November 2007

Career Paths and Market Strategies for the Emerging Writer
by Jay Lake

Jay Lake is a male auxiliary member of Broad Universe who lives in Portland, Oregon. He has sold six novels and over two hundred short stories, and edited or co-edited almost a dozen anthologies. Portions of this article have appeared in a different form on his blog.

One of the most frequent questions any working writer hears from aspiring writers is, "How did you do it?" That question has a slightly different meaning every time it is asked—matters of craft, matters of theme, the natural but meaningless wish for a "magic bullet"—but perhaps the most common interpretation I see is, "What did you sell, and who did you sell it to?" Which translates to, "What should I be writing and to whom should I be trying to sell my work?"

First, to belabor the obvious: No two writers are going to find precisely the same path. Your career path depends a great deal on what you write, who your intended (and actual) audience is, what sort of career goals you have set for yourself, and even nuances such as the length at which you choose to write.

What Should You Be Writing?

You should be writing good stories. Interesting stories. Stories which make readers pay attention. Remember, editors are readers first and foremost, standing proxy for their entire circulation.

I'm not going to try to tell you what stories to write. Rather, I'm going to try to give you a few things to think about as you're writing. Hopefully this will guide your process and help you find a path to selling more stories to more markets, and delighting more readers.

As a new writer, there are some risks which are simply more difficult for you to take. For example, your beginnings need to be strong right from the title and the first words of the opening line. Gene Wolfe could send in stories written on butcher paper and draw very serious consideration, where you or I would be bounced for having an unreadable manuscript. As an established-but-newer writer, I can probably take more liberties with market theme and acceptable plots than an unknown aspiring writer. Your by-line doesn't yet have the reader trust to sustain an elliptical opening scene or a long build up, unless you have done that very, very well. But a good, strong story trumps everything.

You don't have to be a Name to write a good story. You don't even have to be experienced to write a good story. You just have to write a good story. How to get to that point is a complicated and sometimes controversial process. It's a tough world, a tough marketplace, and idiot persistence counts for a hell of a lot.

(Lest anyone feel I am thoughtlessly dictating from my lofty perch as an established writer, please bear in mind that I wrote and submitted a very large amount of material for about ten years before I had my first sale. I vividly recall the frustration of that process. What made me better wasn't the presence of an accommodating market or editor, it was the practice that a decade of that idiot persistence gave me.)

One thing to be wary of when creating a story is writing to guideline. With the notable exception of themed markets—typically anthologies—guidelines are elastic. Some are more elastic than others. A market will tell you in flashing bold letters they won't buy vampire kitten stories, ever, under any circumstances, but if you send in the best damned vampire kitten story on Earth, they might buy it anyway. Then again, they might not. "Seen it before" plot warnings can be trumped for a good enough story. What you want to avoid is writing a story for a market. Write the best story you can write, then fit it to the market.

The immediate and glaring exception to the above advice is themed anthologies. If someone is publishing vampire kitten stories, your Howard Hughes as immortal avatar novella probably isn't going to fit in the slightest. My solution to this is write to the edge of the guideline. This means that when my story is under consideration, it probably isn't very similar to much else in the pile. It also means that if I get rejected and need to remarket the story, it doesn't look very much like the other stories which didn't make the themed anthology.

To give a specific example from my career of writing to the edge of the guideline, I submitted a story to The Magic Toybox. The theme was toys which come to life. I didn't want to write another Nutcracker or china doll story, so instead I wrote about a Neanderthal toddler and the stick which is her most beloved possession. Little Pig, Berry Brown and the Hard Moon made it into the book.

Another thing that new writers often seem to worry about is sending out work which will somehow earn them a black mark with editors. I hear people say, "I'm waiting until I'm good enough before I start submitting." While it's certainly true that a certain level of craft and professionalism are expected in the submission process, here's a little secret:

Editors don't remember bad stories.

Unless you're writing heroically bad, Eye of Argon level stuff, they literally won't think of it again once they've rejected. (Or unless you do something bizarre, such as put the editor or their children directly into the story as characters. Don't do that, trust me.) While they don't remember stories, editors do remember names. Your regular appearance in the slush pile with steadily improving work counts a great deal more to the good than a moment of the giggles over a howler in an off-the-mark manuscript will ever count against you.

It's also a truism that a writer is the worst judge of their own work. You don't know how good or bad a story is until you send it into the world. I'm not suggesting mailing out every piece of dreck that happens to roll off your keyboard. Rather, I am suggesting that you trust yourself and your stories enough to mail the manuscripts out to the best markets for you, as discussed below.

Don't worry about not being good enough. I've never been good enough for F&SF, and I have well over 100 rejections to prove it. Still batting .000 with Mr. van Gelder to this day. But the only way any of us ever can get good enough is to keep writing and sending.

To Whom Should I Be Trying to Sell My Work?

The conventional wisdom is to start at the top markets and work your way down. This happens to be very good advice. Like most very good advice, it makes sense largely in retrospect. This does not help much when you're searching for the way in to your career.

Let's try to break that advice down a little, and help it be more immediately useful. One problem is that the conventional wisdom doesn't handily define "top markets." For example, Analog is the highest circulation market among the digests. It's also widely considered one of the top short fiction markets in our field. However, if you're writing highly surreal erotic elfpunk in a nonlinear stream-of-consciousness structure, the good Dr. Schmidt may not be your most natural reader.

This is called "knowing your market." Analog is a rather simple example to point to, simply because of the magazine's well-defined voice as a classical Silver Age SF venue. Applying this rubric effectively across your chosen field requires a good understanding of the available markets, as well as an honest, objective understanding of how your own work reads. Neither of these comes naturally.

I've been asked if there are markets which make allowances for new writers. In a word, no. At the same time, every editor dreams of discovering the next big thing, of fostering a new talent into the world. New writers have new voices, new visions.

I don't think it would be healthy if there were "sandbox" markets for new writers. What good would a market do that was deliberately seeking to buy less than the best stories which present themselves in a slush pile? How would you react as reader to something like that?

We all secretly believe ourselves to be undiscovered geniuses. Once or twice in a lifetime, someone is right about that. What are the odds that someone is you, and your lifetime is the once or twice in question? What you have is hard work, your distinctive voice, and the process of steady improvement through regular writing habits.

You do have those, right?

Once you have a sense of what you're offering, both as a writer with a developing career arc and on a story-by-story basis, you need to define your top markets. There are several distinct ways to view this. Pay rate is a traditional measure. Circulation, often but not always closely correlated with pay rate, is another. Likewise prestige. It all depends on your career goals.

If "make a living at this" is key to you, aim for highest pay rates, for example. Baen's Universe has the highest stated pay rate of any regular periodical market out there. Want to be well-read? Analog has a wider readership. If "make a splash in the field" is important to you, look at markets like Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet which are regularly reviewed, generate award nominated stories, have frequent Year's Best (YB) reprints and honorable mentions, and so forth. Which is more important to you?

You also need to review your markets according to the length at which you write. Check guidelines. While there's almost always some bend in them, you're not going to shoehorn a novella into Realms of Fantasy, which has pretty strict upper length limitations, presumably for production reasons. Some of the really interesting literary/slipstream markets, such as Flytrap and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, favor pieces at quite economical lengths.

If "make a splash in the field" is important to you, what markets are regularly reviewed, regularly generate award nominated stories, YB stories and honorable mentions, and so forth? Polyphony has been up for a World Fantasy Award three years running, we produced several WFA nominees and one winner, as well as a story which landed in Best American Short Stories. Nice company to be in, if that's where you'd like to be seen.

The answer to the question of where to sell your work boils down to "it depends." The best way to think about it may be to simply define where you want to be, who you want to be seen with on a table of contents. I sometimes use the concept of a "bellwether" writer. Find a writer whose work you like, whose career you like, with whom you share some similarities. For me, these include James van Pelt and Ray Vukcevich. Look at the markets they appear in, and follow them there.

Two of my favorite resources for understanding the markets out there are the summations at the beginning of the Dozois-edited Year's Best Science Fiction and the Datlow/Grant/Link-edited Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Bearing in mind that the information is twelve to twenty-four months out of date when you read it, those two books give an excellent overview of markets, where certain authors are being printed, and what direction the field is going in. Also, ralan.com is an excellent resource for up-to-date submission information.

No matter what you write or where you send it, a good story trumps everything. The only rule is be interesting. Write more, write often, and keep it in the mail.