Feet, Meet… Wet
So after a lot of thinking about it and some very good discussions with people at the workshop this last weekend, I’ve decided to get my feet wet with the whole electronic publishing thing. I already had plans for an experiment with longer fiction, which I’m going to talk about closer to the things happening date (not for months… stay tuned!). But I hadn’t really thought about putting up short fiction yet.
However, I do have a few literary stories that have made some submission rounds (you think spec fic mags are slow to respond? Try the lit fic world, whew). A couple even got nice rejections from what I think are prestigious literary magazines (and certainly ones that pay fairly well). Two of my stories got me into graduate school (MFA program which I then dropped out of…). So I know the stories aren’t horrible, they are just hard to place.
And now they are available online. I bundled two surreal shorts together, and then put up the longer ones separately. Will I sell any copies? Who knows? But I haven’t resubmitted them in a bit (even though it would have increased my race score I guess) and so they weren’t doing me much good sitting on the computer. If you want to read them, they are cheap (inexpensive?) and found here for Kindle and here for other formats (the sidebar there has the other two stories).
So I’ve decided to change my submission habits a little. I still intend to submit every story I write to every pro-paying magazine and to the handful of good semi-pro zines that I love. If a story then doesn’t sell to those magazines, I’ll put it up online. It’ll take a while for each story to make those rounds (looks like about a year to two years so far), but at least there will be no trunk. I’ll also probably (depending on if/how well anything sells online) put up stories of mine that I have sold and then gotten the rights back from. This ebook stuff is a brave new world and interesting changes are coming for everyone, and damn but I want to be a part of that. I think it’s good to stay on top of the changes and for me to get my feet wet learning how to put things online. There are readers out there and they’ll vote with their dollars on the quality of things. Plus it is good practice for writing blurbs, right? *grin*
Anyway, as other stories finish the submission rounds, I’ll be slowly putting them online. I have a great friend doing my covers and I spent quite a few painful hours learning to format for Kindle. It’s a fun new thing to try at the very least. And as I said, I have a crazy/awesome idea for an experiment starting up in a few months, so eventually I’ll post a nice long thing about that.
Meanwhile, I am running into my own writing deadlines full speed. I signed up for another novel workshop in October and haven’t even started the book I want to workshop. So I guess I’d better stop blogging and go (have my characters) kill a few people and wrap up the current novel. Lots of work ahead, but I feel good about. I’m so busy between writing and Starcraft 2 that I’m (mostly) not even stressing about WotF results. Crazy 🙂