Short Story Publishing?

[breezeshadow]

Hello everyone. So I've been a writer for ages, and today, after showing one of my friends my writing and having her like it, I started to consider whether I may actually be good enough to get into publishing. There's just a few concerns about this.

First off, I don't know if I'm actually good enough. I have stuff posted on my DW (here, here, and here are the recent ones), and on my dA are edited/more complete versions of those three stories, along with other things (dA here.). But I know my friends saying I'm good enough to publish does not necessarily mean I am, and I don't want to get ahead of myself. You don't need to read every one, or any, or give any extensive critique if you don't want to; I just want to make sure I'm not jumping the gun.

Second, I am a fantasy writer. As far as I could tell, there are very few publishing venues that are interested in short stories of the fantasy variety. Does anyone here have any experience with magazines, online and off, that accept fantasy submissions? Or know of any? I could write realistic stories, but they aren't my preference.

Also any advice about this would be fantastic. I've never tried submitting anything before, so I don't really know how it goes. Thus, any comments at all would be fantastic.

Thank you! Sorry for not replying much here; don't have much time to think about DW this semester.

Comments

[analect]

I'd definitely agree with that, although I would say - from personal experience - a) self-publishing can be a real PITA. With Amazon's 70% over 30% deal, you need to read the fine print clearly, because it's not for everyone (they may include your book on loan projects, for example). Also, their back-end system is terrible from a technical point of view, so it's lovely to be able to have a publisher with an experienced tech/format team to stand between you and the screw-ups. b) If you intend to be anywhere other than *just* Amazon, you need to know or learn XHTML to correctly format and prepare your work for .epub format, plus doing all the conversion, distribution etc. yourself, which can be a real headache. (Alternatively: I just suck at it. *grin*)

In my view, small presses that epublish give you the best of both worlds: you can focus on actually writing, and leave the technical stuff to other people, and you still get an average of 30-40% royalties on cover price. Some also pay advances for longer work, usually around the $1000 mark (although yes, that does require recoupment, but it's handy). True, you don't shift the kind of numbers you do with a larger company, but they are also much more open to new talent, new ideas - and less run by accountants!

The only issue I've found is that there are fewer epublishers dealing with non-romance genres. Ones do pop up that deal with mainstream fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc., but they don't do half as well as romance/erotica houses. I'm trying to cling to the hope that this will yet change. (If I'm wrong and someone knows of a really successful digital publisher who doesn't predominantly do romance: for the love of all that's holy, please share!)

Oh, and in addition to those excellent recs of fannyfae's: check out the Chicago Manual of Style. It's worth investing in a copy, as that's many publishers' standard text.

[fannyfae]

Passive Guy mentioned a fairly painless program last week called Jutoh which takes a great deal of the PITA formatting etc. out of eBook formatting. I agree, without something like that, it is just maddening. I had one book up on Amazon that I had to pull down because the illustrations didn't make it into the final text. Amazon failed to mention that if your manuscript has any illustrations at all in the old KDP model, you had to put it in as a zip file. Now that I have Jutoh, and am nearing a point where it will be uploaded once again, I will let you know how it turns out. So far so good.

And yes, reading contracts is important - which is why I suggested the three blogs that I did. Passive Guy (PG) is an attorney, and he will be uploading an analysis of the Amazon contract, etc. Other publishers, especially with eRights, it is becoming clear that they do NOT care about the authors as much as they might have in the past and that their main concern is maintaining their relevance and profit margins in an industry that is currently changing at an astounding pace.

[analect]

Oh, bummer about the illustrations. Their lit was never terribly clear, and some things do still seem to function in a fairly random manner. I've had things disappear for no reason, and things that were pulled down magically pop up again... yet never been paid for copies sold when they did. :\

But I digress. Thanks for the rec - I will definitely look into Jutoh. There's quite a handy plug-in for OpenOffice as well, that automatically converts .odt to .epub. I'll see if I can find the link and see about making a resources post for this kind of thing - could be useful!