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...