Magazine Submissions - Mostly a Publicity Tool

 One of my MFA students has asked for advice about submitting her stories for publication, and my reply touches on so many of the concerns of this blog that I'm posting my reply to her here.

 

Here's the situation. The student writes short fiction, and so far has been successfully self-publishing in the form of chapbooks or zines. That is, she brings out her work in handmade editions, laser printed, saddle-stapled, and mailed to readers who fund these publications on Kickstarter.

 

She also sends her individual stories out to literary magazines and web sites and is frustrated by the high rates of rejection. The effort it takes to research these publishers and send her work to them takes a lot of time, time that she could be using to self-publish. So she is asking a small constellation of questions about the submissions process. Her concerns boil down to:

• Why should I seek to publish in these outlets at all?

• How do I decide where to submit?

• How do I manage the mechanics of submission?

Why Seek Another Publisher At All?

There may be other reasons such as the personal gratification that comes with acceptance, but in career terms, publishing in a magazine or a literary web site offers two benefits: money and publicity. And the money, even in the best of magazine markets for fiction, is negligible. Most literary magazines pay nothing, or pay a token amount. Some of the top journals just below the mass commercial general circulation magazines might pay a few hundred dollars. At the top, the commercial market that very few writers will reach, are magazines that pay a thousand dollars or more for a story, but even writers who crack these markets can't expect to sell to them more than a few times a year. The money that comes from publishing fiction in magazines is a bonus, but it's not reliable as the basis for a career.

(It is still possible to sustain a freelance career in nonfiction magazine writing. But there isn't enough fiction featured in well-paying magazines for the writer to rely on being paid regularly.)

The main benefit of publication in magazines, in anthologies, and on literary web sites is publicity. Even the goal of “having readers,” which is the first benefit of publication, serves this goal of having still more readers for one's work published elsewhere. The byline on a good story is a line of advertising for all of the writer's other stories. It says, in effect, “If you liked this reading experience, look for this brand again for similar experiences.” The contributor's note, and the URL of the author's web site, is, along with the byline, the second half of this publicity package.

It's true that publishing in these venues also helps to establish the writer's credentials, but those credentials are easy to re-frame as yet another form of publicity. Editors and readers alike will see these credits as an indication of quality.

So publication is a step toward building audience, and that means that the writer should have thought in advance about what she is going to manage and build the traffic that publication brings to her web site. Does she offer her existing publications for sale at the web site mentioned in her contributor's notes? Does she offer visitors a newsletter so she can maintain a mailing list of people who are interested in her writing?

Where to Submit?

There are so many venues for publication that my student feels daunted by her choices. Where should she be sending her work? No matter what the goals of publication might be, some of the oldest and most basic advice should serve as the writer's first selection screen: Submit to publications that publish work like yours.

Of course, this rule is easy to follow in general, but trickier in the details. At a minimum, the writer should read the publication's description in the various market listings and refrain from sending a realistic literary story to a publisher of mystery stories or science fiction. And, yes, it's a good idea for the writer to have a look at an issue or two before submitting. But it's also possible for a writer to talk herself out of a submission that would have been successful. If she notices that a magazine has a pattern of publishing only sad stories, she might fail to send a story with a happy ending. If sad endings aren't mentioned in the editor's description of what he's seeking, then it is at least sometimes a mistake to invent editorial policies for a magazine based on what they are already publishing. It's the editor's job to reject work, and unless a submission is clearly inappropriate, it's worth a try.

If the primary benefit of publication is publicity, then the question of where to submit is clarified some more. Where will the writer get the most publicity. In general, the larger the circulation of the publication, the more useful it will be to appear there.

The Mechanics of Submission

My student expressed some dismay over how little information she typically gets when her work is rejected. She would like to be able to fine-tune her submissions to have a better sense of which stories to try with which editors, but when the only data point she gets from a submission is, “No,” she has little to work with when she's allocating stories to editors in a new round.

It's reasonable for her to feel frustrated. She wants to feel that if she sends out a dozen stories and all of them come back, she has at least learned something that will increase the chances for acceptance when she submits again. But the truth is that she needs to make her peace with that frustration and understand that submitting for publication is a matter of persistence in the face of little feedback. If she has reason to believe that her work is good (and her work is good), then she just needs to keep the work in circulation until, by chance, she begins to get some of the feedback she is hoping for. An editor who sends specific comments about a story is an editor that she should send to again, and again, and again. An editor who accepts one piece deserves to move to the head of the line and be the first person to see new work.

Chance plays a big part in submission. A story that might have been accepted yesterday might arrive just after a similar piece has already been accepted. Rejection can mean that the story is of poor quality, but what editors are saying when they reject work is, “I can't use this right now.” The writer won't usually know why that's the case, but the reasons can be completely extraneous to the quality of the work. Additionally, editors are readers, too. They have good days and bad, days when they are inattentive and just don't get a story that, on a different day, they would recognize as wonderful. An acceptance is a happy confluence of a quality story, a suitable slot for such a story in the publication at that moment, and recognition that the story and the slot are a good match. The writer can control only the quality of the story and whether the story is given a chance to appear in the right hands at the right time.

So other than seeing to the writing, all the writer can do is put the work in circulation and keep it circulating until it finds a home. The mechanics of submission should be, well, mechanical. Once the writer has identified some possible venues for her work, she should send her work to one after another, keeping track of where each piece has been, probably with a spreadsheet. When something returns, it should go out again for consideration elsewhere, ideally in the same hour. Every finished piece should be under submission somewhere.

And when pieces are published, and when some small percentage of their readers follow a link to the writer's web site, that's the first small step in the writer's strategy of bringing more readers, ideally paying readers, to more of the writer's work.

More About Direct Sales

 

What follows is grossly oversimplified. I have sacrificed nuance and accuracy for the sake a sketching a rough outline.

 

When we think of "how publishing works," most of us think about the model that dominated the last couple of centuries. The writer wrote and sent the resulting work off to a publisher. An editor considered the manuscript and, if it was found to be suitable, made suggestions or changes to fully realize the work's potential. The publisher designed the pages, commissioned art if necessary, paid for printing, and undertook whatever publicity or advertising would help to sell copies.

 

In other words, writers wrote, and publishers published.

 

The first thing to keep in mind about this model is that it represents a phase of publishing, a distinct era that now seems to be drawing to a close. Publishing was not always like this. The first printer in England, William Caxton, was in some ways like a publisher of the twenty-first century. He produced books in print runs of about 300 copies, so his market was small enough that he could get to know his buyers personally. He managed every stage of production himself. He wasn't a writer, but he worked at a scale that would be familiar to many self-published writers today.

William Caxton, the first printer in England (1476) and a savvy acquiring editor, publicist, and salesman.

The second thing to keep in mind about the nineteenth-and-twentieth-century model of publishing is that it is no longer as good at fulfilling its role as it was in the days of Frank Doubleday. Consider the services that a traditional publisher provides to the writer:

• Imprimatur. The publisher acts as a gatekeeper, only taking work that is good, so the reader can have some confidence. "Doubleday" on the spine is a mark of quality.

• Editing. The publisher pays an expert, or usually several experts, to work with the text at various stages, from development to copyediting and proofing.

• Design and Art. The publisher pays a different set of experts to make the book block and the covers of the book attractive.

• Production. The publisher foots the considerable bill for offset printing.

• Distribution. The publisher has existing relationships with wholesale distributors and book sellers.

• Publicity and Advertising. The publisher pays for ads, sends out copies to reviewers, and attracts publicity for the book.

 

What does the performance of a twenty-first-century large publisher look like in these areas?

• Imprimatur. The publisher still acts as a gatekeeper, but the criteria for what publishers will take has grown increasingly narrow. In Frank Doubleday's era, there was some room on a commercial list for books that the editors loved and knew would not be big sellers. No longer. On one hand, an ardent fan base of ten thousand readers who look forward to the next mass paperback from writer Jane Doe is not a large enough audience to satisfy her large publisher, so some high-quality work without enough mass appeal goes unpublished. On the other hand, a mediocre children's book by a pop singer will be published on the grounds that the singer's name will sell even though the book is run-of-the-mill. So imprimatur from a large publisher still means something, but certainly less than it once did.

• Editing. Large publishers still pay for copyediting and proofing, but most writers can forget about getting developmental editing from a large house. Editorial staffs are trimmed ever leaner, and the expectation is that if a manuscript needs editorial work to be ready for publication, the writer had better pay for help from a freelance editor before submitting to the already overworked acquisitions editor.

• Design and Art. Big publishers still do this very well.

• Production. This is another service big publishers still provide well.

• Distribution. Publishers have relationships with distributors all right, but there are fewer players these days, which makes for a fickle market. If one big chain store doesn't commit to carrying a title, the result will be a smaller print run. Publishers still have an in with various players in distribution, but this counts for less and less.

• Publicity and Advertising. Forget it. One of the questions publishers want answered up front about an author is, "What sort of platform does he have?" Platform is one's social and professional footprint. Is the writer a public figure? Are his name and face recognized? If so, he has a platform. He'll need it. Publishers expect writers to run their own publicity campaigns. Publishers do not spend a lot advertising books except for those at the top of the bestseller list. Increasingly, the publicity staff for a book consists of the writer, period.

I see a lot of writers opting out of the big publishing model. Editing and design are things that patient writers can learn to do for themselves or, if need be, hire a freelancer to do. Distribution is still difficult with physical books if the writer wants to sell them in brick-and-mortar stores, but e-book distribution and selling trade paperback through Amazon is as easy as registering an online account. Since publishers expect writers to do their own publicity anyway, the writer loses nothing in that area by publishing independently.

Depending on the distribution channel, whether a direct e-mail newsletter of content, or an e-book, or a trade paperback printed on demand, the writer may get to keep anywhere from 25% to 100% of the retail cost of the text. That certainly beats the 8% or 10% offered by a traditional publisher. That larger margin means that the writer may be able to survive with the support of a fan base numbering only a few thousand readers even if a large proportion of sales is in low-priced e-books.

The main difficulty for the writer who self-distributes is finding those few thousand readers without the imprimatur of a big press...or the similar imprimatur of being shelved in a book store. The work may be good, but how does the writer attract a skeptical buyer? The big publisher's value as a gatekeeper is hard to replace. For the independent writer, the validation of recognizable writing awards may be much more important than it is for a writer working inside the traditional model.

Culturally, this new model is bound to result in a larger number of writers surviving with the support of a relatively small fan base. In this scenario, there will still be breakout books that become bestsellers and common cultural references...the books everyone is talking about. Some of those will be very fine books. Some will be crap. But they will arise out of a much larger pool of candidates than traditional publishing has ever been equipped to put forward.

More About Licenses

At the Frankfurt Book Fair a few years ago, I found myself talking to an editor from Iran. Her press was in Germany looking for materials to license, which I thought was interesting given the copyright situation in her country. Iranian composers, writers, and other artists were protected by Iranian copyright, but Iranian law offered no protection whatsoever for anything produced beyond the country's borders.

There are international treaties that protect copyright: the Berne Convention and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. There are copyright rules that govern members of the World Trade Organization. But Iran wasn't a signatory to any such treaties, was not a member of the WTO, and so was legally similar to the U.S.A. in the era of Charles Dickens. Poor Dickens. His books were enormously popular in the U.S., but American copyright law did not extend any protection to foreign writers. Every edition of every Dickens novel sold in America was a pirated edition. American pirates made their fortunes off him, but the only way the novelist found to profit from the popularity of his works was by giving an American lecture tour.

 

The only reason I knew anything about Iranian copyright law was that a few of my stories had been translated into Farsi. The translators didn't always contact me first to get permission. Instead, they would typically send me a contributor's copy of an Iranian magazine in which I had a story. I was flattered, but also a little irritated until one of them explained to me that they had the right to translate anything they pleased of mine without my permission or compensation. The fact that translators took the time to find my physical address and send me a magazine after the fact, usually at their own expense, was actually a very kind and collegial gesture. Legally, they owed me nothing.

 

Why, I asked the editor, was her company spending thousands of dollars to send her to Germany to buy reprint rights when, by Iranian law, she could just take whatever she wanted?

 

"But we have rights to sell as well," she explained. "It really doesn't matter what the laws are at home. If my company doesn't follow the rules of the rest of the world, then the world won't buy from us. We find that the best policy is to go along to get along."

In 2012, the Islamic Republic has finally indicated that it will begin to revise its copyright laws to conform to international standards.

 

 "We go along to get along." That is why, even in an era of rampant thievery, licensing will still be a model that compensates creators at least some of the time. As long as there are businesses that have intellectual content to sell --- textbook publishers, examination boards, movie studios --- there will be licensees willing to pay to include a story in a textbook, to write standardized test questions based on a story, or to make movies adapted from stories. Even if a story of mine is in wide, free distribution, someone whose business depends on their own intellectual property is going to treat my IP with respect, especially if failure to do so could jeopardize their entire operation. In film, for instance, the option to re-tell a writer's story is one of the cheapest expenditures. Why put the the entire expensive film at risk by avoiding a comparatively minor payment?

So although I have pretty much given up on licensing my work to large publishers, I haven't given up on licensing my work to specialized markets or creators in other media. That's one continuing trickle in my revenue stream. Unfortunately, it's a rather fickle trickle. It's a waste of time to seek out textbook writers, exam writers, or movie makers with my back list. Generally, they have to find me. So while selling such licenses has sometimes made a big difference in what sort of a year I've had financially, I can't really include such sales in a strategy for how I'm going to continue to earn my keep.

Classes of Property

 

What does a writer like me have to sell besides licenses to the big publishers? Here are some of the possible classes of literary property:

 

1. Licenses

Just because I don't think I'll be doing business with the big publishers any longer doesn't mean that I don't have rights to sell. Publishers of educational materials, small presses, magazines, overseas publishers, and film makers are among the licensees I regularly sell to now and expect to continue to sell to even in the changing environment for publishing.

 

2. Direct Sales

Rather than licensing the rights to my work to publishers, I can be a publisher myself, paying the costs of converting my manuscripts into books or ebooks and selling directly to readers or for-fee distributors.

 

3. Unique Artifacts

The hand-written manuscripts that I wrote about in my very first entry are an example of unique artifacts. In some art forms, such an artifact is the artist's primary product. A painter can sell his painting while retaining the right to license the image. A writer can sell a hand-written draft while retaining the rights to the text. A painting is obviously more desirable as an object than a manuscript, but there are ways to make a manuscript more interesting as an object to own.

 

4. Novelty

"Novelty" can mean many different things. What I mean here is "be the first kid on your block" novelty, the status of receiving something before others get it. If my stories are eventually offered far and wide in unauthorized editions, I can still offer at least a window of exclusivity right after I create something. When I first write a story, no one else has it. For a while, anyway, I'm the only source.

 

5. The Pleasures of Patronage

We know that some segments of the economy operate not on a material quid-pro-quo, but on the basis of generosity and charity. The ballet company can't survive on ticket sales alone, so they ask for patronage. The program distributed to the audience will list patrons by name, and this public recognition is the only material compensation for the donation. There is, of course, a non-material compensation, too: satisfaction and a variety of participation. If the art could not exist without patronage, then every patron is a co-creator.

 

6. Sponsorship

In addition to a list of patrons, that ballet program will likely feature ads. Any artist whose work attracts an audience has the option of selling advertising, whether that advertising is an actual ad or is a paid product placement in the art itself. (Of all the classes of property, this one may be the riskiest to sell. We're all saturated with advertising already. In some cases, potential patrons will give money to an artist to keep advertising out of the art.)

 

7. Affiliation 

Artists may be admired for their mastery, and their admirers may be willing to pay something to be affiliated with those admired qualities. To be affiliated with the artist, some fans might buy membership in a fan club, a t-shirt featuring the artist, or the right to collaborate with the artist on a new work of art.

 

8. Performances

I have already noted the changing market model for musicians. Recorded music is a de facto free or nearly-free commodity now. For musicians, recorded music is essentially a publicity tool that recruits audiences for their live concerts. The concert income is what enables musicians to keep making music. Writers can also charge for attendance at readings and lectures. Mostly, we don't. Usually an author has to have a substantial following already to have any hope of selling tickets. Most of us have trouble drawing an audience for even a free performance. But it's also true that an audience places more value on what they pay for than what they get for free, so paid performances might actually be a bigger draw than free ones, particularly if they were seen as highly rehearsed and well produced.

 

There may be other classes of literary goods that I haven't thought to mention here. The important point is that there is a lot more that the writer might sell than the license to reproduce a text in a book or magazine.

 

In future entries, I'll detail some of my own experiences so far with different models for living by writing, and I'll outline my future plans.

 

Here at the beginning of this blog, I've written daily entries. I'm unlikely to be able to maintain this pace, so I'm aiming for two entries a week from here on. I absolutely welcome comments and questions.

What Don't I Have to Sell?

From my teens, when I first started to contemplate being a professional fiction writer, through my forties, when ebooks arrived in theory but still weren't mainstream, the model for a literary career was fixed. The writer wrote. If the writer wrote well enough, major publishers would license rights to the writer's creations and do the work (much of it invisible to the writer) to get the novels and stories into the hands of paying readers.

And there are still some writers for whom this model still works. But such writers are a smaller and smaller portion of the profession. For the most part, these are the writers who have become such cultural icons that their names are widely known. These few best-selling writers sell in such numbers that even though pirates re-sell or give away their books prodigiously, the number of sales are so vast that the writers can easily keep writing.

For most of us, though, best-sellerdom is not in the cards. At one time, a model that was open to us was the mid-list career. We could write books that sold reasonably well to a smaller audience. Most successful writers fit into this category, never breaking into the best-seller lists, but selling enough copies to make a living. As a writer mostly of short stories, I could survive on a parallel path by selling individual stories to mid-list anthologies or to magazines and occasionally licensing the rights to a collection.

Publishing started changing in the 1980s, and a big part of the change was a new attitude about mid-list writers. Publishing houses that had been small, independent businesses, often family owned, were increasingly bought out by corporations. As family-owned businesses, or the legacy of family-owned businesses, publishing houses brought modest profits and significant social prestige to their owners. The new corporate owners focused more intently on the bottom line.

The corporations noticed (quite reasonably), that it cost as much to edit, and publish a mid-list book as a best-seller. It made perfect sense to try to publish fewer mid-list books and more best-sellers. The mid-list was increasingly viewed as strictly a training ground for new writers who were best-sellers-in-waiting. Publishers knew that it was unreasonable to think that a writer's first book would be a best-seller. There was bound to be a learning curve, and it might take a couple books to build an audience. But publishers made it harder and harder for a writer to have a mid-list career. The mid-list was where a writer might work for the first two or three titles on the way to the Big Book. And if the best-seller didn't come? Then that writer had a track record as "not a best-seller," which meant that the big publishers would rather try some other fresh face who might be the next John Grisham rather than publish another title from a writer who definitely wasn't selling like Grisham.

The upshot was that friends of mine who were regularly selling ten thousand copies of their novels were not offered contracts for their fifth or sixth books. Ten thousand readers might adore these books, but that was not enough of an audience for the big publishers to bother with.

If anything, that desire to concentrate on only the biggest of Big Name Authors is now increasing as ebooks put downward pressure on book prices. The big publishers need big profits, ideally concentrated in fewer titles produced with less in-house labor.

So my list of things that I have to sell, and to whom, starts with a negative. I do not have properties that I can sell to a big publisher. I look at my work, at the popular tastes and publishing preferences that make up best-sellerdom, and I don't see a plausible match, especially since my favorite form is the short-short story. Traditional publishing isn't for me.

Tomorrow: Classes of Property

How Bad Is It, Really?

The first thing I have to acknowledge about the state of publishing is that everything is unstable now. Among the things that have been on my mind lately are the following. First, the negatives:

• Ebook piracy is rampant on the U.K. version of eBay in part because eBay has weak policies. EBay does not require sellers to disclose the contents of omnibus book collections, so rights owners can't just look at the listing and see if their work is being sold as part of the package. It takes a lot of leg work, even to the point of buying a copy of the omnibus, to find out if the contents are legal or not. Then it takes time to shut down a seller, and more sellers pop up like Whac-a-Mole moles.

  
  No moles were whacked in the making of this illustration.
  

•  Ebook piracy is also common on the U.K. eBay because British copyright law is laughably weak. The infringed party can only sue to recover the pirate's profits and has to pay legal costs.  And U.K. pirates sell internationally, so buyers in the U.S. can buy pirated copies of my work from the U.K.

•  One of my friends is trying to offer her backlist of stories on Amazon as ebooks, but Amazon crawls the web, finds pirated editions of her work, and tells her she can't offer it for sale because it's available for free somewhere.

• Traditional publishing houses have high overhead expenses, and the downward pricing pressure of ebooks is likely to mean that they can't sell books at a high enough price to stay in business, at least not using their current business models. Those publishing houses have already been cutting their operations to the bone for years. Traditional publishing and bookselling are severely endangered, and I don't expect most major houses, chain stores, or big bookstores to be in business ten or fifteen years from now.

 On the other hand, I see some positive signs:

• Ebook piracy is not rampant on the U.S. version of eBay, in large part because American copyright law is very, very strong. There are statutory penalties for copyright infringement that award high sums per infringement to the plaintiff, to the point that if some of the sellers that infringe my work on eBay from the U.K. tried to do the same from the U.S., I'd be eligible to collect whatever big assets they hold. I'm talking about their house, their car, and the contents of their bank accounts.

• I don't see any signs that U.K. copyright law will be reformed to offer statutory damages, but the U.K. is instituting a small-claims court for Intellectual Property cases where it will be inexpensive to file for small-scale damages. When these courts are up and running, pirates such as those on eBay may find that writers are motivated to be the first in line to claim any and all profits the pirates have made. That is, pirates will be making themselves into targets of opportunity for any infringed author who is short on cash. (That's most of us!)

• My friend who can't sell her work on Amazon because of pirates can subscribe to the services of Muso, a company with software that can do some surprising things. I don't know exactly how it works, but for $15 a month, Muso will use the same search engines as someone looking to download a writer's books or stories for free. Muso identifies all the instances it finds and lets the rights holder identify unauthorized uses. Once Muso knows that a use is unauthorized, it notifies the ISP with the offending server, waits half an hour, and then removes the offending file. Legally.

• Traditional publishers have been asking writers to take over more and more of the effort of publicity, the hard work of finding the right readers, to the point where a lot of writers are beginning to wonder why they have to do so much publicity work for a small share of a book's revenue. The same ebook pricing dynamic that is probably going to kill big publishers is making it possible for writers to write, publicize, and sell their work for a larger share of the sales price.

The upshot is that I can see the market for my self-published backlist and new books being quite profitable in the coming years, or else being a complete bust.

Without a trust fund to draw on, I need to make money from my writing, both my new work and my backlist, and I need to succeed whether or not books sold in bookstores or by Amazon are a viable revenue stream. So how can I do it?

More tomorrow!

 Is this the future of making money as a writer? One of the most popular higher-price rewards from my Kickstarter campaign for a new story collection was this: A handwritten manuscript of the first draft of a story, along with a printed copy of the final version and the pen with which the first draft was written.

 The case is re-purposed from a set of silver coins from the Franklin Mint. I painted the exterior, then created a felt liner with a bed shaped to receive the pen. Here my assistant, Malva, is verifying that the pen can be used as a toy as well as a writing instrument.

 I have started this blog because I've been fighting the piracy of ebooks...and wondering if there was any point in doing so. It's so easy to steal intellectual property now that I'm beginning to wonder if electronic text will have any commercial value. Will it be possible for writers of books and stories to make a living from their work in the future? Musicians have been able to move away from a model of earning from record sales to a model of giving concerts. But it doesn't seem likely that writers would be able to charge money for oral performances of their writing.

Publishing is changing, and with it, the notion of the monetary value of texts. People do still enjoy reading, but they may be less and less willing to pay for books when they can get a pirated edition of any text they want in electronic form for free.

I have started this blog as a place to post my thoughts about where writers might go from here, and particularly where I intend to go from here.