7 Responses so far

1. 1. Rob Darnell on Feb 28th, 2010 at 3:30 pm

   “It was a hand stapled, photocopied, black and white amateur production. With very bad, crude, line drawing art on the front.”
   —

   I’ve been in a couple of those. I’m still pulling my shirt collar back from my neck to let the steam out. Wish I hadn’t blabbered so much about my writing or when I was published.

2. 2. Mark Terry on Feb 28th, 2010 at 5:28 pm

   I finally read Writers Find Markets, which is food for thought. I’d never really thought about it quite like you put it here, but I’ve done it for years.

   It made me reflect, as a freelancer, on the various markets for nonfiction. Writers Market, now an online database, is OK, but over all the years writing and getting published and paid for it (first paid piece was in 1993 and I’ve been a full-time freelancer since 2004), I realized I’ve only gotten one or two writing gigs from Writers Market. Granted, one of those paid reasonably well and I’ve been writing regularly or semi-regularly for them for 4 or 5 years, and working with them led to a book collaboration project & article collaborating, but as a source for markets, WM just hasn’t been all that great.

   I’ve had pretty good luck with listings off Craig’s List, although you really have to be careful with a lot of those–many of them suck and apparently aspiring writers are an amazingly easy mark for con jobs of one type or another.

   When I started out writing short fiction, I’m amused to say, I always started with Playboy. Simply BECAUSE they were such a high-paying market, albeit an impossible one to break into. I can laugh at myself for that–gotta love those rejection letters on Playboy letterhead with the bunny logo on them–but I’m not sure I’d change that. I was reaching high, after all.

3. 3. Jon Hansen on Mar 1st, 2010 at 9:39 am

   “This did not look at all like Analog.”

   Man, this is funny. And very familiar. And really engaging.

4. 4. Stephen Watkins on Mar 2nd, 2010 at 9:35 am

   I like the approach of a rank-ordered list. I’ve been contemplating my approach to this problem recently, as well. I’ve decided to start pretty near the top as well (filtering the choice of which magazine I submit to in part by whether I think my story will fit in that magazine’s style; you allude to this in your article when you learned submitting a fantasy story to Analog’s is a bad idea, but I didn’t see where you stated that explicitly). I’m still waiting to see if I get any more reader feedback on a story I’ve been working on before doing a revision to polish it up before sending it off.

   Thanks again.

5. 5. Stephen Watkins on Mar 2nd, 2010 at 10:48 am

   Err… sorry for the double-post, but I just thought of something. Would it be terribly forward to ask you to go into more detail about how you mine for data out of Locus. I must admit to being mostly ignorant of Locus (I’ve only casually heard of it before, but never really knew what it was or considered looking it up before).

   Do you still use Locus Magazine in this way? Can you get the same data from Locus Online? How do you go about collecting this data. I must say, learning about Locus was kind of a revelation, so I’m interested to learn more.

6. 6. Tobias Buckell on Mar 4th, 2010 at 11:11 am

   At the end of every year, in Locus magazine, there was always a publishing round up column (not sure if it goes online), and there is usually one in the Dozois’s Year’s Bests, where the readership figures of magazines are quoted.

   You can also find them in some descriptions of the markets (or used to) online. Most small press places had a thousand readers or less. The big mags had 10s of thousands (Analog had 30-40K, I think it was the largest of the SF big three, but was eclipsed by Omni. Playboy, where I sent a lot of stories but never sold, had a lot of readers

   TB

7. 7. Stephen Watkins on Mar 4th, 2010 at 1:26 pm

   Thanks, I’ll have to keep my eyes open for it.