10 Reasons You Should be Submitting to Digital Fiction Publishing

Anyone who's been paying any attention to my work over the last couple of years will notice that I've become rather attached to Canadian small press Digital Fiction Publishing: Digital salvaged my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories last year after Spectral Press went belly up, and the back end of 2016 saw the release of The Black River Chronicles: Level One, which I co-created with DFP head honcho Mike Wills; a sequel will be arriving before the year is out.  On top of that, I've lost track of just how many Digital anthologies I've been in.  (I mean, not because it's that many, just because my memory's rubbish.  But it's definitely more than a few.)

Obviously I consider Digital worth sending my work to; I wouldn't keep doing it otherwise.  And, in the wake of a bit of terrifically good news from them, I thought now might be the time to explain why, and to list some reasons that all genre writers should be jumping at the opportunity to push work their way.

1) They Pay For Reprint Rights

A cent a word, to be exact, which seems to be about the market rate - though the actual deal is rather better than that, as we'll come to in a minute.  But, right here, let's just acknowledge that there are very few markets that even accept reprints, let alone who trade in them exclusively.

2) Their Terms Are (More Than) Reasonable

Having been in since the beginning, I've seen a few iterations of the DFP contract, and it's only got better for writers with each version.  You don't often see a publisher bending over this far backwards to be honest and fair.

3) They Make Your Work Feel Special

There's a fair chance your story will be released as a baby e-book all of its own, as well as part of an anthology, and these are reliably gorgeous, as the examples scattered about hopefully illustrate.  Failing that, DFP is now edging into hardback releases, which are looking downright stunning.

4) They Publish Good Books

I'm a little biased on this front, for various reasons, but Digital have been putting out some very good product since the beginning.  I'm up to date with nearly all of the DFP collections I've had stories in, and I've definitely enjoyed the bulk of what I've read.  (The one novel I've found time for, Terry Madden's Three Wells of the Sea, was terrific too.) 

5) I'm Slush-Reading For Them

Okay, so maybe not a reason to submit as such, but if you send in a story for the Digital fantasy imprint once it reopens, or for the currently open Hic Sunt Dracones anthology of dragon stories, then there's a fair chance I'll be reading it.  And, if it's really good, I'll most likely recommend it for publication.

6) They Have Fast Response Times

Like, really fast for fantasy submissions, because I'm too obsessive-compulsive to let subs sit for long.  But averages across the various imprints range from a couple of weeks to at worst a couple of months, which is pretty damn good in my experience.

7) Their Books Get Attention

First Contact, for example, the original Digital Fiction Publishing collection, is up to fifty-seven reviews on Amazon US; I've been in a fair few anthologies, and not many get that kind of notice.  But then, that's at least in part because...

8) They Promote

 Right from the beginning, Digital has been pushing its books hard, with copious amounts of both time and money.  So if your works ends up in one of them, the odds are good that people will actually get to read it. 

9) They Pay Royalties

Nearly last up, the biggie, and the reason I decided to put this article together in the first place: have work published by Digital and you'll get a share in the profits from every single
  Digital book.  Once those shares exceed your initial payment, you get more money - and keep getting more money.  I know this because I just got my first royalty payment, and it was for a solid chunk of cash.  As far as I can tell, this basically makes Digital a co-op, and how marvelously insane is the notion of a co-op publisher?  If the list consisted of this one reason alone then that should be enough.

10) I don't have a point 10

Though I'm sure I could think of one if I really tried.  Um.  Their website is really shiny?  But, okay, not a reason to submit, as such.  Okay, how's this?  Digital even have the decency to pay their slush-readers, so the more submissions, the more money I make, and just maybe if you and I run into each other I'll have sufficient pennies saved up to buy you a drink.

Or, more likely, I'll buy more nineties anime to review here on the blog.  So hey, win, win.

So, look, Digital is open right now for that Hic Sunt Dracones anthology I mentioned, as well as for a second volume of horror stories by female authors, Killing it Softly 2.  You can find the guidelines for both of those here.  And most likely the regular fantasy, horror, science-fiction and flash fiction imprints will be opening for submissions soon.  Keep an eye out!

Short Story News, June 2016

Let's start with the big news: the hardback of The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories is out very soon from NewCon Press, I've put my illegible squiggle to all 100 copies (well, 98, it's weird to sign your own contributor copies) and more to the point I've seen it and, holy hell, this book is stunning.  Between Duncan Kay's phenomenal artwork and the work Ian Whates has put into making SitM the bestest, shiniest thing it could possibly hope to be, I'm overjoyed with how this collection has turned out.  That it also contains some of the finest short fiction I've produced seems almost trivial compared with just how lovely the whole book looks.  And feels, for that matter - because even the paper is outrageously posh.

We'll be officially launching at this year's Edgelit, but the actual release date is likely to be a little sooner than that - or, rather than wait, you can pre-order your copy here.   (As ever, if you can't stretch to the deluxe hardback, there's the paperback and e-book already available from Digital Fiction Publishing.)

After that, the next biggest piece of news is surely the fact that my story Great Black Wave is up to read (and listen to) in the latest issue of Nightmare.  This may well be the best podcast of any of my work, Stefan Rudnicki narrates extremely well indeed, so I'd start there, personally, and avoid the strain of reading all of those pesky words.  Either way, though, I'm proud of this story; it was a tough write on a difficult subject.  Great Black Wave follows a bomb disposal unit in a very near future Afghanistan, as what begins as a routine operation turns into something much darker and stranger.  That meant a fair bit of research - which I talk about in the accompanying interview - followed by a descent into some weird mental places.  And also Arcade Fire references, because why not?  At any rate - and as always - I would recommend picking up this month's Nightmare, it's a terrific magazine, and isn't that cover just about the most horrible thing ever?  Yeah, I think so.


In other release news, I have a new story out from Digital Fiction, in solo e-book format, with the anthology no doubt soon to follow.  This time around it's Black Horticulture, my stab at writing a conventional fantasy story, except in so much as it's mostly about magical gardening.  So ... um ... maybe not that conventional at all.  Anyway, you can pick it on Amazon US here and Amazon UK here, at an exceedingly reasonable price.  Oh, and I've agreed to do a bit of slush reading for Digital, who are currently open for previously published fantasy, SF and horror submissions.  So if you send something in, there's a one in three chance that I'll be the one to read it.  You have been warned!

Finally, on the anthology front, there's a table of contents now up for Far Orbit: Last Outpost.  And, with the Mysterion anthology due to arrive soon, there are extracts of stories up on the website, including one for my story Golgotha.  You can find that, along with other extracts and pre-order details, here.

Black Horticulture Up at Abyss and Apex

Didn't these blog posts used to have imaginative and silly titles?  Oh well.  I suddenly seem to have a lot of stories coming out in a relatively small space of time, (okay, three in as many weeks, if things hold to schedule), and I'm a bear of relatively little brain at the best of times, so let's go with stating simple facts this time around: my story Black Horticulture is now available at top genre webzine Abyss and Apex.

Reading through it again for the final edit, it occurred to me that Black Horticulture was my one great stab at twee fantasy.  Now, I don't mean that in any way as self-criticism; some brilliant work has been done in the field of what I think of as twee fantasy.  I would, for example, lump Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions in there, and that's a completely wonderful novel.  Sometimes tweeness doesn't equal badness.  Sometimes it means charming and perhaps a little innocent and unapologetically fun and exciting.  Those are definitely the qualities I was aiming at with Black Horticulture.

Well, those and lots of crazy, garden-related violence.  Because after all, even Three Hearts had a guy lusting after a were-swan.

Black Horticulture is free to read right now.  But there will come a time, not so distantly in the future, when it will only be available to subscribers.  So if you'd like to read it, you should probably get onto it now, or else subscribe to Abyss and Apex. Or, you know, both.

Black is the New Black

I mentioned last week that my key to successfully getting short stories accepted at the moment seems to be just to send out the same story, Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams, out over and over again, since it got picked up by two different markets within a week of each other.

Recent events have made me reconsider this rule slightly.  From now on, I'll only be sending out either Caretaker or tales that have the word "black" in the title.  Reason being, having recently had Black Sun accepted by Digital Science Fiction, I've now sold Black Horticulture to long-standing, consistently great webzine Abyss and Apex.

According to my dubious records, Abyss and Apex was the thirteenth market I ever sent to, way back in early 2006.  Since then, I've been hammering them with submissions on a regular basis, at a rate of roughly three a year.  So all told, it only took me sixteen attempts to find one they really liked!  Sometimes determination really does pay off.  Then again, sometimes they call it "stalking" and throw you in jail for it; I guess telling one situation from the other is just one of those life lessons we all have to learn sooner or later.

Anyway, Black Horticulture's kind of a special story, and I'm really glad it was the one A & A finally caved on.  In 2007 or 2008, I wrote a small handful of tales where, for the first time, I really felt like I'd nailed something, even if I wasn't completely sure what it was or what to do with it.  Black Horticulture was one of those.  If I remember rightly, the others were  Rindelstein's Monsters, which ended up in Comet Press's The Death Panel anthology, In the Service of the Guns, which landed in Space and Time, and Dancing in the Winter Rooms, coming up in Electric Velocipede.  So they've all done good, and Black Horticulture is no exception.  If it's taken a bit longer than the others, it's because - in another one of those crucial life lesson things - I discovered that sometimes you don't have to start with five pages of back story covering your hero's entire life from birth, you can just tuck that information away in a couple of lines in dialogue.  Eureka!


Right.  I'd better get back to work on my new story.  It's called Black Caretaker in the Black Garden of Black Dreams - the uplifting tale of one 1940s African-American groundskeeper's struggle to defend the baseball stadium where he works as a nightwatchman from interdimensional aliens.  Seriously, this one's gonna make me rich...