Well, I promised you I was going to Caithy Weaver this post, and show you each step of sending out the next two queries. Here’s how that went: Monday, May 18th 6:29 – With only 30 minutes of writing time left before I have to grab breakfast and take out the trash, I decide to go to the simple route. Just find the simplest template for a short story cover letter, and create the simplest draft possible for each of the publishers. I’ll be changing them 20 times, anyway. 6:36 – Basic templates created! 6:39 – Start reading the submission…
I’m feeling pretty confident right now! I know where I’m sending my work, when I’m sending my work, and I’ve got detailed instructions on how to get the manuscript from Point A to Point B. Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m going to say to each publisher when I query my short story. Wait… what am I going to say to those publishers? Is querying for short fiction more difficult than querying for novels? Or agents? I know how things used to work back in the day, but have they changed in 2020? Well, after…
When you’re querying your short fiction you’re going to get rejected. A lot. Stephen King once famously mounted a railroad spike on his childhood bedroom wall when he started submitting short stories as a teen. Each rejection letter King received got impaled on the spike. After a while, the weight of the paper was so heavy it started to warp the railroad-grade iron. You’re going to have to assume that no one is going to immediately declare your work a masterpiece, and buy it off of you for one million dollars. Which means, even from the start, you’ll need to…
It’s one thing to get a list of excellent publications that are accepting stories with your theme and word count. It’s another thing altogether to find a publication that might actually like your submission. In order to determine which magazines on my list fall into that second category, there’s only one thing to do: actually read the stories they publish. I’m going to read the latest editions of each magazine, then ask myself three questions: What type of fiction do they normally publish? Do they publish authors who write like me? Is there any reason why they might not publish…