that I want to read (usually on the Kindle). I also plan on purchasing subscriptions to F&SF and possibly a few others in the near future. Meantime, I wanted to support three of the web sites that were instrumental in helping me to get published.

First up, critters.org

Critters is an online workshop where an author can get feedback from fellow writers. It's free, but one must participate by critiquing at least one story per week. There are other web sites that do this, but Critters is perhaps the largest, best organized, and very well maintained by SF writer and programmer Dr. Andrew Burt (a.k.a. Critter Captain).

An aspiring author usually starts out by showing off their writing to friends and family. This is ego-stroking (as most of them will praise the manuscript, however mediocre it might be), but not very useful if you want to improve. On the other end of the spectrum, submitting these early attempts for publication will usually result in a form rejection letter, that doesn't point out the story's flaws.  If you are very lucky, an editor will include a paragraph or two commenting on what didn't work for them. A critique by fellow writers is far more useful. They'll pick apart both the writing and the logic of the story, question every detail you may not have even thought of, and will often help you find and eliminate flaws in your writing you weren't aware of.

The system isn't perfect. Quality of critiques ranges from absolutely amazing to utterly useless. I once had someone send me a page-long manifesto the entire purpose of which was to convince me that I should never EVER begin a short story with a line of dialogue. Which is utter nonsense, of course. Still, the signal to noise ratio on Critters is very good and it's a service I highly recommend to anyone who is starting out and to writers who do not have a good local critique group of their own.

I must admit that I haven't been using Critters myself recently. I have precious little time to dedicate to writing (hey, I hardly ever get to update this here blog!) and even less to critiquing others. When I do have time to crit, I usually do it for writers whom I've become friends with at AW (see below). Still, Critters was extremely helpful to me early on, and they easily made my list of  venues that I simply had to donate some cash to.

My current stomping grounds and a site I visit daily is Absolute Write. There are thousands of writers on their forums who share information and resources. There is a Critique component (in the Share Your Work sub-forum) as well as sections for every possible facet of writing, from genre categories to Bewares – a watchdog section keeping an eye on shady publishers and agents. I've made a lot of new friends by hanging out at AW. It's also a great place to pop in and ask a question. The level of conversation is very mature as compared with what goes on in the "Interwebs" – I've been a witness to no more than two flame wars in over a year of using the site, and both were quickly and efficiently extinguished by the moderators.

Last but not least on my list of "must-support" sites is Duotrope.com

Duotrope is a database of fiction markets for all formats and genres. It keeps track of new publications, the goings-on at current magazines, and venue closings. Much of the content is user-generated. When I submit a short story to, say, Clarkesworld, Duotrope helps keep track of my submission in a nifty database. At a glace I can see what markets my story has been to, when I subbed it, and when it was rejected. While I'm doing this, Duotrope also uses this information to (anonymously) report the recent responses at each market. Thus I know that, this week, Clarkesworld is taking 5-7 days to respond to their submissions. So when that rejection comes, I can consider response times and resubmit it to, say, Lightspeed Magazine (which responds in 1-3 days) instead of TOR.com (which takes nearly a year!).

Of course, response times aren't the only criteria to go by. Excellent markets like TOR.com mentioned above are well worth waiting for. But when you have a new market, or one you aren't very familiar with, How long will they take to respond? Are they likely to comment on your submission or send a form rejection? How easy/tough is the market to crack? Duotrope will let you know at a glance what to expect.

In the end, none of this data crunching will help sell a story. The editor will either love it, or not. Still, it's a hugely useful resource and they deserve a donation for providing it to everyone at no charge.

So there you have it – Critters, AW and Duotrope all received small, but very sincere contributions from this humble author today. If you are in a similar situation, I encourage you to use their invaluable services, and to pay it back with a donation of your own once those stories begin to sell.

Comments Off on Paying Back | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Time Away

October 3, 2011

Here's a double entendre for you – while I'm enjoying time away on a family vacation in Barbados, White Cat Publications bought and published my flash fiction story of the same name. It's live already and can be read here:

http://www.whitecatpublications.com/?page_id=991

"Time Away" is one of the first stories I've ever written and it has been submitted to a whole bunch of magazines before, with varying results – from form rejections to "very close, we loved it, but it isn't the right fit." Persistence is key though. Heinlein once wrote that you should keep submitting your story until you run out of markets and, in this case, my perseverance paid off with a sale to a very nice new market. So don't give up on your stories too quickly, they don't generally have an expiration date! 

Comments Off on Time Away | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »