Duotrope's Digest, Three Years On

Helping the headless since August 2005.

Somewhat over three years ago now, I wrote a post titled No More Free Duotrope's to commiserate the fact that Duotrope's Digest - self-described as a "service for writers that offers an extensive, searchable database of current fiction, poetry, and non-fiction markets, a calendar of upcoming deadlines, submissions trackers, and useful statistics" - was moving from a donation-based model to a subscription-only one.  I've been a user of, and a fan of, Duotrope's for more years now than I can be bothered to count.  But having recently resubscribed for one more, and with doubts that I'll do so again come 2016, I thought that this might be the time to come back to the question I posed a third of a decade ago: is Duotrope's a good enough, vital enough service to warrant the $50 a year it currently costs?

Inevitably, the answer is "yes and no" - but to that I may as well add straight away that, for me, it's now more no than yes.  I said at the time that $50 was too expensive and lo and behold, it's still too expensive, a fact I'm feeling more now that writing is my only source of income.  The thing is this: I'm not paying for the submission tracker because I have a spreadsheet that does that, nor for the calendar of deadlines because again that's easy to do myself.  I'm certainly not paying for those useful statistics, since they're rarely terribly useful - but also for other reasons I'll come back to.  What I'm personally paying my $50 for is the database and the market updates, and unless those provide me with sales well in excess of $50 to markets I wouldn't (and couldn't) have found out about otherwise, there's just no way I can justify the expense.

There's a reasonable argument that 2014 scraped past that line, with sales to three anthologies I found out about from Duotrope's listings.  But when I stop to analyze that, the picture quickly looks less rosy: it works out that I paid them about 14% of what I earned because of them, which is only marginally less than the rate an agent would charge.  And if all an agent did was present me with a list of potential markets and say "knock yourself out," I wouldn't be paying them a thing.

Perhaps, in a sense, that's both an unfair and an overly restrictive yardstick to judge Duotrope's by.  Just because I'm not using all those other features, that's not to say they don't have value.  Nevertheless, it seems to me that the moment a service becomes commercial, it opens itself up to such criticisms; clearly, most of us don't pay for something for no reason.  The point where a service begins charging, in fact, raises a whole host of expectations.  Three years ago I said that "maybe I'm wrong, and that extra cash will see Duotrope's develop into something even more marvelous" and I think what bothers me particularly is that that's exactly what hasn't happened.  This may to some extent be a failing of memory, but I'm fairly sure that, but for a few aesthetic differences, the Duotrope's Digest of 2015 is largely the Duotrope's Digest of 2012.  The added income appears to have done little but keep it ticking over, which feels unambitious from a site that once upon a time improved on an almost daily basis.  In fact, more and more, it seems like a service stuck in stasis.  It frustrates me, for example, that they're yet to amend their criteria of professional markets in line with the SFWA's not-that-recent revision; I realise the SFWA don't run the world, but since the Duotrope's definition for both short fiction and novels is exactly the same as the SFWA's old one, it seems a safe bet that that's where they got it from.

Oh, one last grumble, while we're here.  An obvious point of contention that the owners of Duotrope's acknowledged when they moved to the paying model was that anything which reduced the size of their user base would inevitably affect the quality of their data.  The point has been repeatedly made that this isn't the case; Duotrope's even has a specific page called "state of the stats" that exists to deflect such criticisms.  However, it also has a page that shows which markets have registered the most responses, and that tells a somewhat different story.  In retrospect, it's one that should have been obvious: the quality of statistics for markets now depends greatly on how much they pay.  For Clarkesworld, with over a thousand reports made, they're probably rock solid.  For smaller, lower-paying markets - or for markets that don't pay at all - it's a safe bet they're considerably less reliable now than they were three and a half years ago.

Since I don't feel entirely good about sticking the boot into a service I've used devotedly for years now, I should finish by saying that at its heart Duotrope's Digest remains a profoundly excellent product. It's effective, intuitive, easy on the eye and has been constantly useful to me over the years; I have no idea how I'd have managed without it.  And while I don't think that directly charging the user base was the right choice when it came to monetizing the site, it's not a service I actually begrudge paying for; I was, in fact, one of the few people who used to donate regularly back in the day.  All I'm really saying is, Duotrope's is great, but it's not indispensable.  And for me it's now too expensive for what it actually provides.  If I'm going to be still using it in another year from now, it will need to be a damn sight cheaper - I'd posit $36 as a reasonable charge - or a damn sight more essential.

I sincerely hope it ends up being one or the other, because if I'm forced to give up on Duotrope's Digest, I'm going to miss it.

Third Sale to Pseudopod

Yes!  Pseudopod have indeed joined the tiny but worthy pantheon of markets to have accepted more than one or two of my submissions, having just now followed their purchases of Stockholm Syndrome and Prisoner of Peace with my zombie-story-with-almost-no-zombies-in-it Twitcher.   Yup, very few zombies indeed, but an awful lot of bird watching - as the title suggests - and no that's not a metaphor or a crude pun or something, it really is absolutely a zombie story about bird watching.  Possibly the first and quite probably the last, but I wrote it and Pseudopod have accepted it and that, as the saying goes, is that.

Anyway, what was especially nice about this particular sale is that it ended a quite staggering run of rejections.  I'm sure I've discussed this before*, but there are times when spells of short story rejections (and by the same measure, I suppose, spells of acceptances) seem to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.  Thanks to the might stats-providing majesty of Duotrope's Digest I can say with confidence that my acceptance ratio towards the end of October was above 13%, the highest it's ever been, and that nearly six months and maybe sixty submissions later it was sitting at less than half that.

Now experience has taught me not to worry too much and that it all balances out in the end, but what I find myself wondering is, how does this happen?  How can you be one minute comfortably selling a story a month and then going for six months without a sniff of interest?  I can think of any number of factors, but most of them would depend on me - the types of stories I was submitting, the markets I picked, the regularity with which I sent work out - and as far as I can tell my behaviour is fairly consistent.  To the best of my knowledge I haven't spent the last six months submitting crappy work or picking wildly inappropriate markets or accidentally sending out my shopping list.

Maybe the problem is that I'm looking for micropatterns when I should be looking for macropatterns.  Maybe I'm just a crappy judge of my own work.  (I'm not.)  Maybe the universe is a crazy, random place and the publishing industry is an even more crazy, random place and we're all just like dust motes in a beam of sunlight. 


No!  I believe in order, damn it, and there must be some logic here.  There must be!

But for the life I me I can't see it...




* I did and it was here.

No More Free Duotrope's

I have very mixed feelings about Duotrope's Digest's recently announced decision to move from a free / donation funded model to a subscriber based model at the beginning of next year.

On the one hand, Duotrope's is a superb product.  For those unfamiliar with it, (and if you are, and you write, you're shooting yourself in the foot by not going to take a look right now), it's basically a regularly updated, searchable database of publishing markets, accompanied by buckets of useful statistical information and an integrated submissions tracker.  But any such simplification does Duotrope's no justice; a huge amount of thought and effort has been put into it over the years, and these days it's an invaluable resource for the writer of any level.  Truthfully, I have no idea how people used to sell short fiction before it came along; I know I would have struggled far more than I have without it.  It's staff are tireless, it's content is phenomenal, it's listings are for the most part reliable, and in its current form I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

But ...  then there's that other hand.  Because as of now, the Duotrope's team are asking for a minimum of $50 a year, and $50 is a lot of money to some people.  And by some people I mean writers - members of one of the lowest paid professions on the planet, whose average earnings are generally more comical than impressive.  Now I'm not suggesting that right now I can't personally afford fifty bucks, but there have been times since I started trying to write for money that it would have been a genuine stretch.  In my first year of trying to sell my short fiction, for example, I earned the princely sum of $10; in my second, a whopping $220.  Take off $50 a year from those amounts and I wouldn't have been left with a whole lot.  In fact, since the vast majority of markets that Duotrope's is helping to publicize are non-paying, pay token sums, or worse, charge authors to submit, the service is unlikely to pay for itself for many of its users.

There's also, as other people have pointed out, a more fundamental problem here.  Once the charges come into effect, it's a safe assumption that a large part of Duotrope's' user base will vanish overnight.  Since one of the main services they're offering is statistical data and since those statistics are likely to be much less representative with such a shrunken pool of contributors, they're effectively asking to be paid for a service that's inferior to what they've been giving away for free.  This isn't really anyone's fault, of course, but I can't help feeling that more thought could have gone in to how this will work.

So ... mixed feelings.  I don't begrudge Duotrope's Digest a reasonable payment for their service, but I'm not one hundred percent convinced that $50 a year is a reasonable payment.  Even if it is, I doubt that it will make them competitive in the current climes, and so their user base - and inevitably the value of their content - will take a steep decline.  In short, while I sympathize with the end, I'm not sure this is the right means to it, and I have an unpleasant feeling that this may be the beginning of the end for one of my all time favourite websites.  Then again, maybe I'm wrong, and that extra cash will see Duotrope's develop into something even more marvelous.  Either way, as one of the people who has routinely donated to help fund the site, I suspect I'll be stumping up my $50 for the first year ... I certainly owe them that much.

Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 9: Personality

Back in the day, before all the madness of a three book novel deal came along, one of my chief pleasures as a writer was getting to muck around, trying odd new things and taking risks, safe in the knowledge that the worst that could happen would be that I'd end up with an unpublishable short story - or that I'd inadvertently sell something that by all rights was too silly to see the light of day.*  There are many sucky aspects to being an amateur writer, but that's not to say it doesn't have its virtues too, and surely one of those is that you can treat storytelling as a playground rather than a workplace.  Want to write a second person romance, or a fairy tale where the prince is a weregoat and the princess is a serial killer?  Hey, why not?  Possibly no one but your mum will ever read it, but at least you might pick up some tricks for the next one, and - if you happen to really take some risks or go all out on the crazy - you might even end up with something special.

My impression is that all of that holds true for the small press too, at least in most cases.  Obviously as a small press editor who hopes one day to be a professional editor, you might not want to make too many embarrassing mistakes or take too many unnecessary risks.  But it seems to me that those editors, the ones who are primarily interested in working their way up to bigger things, are in the minority; the majority of small press editors want to be exactly that, and to enjoy the freedoms that it entails.

Only, what exactly does that freedom entail?

It strikes me that the least interesting thing a small press market can be is a cut price version of a professional market.  Without naming names, I can think of a handful of webzines that are a lot like, say, Strange Horizons, only with lower production standards, less quality control and reliably weaker fiction.  That's not to say those markets are worthless; at the very least they offer a ground for learning writers on their way up.  But without the obligations of needing to reach a large readership, surely there are more exciting things to do than what someone else is always going to do better?

Point being, one of the values the small press is uniquely well placed to deliver is character.  In fact, character is high on the list of things a good small press market can't afford to be without.  I've touched on this in other posts, but what I'm really talking about this time around is stuff like developing a distinctive editorial voice, looking for themes that no one else is touching, trying to keep authors whose work you like coming back and representing all those choices with a distinctive visual tone - trying, in short, to make something that has a bit of your unique identity in it and so is unlike anything else out there.

It's a hard thing to get right, just as figuring out how much of your personality should make it into writing or blogging or any other kind of interaction takes time.  It's easy to slip into creating an ego product; in both writing and editing, it's vital to love what you do, but equally important to keep a small part of your mind concentrated on the question of whether other people will be able to love it too.  Still, like I said, it's completely necessary.  If you need proof, just keep an eye on a site like Duotrope's Digest, see how many cookie-cutter webzines are announced, with similar names, similar designs, asking for similar stories - and see how many of them are still around in six months' time.

A few words of caution, though.  Like anything, you can take this stuff too far.  It's always struck me as unfair, for example, when editors come up with themes so wilfully obscure that writers are obliged to write stories that can't possibly be sold elsewhere.  It might seem like a great idea to put together an anthology of Lovecraftian horror featuring anthropomorphised soft toys, and maybe it is - in fact, now that I think about it, that would be the best anthology ever - but it you receive a hundred submissions and accept only twenty, that's eighty authors who've put time and energy into work that stands no chance of seeing the light of day.  Too many small press editors don't seem to even consider things like that, but routinely wasting people's time is hardly a great way to make friends.  Similarly, there's a fine line between exploring interesting niches and being needlessly obscure, and the latter doesn't exactly tend to drag in readers.

Which, I suppose, is only to make the obvious point that having a distinctive editorial character means having a good - or at least interesting and entertaining - editorial character.  Let's just take rule eleven, "not acting like a jerk," as read, okay?

Next week: Part 10!  No one ever believed it would happen!  Or much cared!  But it will ... oh yes, it will...



* Which, in fairness, did happen at least once.  I'm thinking here of the weasel-filled barrel of crazy that was My Friend Fishfinger by Daisy Aged 7, as published by those adorable loons at Andromeda Spaceways.

Some Theories out in Encounters #4

I just got word that the new issue of Encounters is out from Black Matrix Publishing, with my story Some Theories Regarding the Current Crisis nestled somewhere in its nether-pages.

Normally at this point I'd say that I can't actually comment on the magazine because I haven't seen a print copy, and while that second bit is true - I believe it literally just came out today - the first bit isn't.  That's because Black Matrix make canny use of some neat technology to let readers sample the first few pages on their site.  (This tool, by the way, is something I've seen nowhere else, and I'm bewildered that more magazines haven't adopted it.)  So I can say with confidence that Encounters is one of the best-presented small press 'zines out there, with an emphasis on clarity and readability (something else I'm often puzzled by the lack of, even in the professional publishing world) and some nice, eye-catching artwork.  I was also impressed by Guy Kenyon's editorial, the gist of which is that he wants to put out a magazine full of good fiction and get it read by as many people as possible.  Needless to say, that's pretty much exactly what I want to hear from an editor who publishes my work.

Of course, these are all things that Guy's been getting right since day one, and pretty much the reasons I submitted to him in the first place.  I've mentioned many of them before, but I figure they warrant repeating - one of the reasons why being a discussion that I touch on at the end of this post.

Before that, though, a few notes about Some Theories Regarding the Current Crisis.  I've mentioned the gist before, I believe, (think atmosphere-driven sci-fi with an emphasis on spooky weirdness), but it occurred to me a few days again that I've never credited Alasdair Stuart's considerable input.  Some Theories was actually written for a planned shared-world antho that Al was cooking up with the York writing group he hosts, and much of the background (as well as a fair share of the weird) is his contribution.  After I left York I rewrote it to help it stand on its own two snow-shoe'd feet, and of course I'm far too mean to consider giving Al a co-author credit or anything like that, so I'll settle for pointing out what an excellent writer (and human being) he is, that he has more good ideas in the tip of his pinky than I do in my whole damn head, and that some of them went towards making Some Theories what it is today.

That being, spookily weird.  I said that, right?


Lastly, something that readers may possibly find interesting: In the early days of Black Matrix Press, author John Scalzi wrote a blog post castigating them for their low pay rates and Guy Kenyon responded on his own blog.  This is a subject that I've written on quite extensively myself here, and one I find both interesting and under-discussed within the industry.  I've been thinking a lot about the small press lately, and what I'd like to see it doing in a perfect world, and I plan to put some of those thoughts down here when I get a spare few minutes.  In the meantime, I find John and Guy's comments interesting because they sum up so well the fors and againsts of what Duotrope's Digest calls token-paying markets.