Issue #15 of Plasma Frequency Magazine is out, and it includes my short story, The Witch.
Go. Read the story and then come back to finish this blog post. Seriously. I’ll wait.
*waits*
*waits some more*
*waits a wee bit more*
Ya know, I can tell you haven’t gone to read the story. It’s short. Humor me. I’m about to talk about it and you’ll get more from the discussion if you’ve read the story.
*waits*
Right.
So.
Some stories are trickier to sell than others and The Witch was a tricky story to sell. It gathered 21 rejections including a fair number of ‘close but not quite’ personal rejections and several times it got rejected for the same reason. The editors would say (I’m paraphrasing of course), “I know what’s going on in this story, but I don’t know if my readers would.”
Which could be legit but every time I considered making the story more obvious I’d send it to a friend and be like, ‘Do you know what’s going on here?’ and they’d be like, ‘Yes?’ and I’d be like, ‘Damn it!’ which was a bit confusing for them but if everyone who read it ‘got it’… well then the problem was one of perception, not storytelling. So how do I fix a problem that exists outside of the story?
The answer, it turned out, was Plasma Frequency Magazine. Which just goes to show that it’s all about finding the right market for the right story. My point (which most of us know but occasionally need a reminder of anyway) is, the home for your work is out there, the trick is not giving up before you find it.
Related, but not, my current record for number of rejections before a sale is 23, and that eventual sale is one of the ones I’m most proud of thus far in my career. What’s your record so far? Can you beat mine? LOL
This issue of Plasma Frequency is available at:
Createspace:
Print
Weightless Books:
Kindle, ePub, or PDF
