Solid day, but I’m only at my quota so far. I should do a little better than that today though.
I had a lot of loose ends to tie up today. For starters, I now have Indie Author Confidential Vol. 10’s cover. It is ready to publish. I’ll publish one day this week when I’m over my quota and have some time to kill. Since I’m in Beast Mode, the words have to come first.
I did a final review of my short story “The Goddess of Crime” and looked for suitable fantasy magazines to license it to.
It has been a while since I have submitted stories to magazines. The magazine landscape has changed a lot since COVID. There are a lot fewer of them now, and a lot of anthologies are now Kickstarters and therefore invite only. Crazy how times change.
I try to talk about my processes on this blog because I know many of you are interested in how I spend my time everyday. I'll be honest that one minor reason I haven't written short stories in the past few years is because of the logistics problem.
First, assuming you want to make money from your stories with fiction magazines (which is a very good idea), you have to have an understanding of the current market. Just because you write a fantasy story doesn't mean you should submit that fantasy story to every fantasy magazine. Many magazines won't want to read it either because of the length, the subject matter, or the fierce competition.
Second, when you submit stories, you have to have a system to track your submissions (Submittable and Duotrope don’t count in my opinion—that’s a topic for another post). Almost every professional paying magazine I know of doesn't allow simultaneous submissions, which means that you can only send them one story exclusively. You can't shotgun your story out to different magazines at the same time (which would save you a TON of time).
Let's say that you submit a story to magazine A, which has a turnaround time of three months. If you submit on January 1st, that means you have to wait until April 1st before the magazine either accepts or rejects your story (if you’re lucky). If they reject your story, you must then find another magazine to submit it to, and then begin the process all over again.
When you think about dozens of magazines that could be a market for a story, and the fact that you must submit your each story to a different slate of magazines…now you see why you must be very organized. You must always know what you've submitted and where your work is.
Now, imagine with me for a moment that you do the Ray Bradbury challenge something I've always wanted to do and may very well do next (breaking news). 52 stories in a year—one per week. You've got to juggle those stories along with the stories that are already out for submission.
In other words, this becomes a logistic nightmare if you're not organized and dedicated to staying on top of it. I
Anyway, I have the time and bandwidth to focus on short stories again, and I'm excited about it. Today, I developed a tool to help me track my short stories at different magazines.
The tool is just a simple spreadsheet. I've decided that I am going to only submit to the top tier magazines. I could spend half my life submitting to the lower tier ones. If the big ones pass on the stories, I will self-publish the stories, either as singles or in a collection.
I did the math on how long it could potentially take one of my stories to circulate through all of the relevant fantasy magazines that pay Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) rates of at least 0.08 per word. I estimate it will take approximately 1 to 1.5 years…for ONE story. Crazy.
The spreadsheet will help me stay organized so that I always know which magazine is next up, and when it's time to throw in the towel and self-publish. This means that if I start writing short stories now, the first one won't be available for me to self-publish until the end of next year.
Another reason why it took me a while to get this going…
But the tool is built now and I'm happy with it. It will save me massive amounts of time as I start writing and submitting more stories.
Speaking of stories, I started writing another short story today. I'm about 2000 words into it. We'll see where it goes.
I've also changed my story goals–the Lester Dent method advocates for 6000-word stories, but only a few paying markets accept stories over 5000 words these days. Editors are opting for shorter stories because they can fit more stories within an issue of a magazine. (And it’s cheaper for them when they’re paying $0.08 per word…let’s be real).Therefore, if all my stories are 6000 words or greater, I'm cutting my chances of getting my story published by over half.
Today, I did the math and think I can make the Lester Dent method work with 5000 words. Will every story meet this criterion? No, some stories just need to be longer. But on average, I'm going to try to shoot for about 4800 words per story. This will maximize the number of magazines I can submit to and give me more options. That is, if my creative voice lets me. LOL. (Always obey your creative voice.)
In other news, I also began reviewing the last book I wrote, which is the book on R.A.M.P. I am about 33% through my final review, and I'm happy with it so far. I think many of you will be too.
So anyway, my R.A.M.P. blog post format is out the window today. I’ll see if I can get back on the horse tomorrow.
I wrote 2800 words today, which puts me slightly over my quota. Since I started another story today, I'm not surprised that my word count is a little lower. The main reason is that I am exploring this story’s world and getting used to it. I’m taking a little extra time to get the opening, character voice, and a few other elements dialed in. That slowed me down today.
I think I've got it now, so I'm going to try to write the bulk of the story tomorrow in hopes of finishing it either tomorrow night or first thing Tuesday morning. I've decided that I don't want to spend more than three days on a story. Better to write it, do the best I can, and then ship it out. Heinlein’s Rules at its finest…
Have a good night.
(By the way, I have been experimenting with the dictation feature in Microsoft Word. This blog post was dictated with Microsoft Word for Mac. Let me know what you think. I happen to think it's pretty good, but not quite as good or fast as Dragon. But it allowed me to write this blog post in about 5 minutes. It took about 10 to edit it.)
YTD Word Count: 51,450
Plan: 1,252,000
Words Over/-Under Plan: 10,200
Days Ahead/-Behind: 3.71
Projected Annual Word Count: 1,470,000
Projected Decade Word Count: 14,700,000
Deadline 12/31/2023
Days to Go Until 12/31/23: 476
Word Count Average: 3,430
Average Pulp Speed: 2.0
