Everything Must Go?

Something me and my writer mate Rafe McGregor often used to debate was the question of whether a writer should ever give their work away for free.  At the time, and perhaps partly due to a bad early experience, I was very much against it: even an imperfect story still amounts to hours, perhaps tens of hours work, and I didn't see how an editor could expect to receive the fruit of all that labour for nothing.  Rafe was more philosophical about the whole thing.  It can often be a huge slog getting a story hooked up with a paying market, and then the amount in question is unlikely to be life-changing.  Why sit on a story for yet more months, or attempt yet another polish, when said story could be out there being read?

We debated it back and forth and, buoyed by a few good sales, I decided on a hard-line stance - I'd sell work for semi-pro rates, (that is, at least a cent a word), or not at all.  Writing, like any business, requires a certain amount of financial investment - stamps, postage, paper and ink, and additional contributor copies don't come free - and even with those good sales, I was barely making a profit.  So why should publishers get away with the argument that they couldn't pay me because they wouldn't be able to break even if they did?  Nope, editors could pay or they could not publish my work.

Editors chose the latter.  There followed the worst dry spell I've had for sales since the day I started submitting.  And as the months edged by, inevitably, I began to question my position.  Might it not be better to get something, anything out, then to go the rest of my life without ever seeing my name in print again?

Needless to say (since it's obvious from some of the things I've had out recently) I changed my mind.  I realised that payment can come in more forms than just the financial, especially when the difference is only one of a few dollars.  I'm not, after all, writing to get rich at this stage.  If I was I'd be an idiot.  I'm writing to build a career, to train myself to be a better writer, to understand the industry, to bring myself to the attention of editors, and if I can possibly make a little pocket change on the back of that then that's great.  But I want to get my work read.  I don't want to kill a story that I'm sure people will enjoy because it's out of line with current fashions.  I want to enjoy what I'm doing, and part of that enjoyment comes from having work published. 

Moving into 2010, I suspect another rethink is on the way.  I'm pleased with how the Kings of the Realm anthology turned out, for example, but having to buy my own contributor copy from the US left such a dint in my wallet that I'll think seriously before submitting to a non-paying antho again.  Also, I've shifted the vast majority of my back catalogue over the last few months, and am writing less and less short stories as my focus shifts more to novels. 

So, for the record, here are a few alternate forms of payment I've accepted or would have considered over the last few months:

- Having someone podcast my story. 
- Having someone illustrate my story, particularly when that story's a comic script.
- Having my story appear in a well put together magazine or collection full of work by writers whose work I enjoy.
- Having my story edited by someone who really knows what they're doing.
- Having my story reprinted so it can find more readers.

All of these things can, and have been, as or more satisfying than cold hard cash.  And here seems as good a place as any to mention Stephen Theaker, who's published my stories in both Theaker's Quarterly Fiction and the British Fantasy Society's Dark Horizons, who's written convincingly on this very subject, and who I suspect I'll keep submitting to simply because he's a pleasure to work with and I always enjoy the magazines he puts out. 

Finally, a note as to what I'd strictly avoid. I've come to think that there's very little to be gained from any magazine that takes my work and sticks it on their website without paying me.  There are some great paying webzines out there, and I've been fortunate enough to work with some of the better ones, but I find it hard to believe that readers will flock away from venues like Flash Fiction Online and Chiaroscuro to ones where the editors have so little faith in the work they're presenting that they refuse to pay even token amounts for it.  The same goes for non-paying electronic anthologies.  I don't doubt that many of the people behind these have the best of intentions, or that they genuinely mean it when they promise to bring writers exposure, but experience has led me to think that those promises are nevertheless pretty hollow. 

Anyway, if anyone has further thoughts on this question, or an approach that radically differs from mine, then I'd be interested to hear about it...

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction # 29

As of the start of last week, Theaker's Quarterly Fiction # 29 is now out to buy in print from Lulu, or to download for that best of all prices, absolutely nothing.

Somewhere towards the middle is my short fantasy story Imaginary Prisons. One of my great bugbears with fantasy (and increasingly, with bad sci-fi too) is the use of destiny and prophecy to paper over the cracks of otherwise horribly implausible stories. Imaginary Prisons is me poking a bit of fun at that whole idea, and asking some of the questions that have always bothered me about it. Like, okay, things are pretty straightforward if you've only got one prophecy to follow - but what happens if there are two, and they don't match up? Or three? Or maybe half a dozen? And what if the dark lord decides to come up with a prophecy of his own, where the hero gets it in the neck before he even sets a foot out the door?

Anyway, this is a nice publication for me for a couple of other reasons. This is my second time working with editor Stephen Theaker, who accepted my story The Tyranny of Thangrind the Cruel for the British Fantasy Society's magazine Dark Horizons last year. It's also my first appearance alongside John Hall, who I've been fortunate enough to meet on a couple of occasions, and my second time beside friend and crime novelist extraordinaire Rafe McGregor.
In short, it's sort of the magazine equivalent of a night in the pub with my mates!

Five Star Goodness

I just came back from a weekend in suprisingly sunny Cambridge to much news, both good and bad.

Let's get the bad out of the way first ... it came in the form of a couple of rejections (one, interestingly, accusing me of plagiarism) and the news that The Willows magazine is now officially defunct. I guess that in epitaph I can admit I had mixed feelings about The Willows; still, it was a unique home for Weird Tale pastiche, it published more of my work than any other market, and on the whole I was pretty fond of it. Perhaps more to the point, from a selfish angle, my turn-of-last-century ghost story The Burning Room is now without a home. One of my deep dreads since I started writing to publish was that a market would accept my work and then die a death; now it's happened.

Hey ho.

(If anyone wants to pay me money for a cracking little ghost story then, hey, leave a comment.)

Right! Good news!

Rafe McGregor saw fit to answer my answer my recent challenge to write a twitter [140 character] story; not only that, but I've read the results, and they're marvelous; not only that, but twitterzine Nanoism have accepted it for imminent publication.

Buoyed by this success, I'm extending my challenge to the entire population of the Earth - or at least those that stumble on this blog. I have an ulterior motive here, I have to admit; my groovy map thingie tells me people are passing by, but no-one's commenting. I know that by its very nature this blog is about writing in a vacuum*, but come on! So, to anyone who reads this, comment with a story of less than 140 characters - if you dare! Or, better still, write it and get it published. Brevity is the soul of wit, right? So, hey, maybe it's the soul of great fiction too.

Lastly and bestly ... a while back Jake Freivald published my story Strive to be Happy in his reliably wonderful webzine Flash Fiction Online. Before, during and since, Jake's been immensely supportive of what's unarguably a difficult little story, but this is something else.  It's a touch baffling and immensely touching to see something I wrote get praised to such a degree.  Thanks, not for the first time, to Jake, and to David Erlewine for such a thoughtful review.

Really lastly, I stumbled across this quote from Robert Holdstock, of Mythago Wood fame, in the British Fantasy Society's magazine Dark Horizons, a response to the question of whether the short fiction market is shrinking, and was touched by the sheer damn truth of it:

"Writers are not in free fall. They float above the clouds and hope, as always, to be a part of the rain where the rain is welcomed."



* Okay, technically speaking the moon has an atmosphere, albeit a pretty thin one. But none of us are going to be taking the wife and kids for a picnic there any time soon, so I'll let that one stand.