As of today, I’ve made just over $800 from short stories.

Originally shared by Writers Write

http://writerswrite.co.za/the-top-20-literary-quotes-about-short-stories

Via Laura Gibbs. These are good reasons, and some of them are reasons that I write short. Others include:

– Quicker turnaround time on submissions than on novels to trad-pub

– Quick rights reversion

– Comparing pro-rate short story sales to the average novel advance, better rate per word (approximately twice as much).

Originally shared by Writers Write

http://writerswrite.co.za/the-top-10-reasons-to-write-short-stories

My story “Something Rich and Strange” is in this anthology (it was previously issued as a standalone – and it looks like, right now, the anthology is the same price as the standalone, 99c).

Julia is a young Victorian woman who’s accompanied her professor father on an expedition to the bizarre phenomenon known as the Change Storm. Despite her father and his mansplaining assistant James, she’s determined to experience the Storm for herself and make her own life.

I do copy editing for the publisher (as a consequence of being published by them, rather than vice versa) and the standard of the stories is usually good – they’re all reprints that have been published before by pro or semipro markets. I’ve only edited a couple of the ones in this volume, but as I recall they were enjoyable stories.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01I74T0FQ

Rock! Daily Science Fiction is buying my flash story “Forget You”.

First sale to an SFWA-accredited market. Not that I care about SFWA as such, but “SFWA-accredited” by definition means “established professional SFF market”.

It’s halfway through the year. Time to look at how I’m going on my goals.

Target for the full year: 60 short story submissions to magazines and anthologies.

So far: 41 (68%).

Target for the full year: write 15 short stories.

So far: 10 (67%).

I’ve written just over 30,000 words of short fiction (under 8000 words), and another 80,000 words of longer fiction (novella or novel length) so far this year. That’s more than the whole of last year in both cases, thanks to a changed job situation.

Moving from goals (things I have fairly direct control of) to responses: I’ve had 2 sales, 21 form rejections, and 7 personalised rejections so far this year. One of those sales is to a pro market.

Partly, I think, the low number of sales as compared to submissions is because I’ve been submitting to the established markets, where I’m competing with established writers. I’ll be lowering my sights a little in the second half of the year, and mainly submitting to the emerging pro markets instead.

http://csidemedia.com/shortstories/goals-aspirations-and-achievements/

I aim for submissions, which I can control, not rejections or acceptances, which I can’t (directly) control. But the principle is sound.

(My figures so far this year: 41 submissions, 2 acceptances, 21 form rejections, 8 personalised rejections. Since the beginning of 2014: 137 submissions, 11 acceptances, 105 rejections.)

Perseverance is the key.

http://lithub.com/why-you-should-aim-for-100-rejections-a-year/

Sometimes, when you’re a writer, you can say things best in a story.

This is one I wrote a couple of years ago, but it’s very applicable to today’s political climate. An elderly lady must answer the classic question, “Who is my neighbour?”

http://csidemedia.com/gryphonclerks/good-neighbours/

The middle of the year (by count of days) is this coming weekend.

I wonder if I can get four more short story submissions sent off before then? Because that would bring me equal to my total number of submissions for the whole of 2014.

Counting like that is a silly thing, but it helps to keep me motivated.

(I’ve also had fewer rejections, and twice as many sales. But since that’s two sales rather than one, you can see why I need to keep up my motivation somehow.)

Also published today: “Gatekeeper, What Toll?” In this story, I take what would normally be a six-volume epic fantasy and shrink it to a thousandth of the size, by only showing glimpses of the fated hero as he passes through the Gate of Worlds.

Only accessible to subscribers to their website, but a $12 subscription buys you a year’s worth of stories.

This is my first pro-rate story to be published, though not the first I sold (I have another one scheduled to appear in November in Futuristica 2).

http://cosmicrootsandeldritchshores.com/