Episode 079 - Making the Most of Your Short Fiction with Douglas Smith
May 18, 2021
Douglas Smith talks about how you can turn your short fiction into a “magic bakery”—a term Doug borrows from Dean Wesley Smith—earning you money and building your resume over and over with the same content. We discuss the opportunities offered by reprints, foreign markets, and audio markets, and we discuss how writer’s groups can—and can’t—help you prepare your work for the professional markets.
Douglas Smith is a multi-award-winning Canadian author described by Library Journal as "one of Canada's most original writers of speculative fiction." His fiction has been published in twenty-six languages and thirty-five countries. His books include the novel THE WOLF AT THE END OF THE WORLD, the collections CHIMERASCOPE and IMPOSSIBILIA, and the writer's guide PLAYING THE SHORT GAME: HOW TO MARKET & SELL SHORT FICTION. Doug is a three-time winner of Canada's Aurora Award and has been a finalist for the Astounding Award, CBC's Bookies Award, Canada's juried Sunburst Award, and France's juried Prix Masterton and Prix Bob Morane.
"My main message to writers is to understand the licensing of rights associated with short fiction because that should drive where you send your stories." —Douglas Smith
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Douglas Smith. Hey Doug, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Doug: I am doing fine, Matty. Thanks so much for having me on.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Douglas Smith is a multi-award-winning Canadian author described by Library Journal as one of Canada's most original writers of speculative fiction. His fiction has been published in 26 languages in 35 countries. His books include the novel THE WOLF AT THE END OF THE WORLD, the collections CHIMERASCOPE and IMPOSSIBILIA, and the writer's guide PLAYING THE SHORT GAME: HOW TO MARKET & SELL SHORT FICTION. Doug is a three-time winner of Canada's Aurora Award and has been a finalist for the Astounding Award, CBC's Bookies Award, Canada's juried Sunburst Award, and France's juried Prix Masterton and Prix Bob Morane.
[00:00:49] And our topic is going to be Short Fiction and the Magic Bakery. And in a few minutes, I'm going to ask Doug to explain about the Magic Bakery, but I thought it would be fun to just start out with the question of what is attractive to you about short fiction as an author.
[00:01:06] Doug: So many things. And when I'm talking to new writers or writers who are just starting out, a lot of people start with novels and some people, fewer these days, seem to start with short fiction. I actually recommend to new writers to start with short fiction. I mean, I love reading short fiction. I still write short fiction. I think it's a great way to learn your craft. You can put so many writer tools in your toolbox from developing your craft in short fiction. There are more tools you'll need to learn when you move to novels, writing at the sentence level, introducing characters, introducing backstory, keeping the tension, working with different points of view. There's just so much. Essentially, it's a great way to learn the craft.
[00:01:58] And the example I usually give is, okay, you can write a single 100,000 word novel, or you could write twenty 5,000-word short stories, same word count. It will take longer to write those short stories because short stories are just longer, but for the same number of words that you've created over those 20 short stories, you could have tried different genres. You could have tried first person, third person. You could have tried multiple points of view, unreliable narrator and just everything, any type of story. You're going to be able to practice 20 different combinations, at least, in those short stories. And by the time you've done those short stories, you're going to be much better at the craft of writing them than if you jumped into a single hundred-thousand-word novel, the first thing you've ever tried to write creatively, because 99% of the times that novel is never going to see the light of day, because you just don't know how to write yet.
[00:02:57] Matty: I always feel bad when someone says, they have five novels, but don't bother reading the first one because it was my first and I made a lot of mistakes and I thought, that's just sad because I'm sure they spend as much time if not more on that first novel as they did on the fifth one. And to not be able to point people to it is kind of sad.
[00:03:13] Doug: Yeah. But I'm sure they weren't. And I guess my point is you will learn more faster with the short fiction than you would with that first novel. The other good thing is that when you send out short stories, which is my recommendation, you send them up to pro markets, you're going to start with a lot of rejections, but eventually you're going to start to get rejection letters that actually say, Hey, I liked this, but I didn't like this. They'll give you some feedback. And when you start to sell to pro markets, that's your benchmark. You now know that my craft is at the point where people are willing to pay me money. You're going to get to that point a lot faster with short fiction ...
[00:00:05] Doug: I am doing fine, Matty. Thanks so much for having me on.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Douglas Smith is a multi-award-winning Canadian author described by Library Journal as one of Canada's most original writers of speculative fiction. His fiction has been published in 26 languages in 35 countries. His books include the novel THE WOLF AT THE END OF THE WORLD, the collections CHIMERASCOPE and IMPOSSIBILIA, and the writer's guide PLAYING THE SHORT GAME: HOW TO MARKET & SELL SHORT FICTION. Doug is a three-time winner of Canada's Aurora Award and has been a finalist for the Astounding Award, CBC's Bookies Award, Canada's juried Sunburst Award, and France's juried Prix Masterton and Prix Bob Morane.
[00:00:49] And our topic is going to be Short Fiction and the Magic Bakery. And in a few minutes, I'm going to ask Doug to explain about the Magic Bakery, but I thought it would be fun to just start out with the question of what is attractive to you about short fiction as an author.
[00:01:06] Doug: So many things. And when I'm talking to new writers or writers who are just starting out, a lot of people start with novels and some people, fewer these days, seem to start with short fiction. I actually recommend to new writers to start with short fiction. I mean, I love reading short fiction. I still write short fiction. I think it's a great way to learn your craft. You can put so many writer tools in your toolbox from developing your craft in short fiction. There are more tools you'll need to learn when you move to novels, writing at the sentence level, introducing characters, introducing backstory, keeping the tension, working with different points of view. There's just so much. Essentially, it's a great way to learn the craft.
[00:01:58] And the example I usually give is, okay, you can write a single 100,000 word novel, or you could write twenty 5,000-word short stories, same word count. It will take longer to write those short stories because short stories are just longer, but for the same number of words that you've created over those 20 short stories, you could have tried different genres. You could have tried first person, third person. You could have tried multiple points of view, unreliable narrator and just everything, any type of story. You're going to be able to practice 20 different combinations, at least, in those short stories. And by the time you've done those short stories, you're going to be much better at the craft of writing them than if you jumped into a single hundred-thousand-word novel, the first thing you've ever tried to write creatively, because 99% of the times that novel is never going to see the light of day, because you just don't know how to write yet.
[00:02:57] Matty: I always feel bad when someone says, they have five novels, but don't bother reading the first one because it was my first and I made a lot of mistakes and I thought, that's just sad because I'm sure they spend as much time if not more on that first novel as they did on the fifth one. And to not be able to point people to it is kind of sad.
[00:03:13] Doug: Yeah. But I'm sure they weren't. And I guess my point is you will learn more faster with the short fiction than you would with that first novel. The other good thing is that when you send out short stories, which is my recommendation, you send them up to pro markets, you're going to start with a lot of rejections, but eventually you're going to start to get rejection letters that actually say, Hey, I liked this, but I didn't like this. They'll give you some feedback. And when you start to sell to pro markets, that's your benchmark. You now know that my craft is at the point where people are willing to pay me money. You're going to get to that point a lot faster with short fiction ...
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[00:03:49] Matty: We're going to be spending most of our conversation talking about what short fiction can offer authors and ways to take advantage of that. But I was also curious to have your thoughts on what is attractive to you about short fiction as a reader, and do you think that generalizes to other readers in a way that authors of short fiction should know about?
[00:04:08] Doug: I like that I could pick up an anthology and lot of anthologies, stories from different authors, are around a theme. And I always find it fascinating how you can give a single theme to an author and 20 authors will come up with a different approach to that one thing. So that's interesting. A lot of it is, you know, just pick up a short fiction magazine, and I'll give a shout out to the Canadian ON SPEC magazine, which is one of my favorites. You can jump into so many different worlds in a single issue. I think it's amazing how good short story writers can pull you into a universe and make you feel for their characters in a very small number of words.
[00:04:55] And that's a value, if you're a writer of short fiction or plan to be, you should also be a reader, because you'll learn how writers can do that. My God, I'm only two pages into the story. I love these characters. I'm immersed in this world. How do they do it? And go back and try to figure out how they did it. And then add that to your writer toolbox.
[00:07:54] Matty: Now we're going to jump way ahead. We're going to assume people have done their reading, brushed up on their craft and they've written a short story, and I think that what a lot of people think about is sending it off to traditional publishers. And we can loop back on that as we continue talking. But I want to make sure we allocate plenty of time to what we had talked about as the main topic, which is what else can you do?
[00:08:20] You've sent a story out. It's out there in the world. Maybe you've even gotten an acceptance. So can you just describe what opportunities are available to people once the story is done and they're starting to find ways to market and sell it?
[00:08:34] Doug: Yeah. If you allow me, I'm going to have to step back though, before they even sent it out, because that is usually where beginning writers make the first mistake. And they sent it out to markets they should not be submitting to, like ever, certainly for a new story. So I always start by talking to writers, telling them that the most important thing they need to learn about writing is the rights associated with anything, and licensing those rights.
[00:09:09] Because you and I, if we're talking about, Hey, I just sold a story. We'll say that, we'll say we sold a story to ASIMOV'S or whatever. Actually, we never sell stories. What we do is, the publisher comes back on your submission and says, Yeah, I love it. Want to publish it. You're not selling it to them. You're licensing a very specific set of rights that you own for that story to this third party in the form of a publisher. And you need to understand that and you need to understand what rights you need to license for them to legally publish your story. And you need to understand a lot of times they going to ask for more rights than they need.
[00:09:47] So my main message to writers is to understand the licensing of rights associated with short fiction because that should drive where you send your stories. And we don't have time to cover it all today but, I want to talk about selling to foreign markets. I want to talk about selling reprints and collections, et cetera.
[00:10:08] So if I could just pick a couple of types of rights that you need to know about as a writer for short fiction, the first one I call media rights. That's pretty simple. It'll be either print or electronic and it will also be modified by the type of market you sell it to, which would for short fiction, it's going to be either a magazine or an anthology. An anthology, again, is a book of different stories by different authors, compared to a collection, which is a book of stories from one single author.
[00:10:42] So if you're sending out a story and it gets accepted by one of these markets, if it's a print magazine, you will be licensing what is called serial print rights. Print is obvious. Serial means it's a magazine. That's all it means. If you sell it to an anthology and let's say they're an electronic only anthology, they only put it out in eBooks, you're going to be licensing electronic anthology rights. And any combination of those are called media rights.
[00:11:11] Now the big thing I want to talk about is what's called occurrence rights, and these are simply two types. It's either first rights or second rights. So if this story has never been published and you send it out to this nice publisher and they want to give you money for your story and publish it, you will be licensing first rights to that publisher. And that's simply means this is the first time anyone has licensed rights for this story in this language. And that's really important.
[00:11:46] So if I sell my story to ANALOG or ASIMOV's, they will be licensing, because they have both a print and electronic form, they're going to be licensing first print and electronic rights in English. And because they're a magazine, those would be serial rights. So hopefully this isn't too complicated, but the most important thing here is the fact that they're licensing first rights.
[00:12:13] So the story gets published and that's great. And now the next most important thing writers need to know happens. And what happens if you assign the right contract, the rights you license to ASIMOV's revert to you, it means they come back to you, so they're yours again, but they come back to you as second rights. In other words, you can't license first rights for that story ever again. So I can sell that story again. I can license rights for it, but it will always be licensing second rights. So I can do a reprint, sell reprints to another 20 magazines or anthologies or more. I can license second rights as many times as I can find someone who wants to buy that story and publish that story. But every time after that first time, it's going to be second rights I'm licensing.
[00:13:05] And the important thing that writers need to understand is the top markets, the really big markets that'll look good on your resume, they only license first rights. There's a few, I'm noticing, that say, Yeah, we'll consider reprints maybe, but the odds are they'd want to be offering stories that have never been published before to their readers. Their readers are paying good money to a top pro market. They expect to be the first ones to be reading the story.
[00:13:31] So the point is, if you have a new story and you send it out to a second rate market, one that doesn't pay pro rates, one that doesn't get much attention, one that doesn't look good on your cover letter on your resume for being a writer, you've given away first rights and you will never be able to get that story into a top pro market because they don't license second rights.
[00:13:56] So, this is why I start with understanding and trying to teach writers about licensing of rights. And most importantly, what first rights means.
[00:14:05] Matty: Is there a platform, a reputable platform, that would ask you never to license it beyond that first rights scenario.
[00:14:15] Doug: No, they don't have that legal right. And the only way that would happen is if you signed a contract that doesn't have a reversion clause in it, or a clear trigger for when the rights come back to you. If you do that, the rights remain with that publisher. That's something I cover under my contract section in the book. So no the short answer, Matty, would be no. And you should never encounter that. You'd never get that from a top pro market. Most of them are very reputable. They've got what are generally author friendly contracts as well.
[00:14:50] So the whole point of this, the thing I want to emphasize is before you send out your stories, your new stories that you write, you should make sure you're sending them to the top pro markets, the very best markets you can. That's my big piece of advice for new newcomers, new writers, is start at the top, find the best market that you can, the one you really want to get into, which hopefully it will be one of the big pros that pay good rates and looks good on your resume, and send it there first.
[00:15:18] If they reject it, which happens more than sales, even for someone who's been writing for a long time, you get more rejections than sales, then you should have a list of your top pro markets, and if the first one rejects it, send it out to the next market on your list and just keep going until you run out of the top pro markets.
[00:15:35] And what I do then is I just hold onto that story because anthologies come up every year. There's always new anthologies opening up, new pro markets sometimes, but anthologies are always going to be there. So basically you just keep the story until another pro market becomes available to you.
[00:15:53] That's my big piece of advice. Understand what first rights are, only offer your first rights to the best market you can.
[00:16:01] Matty: When you're deciding who to submit your stories to, if someone's writing a novel, there's all sorts of advice about not only how you research an editor or an agent, let's say, but how you approach them, make sure you're not sending them a form letter that says To Whom it May Concern, and if appropriate mention some personal connection you have with them, things like that. Is any of that applicable in the short fiction market, or is it more just upload your file and hit submit?
[00:16:28] Doug: You should have a cover letter and pretty well to your point, all of these markets now have some sort of submission portal, right? There are a few that just say, Send me an email and attach it, but most of them are a submission portal. All of those allow you to somewhere put in a cover letter. The cover letter is basically three paragraphs, and it's always the same.
[00:16:51] The first paragraph is "Dear," and find out the editor's name, again to your point. Not just To Whom it May Concern. Do your research, find out the editor's name, and you can go wrong there in another way as well. The standard now is not to use any gender-based salutation. So you don't use Mrs. or Ms. or Miss or Mister or anything like that. If it's pick, one of the most famous editors ever, Ellen Datlow, if you're sending something to Ellen and she's got an anthology she's editing, you'd say, dear Ellen Datlow. That's how you do the salutation.
[00:17:33] Then your first sentence is always, Please find enclosed or attached or whatever my X word story, in other words, my 5,000-word story. In quotes, you put the title of the story. Another thing, short story titles are always in quotes. Novel titles are always either capitalized or in italics. There's a difference. And then if this is a first rights submission, that's all you put in the first sentence. Just, Please find my 5,000 word story such and such and attach.
[00:18:08] If it's a reprint, you'd add a second sentence to that paragraph where you say, This story first appeared in and you give the name of the market and the year it appeared and all you have to do. I've got stories I've sold dozens of times. I don't list them all. I simply refer any of them, if I'm submitting as a reprint, I say this story first appeared in, and that's all I need to tell them.
[00:18:32] Your second paragraph would be your credits if you have any. And if you don't, don't worry about it because they're buying the story, they're not buying you. If you have pro credits though, you should put them in here because it can get you out of the slush pile it and get you into a smaller slush pile. Basically the one with writers with pro credits because they're saying, Bigger chance that these people actually have learned how to write. They've already sold to pro markets, that may even go directly to the editor.
[00:19:03] And I say pro credits. If you've sold to non-pro markets or markets that don't pay you anything, don't put it in because it's going to immediately flag you as a rookie, a newbie, and someone who doesn't know that they should be going only after the pro markets. It's only going to hurt your credibility. You'd actually be better not listing that as a credit, as opposed to putting it in. So if you have pro credits, just name a few. If you've got 25 of them, don't put all 25 down, pick the top four or five. My stories have previously appeared in ASIMOV'S, ANALOG, MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, et cetera. If you've won any awards or been nominated for any awards, real awards, you should list those. I have won the Aurora Award three times. I've been a finalist in yada yada yada. So that's your second paragraph. It's basically your credits.
[00:19:56] And then the third paragraph is very simple -- a polite sign off. Thank you for your attention. I look forward to hearing back from you. And that's it. So if you don't have any pro credits, it's a really short cover letter. You're just telling them what the stories length is and if it's a reprint, where it's been published before.
[00:20:16] What you don't ever do is you don't tell them how you came about to write the story. You never tell them what the story is about. And you don't even need to include the genre. And it doesn't hurt if you say, Please find attached my urban fantasy story such and such. But the problem is a lot of times beginning writers, especially, they don't really know the genre of the story they've written it in, which sounds weird. But a lot of times they don't and it's like, No, that's not urban fantasy. That's supernatural suspense or that's paranormal romance or something. And so don't try to name it. Just let the story speak for itself.
[00:20:52] Matty: If someone is just starting out with submitting their first piece of short fiction, is it worth getting the story professionally edited before you send it to these platforms?
[00:21:03] Doug: I'm going to say no. Quite honestly, writing a story and editing as best I can, and then after it accumulated a few rejections, taking it over again and sitting down and going, Yeah, okay, I can fix that. That's how you learn to write. To quote Stephen King again, the way to become a writer is you read a lot and you write a lot. It's different for novels, obviously, especially if you're indy publishing, you're going to get an editor but for short fiction, it's just not worth the cost that it would take.
[00:21:34] And I don't know any short fiction writers who started by writing their first story and then eventually started getting professionally published, I don't know anybody who paid to get a professional edit done on it. If you've got some writer friends things like critique groups they can be very good for pointing out things that you don't see. Any second set of eyes on your story is good. They don't have to be a writer. They just have to be someone who's a good reader and can communicate back to the writer, why a story didn't work for them or where it stopped working. Like, This character is just one dimensional, or, I don't understand why they're doing anything. So there you know, Okay, I need to put in some motivation here. Or, I can't see it. There's virtually no visual description of your setting and you're not pulling me in at all. So having a second set of eyes on it is great.
[00:22:30] Writers groups are good if you can find a good supportive one. A lot of writer's groups can be just a step down to hell. if they're there with a lot of egos brought to the table and they're more concerned with you telling them how great their writing is, as opposed to be willing to hear that, No, you know, this story doesn't work. You've got to try it again. If you can find a good supportive writer's group that's so important. Just be aware of that they can also be toxic. So if you're finding you're not comfortable in a situation, maybe find another group, but somehow another pair of eyes is always advisable.
[00:23:07] Matty: And I suppose that could help not only with things like I can't picture myself and the story, or the writing is flat, or whatever, but also helping you identify the genre because as you say, I think sometimes the author is the least qualified person to pick the genre. And if you find people who read in the genre you think you're writing in and you show them the story, their response might be, It seems well-written, I can visualize everything, but I wouldn't read this because it feels more like X than Y to me.
[00:23:33] Doug: Yeah. And a lot of times if you're in a group, they should tell you that, you know, Horror is not really my thing, but I'm giving you the best feedback I can, but I'm probably not the best one to comment on this. Sometimes they actually are the best one because they come to it with really fresh eyes. And they can also say, Yeah, okay, it's urban fantasy, but wow, this has been done so much, there's absolutely nothing new here and that can help you too.
[00:23:56] Matty: One of the things that I think is challenging about the traditional short fiction market is that the timeframes can be so long so that if you finish your story, you've reviewed it with a second set of eyes, you're sending it out and you're starting at the top, as your recommendation is, and then a year goes by. What is your recommendation about you've sent it to ALFRED HITCHCOCK or whatever, and now you haven't heard anything. Yes. It's just a personal example.
[00:24:24] Doug: Well for me too, I've got one that's been there over a year.
[00:24:28] Matty: Yeah. At some point, can you just say, okay, I guess they don't want it and move on to your next candidate.
[00:24:35] Doug: So generally accepted guidelines in the industry, and I had this from a number of pro editors when I was writing the book, I wanted to verify that the guidance I'm giving is correct, three months is reasonable. It's reasonable to query after three months. Read the market's guidelines. They may say, We typically take six months to get back to you. Okay. Don't worry before six months then for them, but if they don't specify, three months is very typical. And a lot of the new markets are very quick at getting back to you. So that has really changed. Electronic submission and response helps.
[00:25:13] But my main response here is, What are you waiting for? Who cares? Because if you write a story and send it out to a market, I hope, young writer that I'm talking to, new writer, whoever you are, I hope you're not just sitting back waiting for that response to that one story, because my other piece of advice is that to be successful as a writer, it's a numbers game. And that means that the writer with the most stories out to the most markets at any time is going to win. After you send that story out, you're sitting down and you're writing your next story, right? And then you're sending that out and then you're writing your next story and you're sending that out.
[00:25:56] And you should have some sort of system set up where obviously you've recorded where you sent story. So, you know, it went out to market on January 2nd. So you'd be able to track down to see how long it's been out. But the main response to after you send out a story is to write another story and send it out and just keep doing that. You and it should have 20 or more stories out in the mail. So that's the main way to react to long response times. Just keep sending out stories and every now and then, like maybe every month, check on what I would call overdue submissions, which means anything that has been out there with no response for more than three months.
[00:26:36] And then you have a decision. You can check to make sure -- Oh, okay, it's HITCHCOCK. They can take up to a year, so I'm not going to bug them yet. Or it could be, I don't know, LIGHTSPEED. Well, that's weird, because they usually come back in a few weeks. And again, I have one out there right now and I'm not going to bug them, cause I've got enough out there. Usually that's a good sign saying it's sitting somewhere with a second decider.
[00:27:03] But my main response is don't sweat it. If it gets up to half a year and this is unusual for that market, I think it's okay to send a query. Just send an email saying, Dear editor name, I submitted a story title on such-and-such a date. I'm just wondering if you could provide an update on the submission. Simple as that. Be polite. And hopeful.
[00:27:30] Matty: To get back to you would have hoped to have, maybe 20 stories out in circulation under submission to the different platforms. Makes me wonder ... you're writing both short fiction and novels, so do you have any kind of formal or informal division of, if you're sitting down in the morning and you've just finished one piece of work and now you have to decide whether you're going to work on a piece of short fiction or a novel, how does that thought process work for you?
[00:27:54] Doug: Well, to clarify, I started writing exclusively short fiction until I found all my short stories were not short. They were consistently going over 10,000 words. And there are fewer markets the longer you write. There's another piece of advice. As short as you can, there's more markets, the shorter you write. So I started writing novels and right now I'm finishing up a third book in a trilogy. So really most of my creative time is novels now. I took a break to write the writer's guide, PLAYING THE SHORT GAME, that we're talking about.
[00:28:26] When COVID hit, I just found I could be more focused on short fiction. So I went through a little spurt in the early part of 2020 where I just wrote short stories. Then I went back to the novel. I always thought that once I moved to novels, I'd kind of take breaks and write short stories, but novels are big beasts and a trilogy is a really big beast. So I generally found that I had to keep my head in that. But I know a lot of novelists who will flip back and forth and just take a break, write a short story, et cetera.
[00:29:00] I think you're, as a writer ... when I say you, I mean whoever's listening to this or watching this ... you'll have to decide whether that helps you sort of cleanse your palate and it gives you a break from a novel if you hit a tough spot, or whether it's simply so distracting that you find it's too hard to get back into the novel. I think it's really personal. I think I'll always keep writing short stories, but the bulk of my creative time now, and probably in the future, is going to be novels.
[00:29:31] Matty: I felt that for myself, the ideas that became short stories were the ones that were mainly focused on an event, like I was on a cruise, and I started thinking about the idea of somebody jumping overboard. And so I don't want to write a novel about somebody jumping overboard, but it was a great short story. I t was lovely cruise, but I write supernatural suspense and thrillers, so I can't help thinking about things like that.
[00:30:01] Whereas the novel seemed to be more focused on a theme, like acceptance or resistance to celebrity or guilt about a past event. And I'm not suggesting that that's a generalizable differentiator, but that's how it pans out for me.
[00:30:16] So is this an appropriate time to talk about the phrase, the Magic Bakery?
[00:30:22] Doug: Sure. We've covered some of the licensing of rights. I'll add one more before we go ahead because this will lead right into the discussion of selling to the foreign language markets, and that is language rights. So they're pretty easy to understand. Obviously if I sell to an English market, they're going to want English language rights. And if I sell or licensed to a French magazine or anthology, they'll want French language rights. However, in both those cases, it's going to be first rights unless it's a reprint in English. So if I'm selling for the first time in English, they want first English rights. If that story's already been published and I sell it to a French magazine.
[00:31:05] And if you and I are talking, I'd probably say, Hey, Matty, I just sold a reprint to a French magazine. I'm not really selling a reprint. What I'd be licensing would be first rights again, first French language rights. That's one other differentiator. First rates relate to the media. So it could be first print rights, first electronic rights, first audio rights, but also the language. So I might've sold first print rights in English. If I sell it to a French magazine, an electronic magazine, I'd be licensing first electronic rights in French. Still first rights. So with that one additional piece of information on licensing, maybe we can talk about the Magic Bakery.
[00:31:50] Matty: Let me actually ask you one question about that so that if you're interested in selling into a foreign language market, are you submitting in your own language? Let's say English for an American or English speaking country, you're sending your English version of it to the French publication and then they take care of the translation, I assume?
[00:32:13] Doug: Yeah. Can I defer that? It'll be the second thing I answer, but yeah, there's a few points about submitting to foreign language markets that I want to go over and that is one of them.
[00:32:27] First, the Magic Bakery term is something I stole shamelessly from Dean Wesley Smith. I quote him in the book. Dean is the partner to Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and they're both well-known speculative fiction authors, and they're also excellent teachers of both the craft and the business side of writing.
[00:32:49] Dean has coined this Magic Bakery term, and what he's talking about, and now that we've talked about rights, hopefully all this will make sense, he said, A writer essentially has a Magic Bakery. If you manage your rights correctly, meaning you make sure that the rights revert to you and they become yours again after your story has been published, you essentially have this Magic Bakery, what you can sell a cake and then magically it'll appear and you could sell it again.
[00:33:20] And of course that selling it again means everything we're about to talk about. So that's what the Magic Bakery means. If you protect your rights that you license and make sure they revert back to you, you're going to be able to resell, have your stories published again and again, in a variety of formats.
[00:33:38] And the first format, before I get into foreign language, is what we just call a reprint. And that just means I sold a story to ASIMOV'S. The rights have come back to me and then theology is coming out next year. They're looking for stories. The story is a great fit for that anthology and the anthology, they'll usually phrase it this way, We'll accept reprints. Or they might say we'll consider previously published work, something like that. That means legally they will be licensing second rights. So I'd be able to submit that story that I had published originally in ASIMOV'S, and send it to that anthology, where it would be published, if they accepted it, would be published as a reprint.
[00:34:23] Let's talk about if those markets are foreign language, and ever so many of them. If you want to know how to find foreign language markets, I'll point your listeners and viewers to my website, which is smithwriter.com. If they go there on the homepage, there's a For Writers link, and if you click on that, one of the first links you'll see is what I call the Foreign Market List. And I list 70 plus different markets, non-English markets, around the world. They're speculative fiction markets because I write the speculative fiction. But that's how you would find a market.
[00:34:59] One other recommendation is don't submit to a foreign language market before you sold that story in English. And the reason I say that is some of the top pro English markets actually have contracts in place with foreign language magazines, where those magazines have the right to select stories that come out of the English magazines' issues and translate them and publish them in their own language. So in other words, I think ASIMOV'S is one of those, FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION I think is another, and there's probably more. In other words, if you sell to one of those English magazines, they are going to be licensing foreign language rights from you as well as English. And you might say , Well, why? This is what they'll tell you. We have these agreements in place, and those magazines will have the right to publish stories that we publish. They'll do the translation, but we purchased the language rights from them and just relicense to them for nothing.
[00:35:59] So if you sell that story, instead of going first to a top pro market in English, if you sell it to a foreign language market and then say , Well, I haven't licensed first rights in English yet, I just licensed first rights in French or German or whatever, I can still submit it to an ASIMOV'S, you may be surprised because if they want to buy your story and you tell them, Oh, by the way, it has been published, not in English, but it's been published in this language, they're going to say, Oh, sorry, can't buy it because we need to license first rights in that language, and you've already given away first rights or sold first rights and that language. So my first recommendation is sell it in English, and then once the rights revert to you, look for foreign language markets that you can submit to.
[00:36:46] So you're going to find the markets via my list, the cover letter and your story should all be in English. If the markets that I flag on my market list as the ones you should go to, the green ones, they're flagged either with a dollar sign, meaning they actually pay you money, or just with a yes, meaning they don't pay you money, but they will accept the story submission in English that's been previously published in English. If it's one of those markets, they do the translation for free. And obviously they have people who can communicate to you in English and can read English and translate English into their language. So, yeah, unless it's your other language, unless you're fluent in that other language, don't ever try to submit in their language. In other words, don't go to Google Translate, type in your story, and take that and submit it. That will not end well. So yeah, you can just deal completely in English with them, cover letters, story, et cetera.
[00:37:47] It should be the same process you go through for submitting to a foreign language market as if you're submitting to an English reprint market. And the reason I say that is your cover letter needs to have that second sentence in the first paragraph. It needs to say, This story first appeared in so-and-so magazine on such-and- such a date.
[00:38:07] And there's another reason for submitting only to pro markets and English, because if a foreign language market sees that your story has appeared in a big pro market in English, that's a selling point for them. They might even put that on their cover, as, First appeared in ASIMOV'S, or something like that. So another reason to just start at the top and only target pro markets.
[00:38:27] Matty: When you say pro rates, what do you mean by that?
[00:38:30] Doug: Yeah, pro to somebody might not be pro to somebody else. So again, I'm a speculative fiction writer, so when I say pro rates, I'm using the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's definition of what a pro rate is. And SFWA, as it's called, currently says that a pro rate is, I think it's 8 cents a word. That's 8 cents US a word is a pro rate. So when I talk about pro rates, that's what I'm talking about. And if you can find something better than that, that's great because quite frankly, eight cents a word is still not that much. You're not going to retire being a short fiction writer on the money you make from a short fiction writer. So 5,000-word short story at pro rates is going to give you $400.
[00:39:20] Matty: And what should people expect in terms of reprint payments?
[00:39:25] Doug: Less. You probably guessed that. I've seen some pro markets that will pay, if they do take reprints, they'll pay as much as 3 cents a word. If you could find 3 cents a work for a reprint, you're doing well. Often it's only one cent of word. Sometimes it will be a flat fee like $25, $50, $75, $100. At that point, you as a writer have to decide is that enough to make it worthwhile, my time worthwhile, because even selling a reprint, you're going to have communication with the editor. You're probably going to have two review and sign their contract. You're going to have to go through maybe an editing process, which should be pretty light because it's already been professionally published. You're going to have to go through page proofs. So all of that is a time sink. So decide what the minimum amount you want to be paid for that time is.
[00:40:18] And also remember, even if it's only, I don’t know, $50, if you think that's enough, you can sell a reprint as many times as you can sell it. And as long as you find a market who's willing to republish your story, you can sell it again. So you can end up, even if you've got pro rates for your first sale, you could end up making more money from the reprints than from your first professional sale, even at a lower per word rate.
[00:40:43] Matty: Is there a guideline about how long you should wait between second rights reprints before you pursue the next one?
[00:40:52] Doug: It's not a guideline. It's something I cover when I talk about short fiction contracts in the book. It's the reversion clause again. So you should have a very clear reversion clause in your contract. And if there's not one there, I give suggested wording for putting one in and what reasonable reversion periods are. And it's fairly simple. If it's a magazine, your rights typically revert to you after your story has appeared in the issue. And about the time the next issue is going to come out. So if they publish every three months, your rights for that story will come back in the five-to-six-month timeframe and that's reasonable.
[00:41:28] If it's an anthology, typically it will be a year after the anthology is published, sometimes up to two years. Those are the typical ranges I've seen. You can't legally do anything with your story. You don't have the rights to the story until they revert back to you.
[00:41:44] Matty: Are anthologies usually reprints or is it just as likely that they would be a first rights publication?
[00:41:51] Doug: Actually, the reverse. They're usually not reprints. But a lot of them are. So that's why I say it's a great market to find reprints at decent rates. Most anthologies will ask for non-previously published stories. But if they take reprints, they'll say that. But again, it would be at a lower rate. Sometimes not, though, which is even better.
[00:42:16] Matty: It seems as if every time I ask anyone about how to find out about anthology opportunities, it's always, you know, Hang out at the bar at the conference or something like that. I've never really been able to get a definitive answer about a more formalized way than just hanging out with other short fiction writers who may be editing an anthology. Any thoughts there?
[00:42:38] Doug: Yeah, it's fairly simple, actually. I give a number of market sources in the book. I'll mention my top two. One is Ralan.com. It's a site that's maintained by Ralan Conley. Ralan is an English writer but lives in Denmark. And he's maintained this site for, God, probably 30 years now. So go there and he has it organized nicely into pro markets and anthology markets. And so the pro markets for magazines and the anthology markets will have a mix of pro rates and non-pro rates. But it tends to be a shorter list. So just go there and run down the current open, active anthologies.
[00:43:23] The other source is The Grinder. Just Google "the grinder submission guidelines," something like that and you'll find it. It's a long URL. It's thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com or something like that. It's a free site. Couple of neat things about it is it's got a search feature, so if you're looking for urban fantasy markets, you can actually type that in and it'll give you a list of markets by length, too. Reprints, ones that take reprints thing. So it's got a nice little search feature. And it's free. Also something that a lot of people use for it, it gives you the "report your response times." So you'll be able to type in a market name and say, Yeah, their current average response time over the last 12 months has been 17 weeks. So you'll know that. Oh, okay. Mine's only been out for 10, so I'm just going to sit on it and not do anything and not bother them.
[00:44:21] There's another one. Duotrope. It started charging a subscription fee and quite frankly, I don't know why anyone would use it. The Grinder has all the same search features and Ralan, it's not the most elegant of sites, but it's always got the markets that are relevant. So those are the only two I know I use.
[00:44:44] You also go to Facebook. Facebook groups. There's a number of groups that will post open submission calls. So if you go to Facebook, go to groups, do a search for anything that has open calls, open submission calls, anything like that. Short fiction submission calls, things like that, do a search and you'll find them. I list the ones I use in the book. But yeah, that's the easiest way for you to find more.
[00:45:12] Matty: The other platform I've heard about and actually use myself is Submittable. Do you have any thoughts about Submittable as a good platform to use? Sometimes you don't have a choice, right? The place you're submitting to specifies.
[00:45:23] Doug: Yeah. I've got probably a dozen stories out to various markets that use Submittable right now, but I've never used it myself as a source for open calls. I mean, it's a very credible site, so sure. I just prefer the other one. I can go to either one of those sites, I tend to go to Ralan and just look at his new market postings. And then I have my email notification turned on for the Facebook groups. So if someone posts a new open call, I get an email about it and it's pretty easy to keep track of things that way.
[00:45:55] Matty: We've hit, I think, most of the bullet points that we had talked about discussing, but we haven't gone to audio markets. Anything you want to add about any of the previous topics before we move on to audio markets?
[00:46:07] Doug: If you go to my website about foreign markets I have a little article which basically, I think it's called " Submitting to Foreign Language Markets," so read that and it explains not only how to use my site, but mistakes to avoid, some caveats and warnings about foreign language markets. Sometimes getting paid will be more difficult, more and more of them are using PayPal now, but when I first started submitting to them, you'd have to wait to get a check and it would usually be a check drawn on a foreign bank, and sometimes that was hard to cash when you're in your North American city. So check that out.
[00:46:43] I also have a number of translation sites that I recommend. Do not use them to translate your stuff into their language. It's meant for the reverse. Some of these websites that I list on my market lists are only in their language. So if you want to know exactly what their submission guidelines say, I usually summarize them, or do summarize them, but if you want to get more detail and you can use one of those translation sites to translate their submission page and understand exactly what they're saying.
[00:47:15] Audio markets. Great, great alternative, or another option. The cool thing about most audio markets, there are a few exceptions, but they actually prefer reprints. So they prefer that you've sold the story in English already. And I think the reason for that is it raises the quality of their slush pile. So they know they're going to be getting submissions of stories that have already been professionally published and edited. And again, another reason for submitting to pro markets, if they get a story that has been previously published in one of the top pro markets, it's going to help you get them to pay attention to you, and you're probably out of their slush pile immediately.
[00:48:02] The rates you get we'll probably be sort of the high end of reprint markets. So you'll probably get a hundred dollars plus 3 cents a word, that sort of thing. And sometimes more . Some of them ask for first rights now, which means first print rights means they'll publish both the print and the audio version. But most of them are just simply doing an audio presentation of your story.
[00:48:27] And again, go to Ralan, and go to The Grinder, et cetera, and you can find a list of audio markets. There's not all a lot. Somewhere probably nowadays between 10 and 20. Lower, closer to 10, if you're looking for one, you actually pay your money. Some of them are just for the love. If you want the coolness of hearing your story narrated.
[00:48:50] Matty: So where are listener is going to consume those stories?
[00:48:54] Doug: Usually online and usually podcasts. Originally a lot of them were downloadable audio files, but most of them are online and you just go to the newest issue and you click on that issue and it will start playing over the internet. A lot of them are strictly story anthologies formats or magazine formats, et cetera.
[00:49:19] Some of them have a talk show around the stories of there'll be a discussion of maybe speculative fiction movies, reviews, and things like that. And then they'll have a story and then they'll go back to more discussion and something like that. So they all vary.
[00:49:35] The other thing that varies is the quality of the narration. I've been pretty lucky. I tend to target the big audio markets and some of the performances have just been wonderful, just amazing. It's like, Wow, totally nailed that. That character, you got the whole feeling, you got the right voice. The good audio markets will contact you, the narrator will contact you, and say, Hi, I've been picked in area your story. Just want to go over a few of the pronunciations. Like a lot of my stories, I'll have a lot of names that, might not be English names. There'll be fantastic names or alien names, and they just want to check with me that they're going to be saying that word right, which is quite cool. So that's always a good sign if they take the time to do that, they're taking the job very seriously.
[00:50:27] So just a warning. I've had probably a dozen stories published in audio format. Probably half a dozen of those, I'm just thrilled with. I think they're amazing. Another five that are really good, really solid. And then one that just makes me cringe. You can't tell, you don't know what you're going to get, but if you pick one of the top markets, you're probably going to get a very good narrator. They have a stable of narrators and they have and unless you're unlucky to get a new one, they're trying out, you're going to be okay.
[00:50:55] Matty: Do you have any recourse in a circumstance where the product is cringe-worthy?
[00:50:59] Doug: No. Other than I don't point my readers to it. And that's about it.
[00:51:02] Matty: The audio space seems like it would start to blur the lines of first and second rights because it's a little less straightforward. Like if you had a narrator record a short story and you put it up on some platform, then obviously if you sell to someone else, you're not selling it as first rights. But if you read a portion of a work in progress and then wanted to sell first audio rights, that kind of feels like it would be okay. Is the first second rights thing trickier in audio.
[00:51:32] Doug: Yeah, I should have clarified that. So you sell to an audio magazine, they're licensing first audio rights. So again, it's first rights. It's a combination of the media and the language that determines first rights. So even though the story was published and you license first print rights, when you sell it to the audio magazine, you're licensing first audio rights.
[00:51:55] Now, if you did the reverse, if you sold it to that audio market first, technically you haven't licensed them first print rights, but if you tried to sell it to one of the top pro magazines, first of all, you'd have to tell them this story appeared on PSEUDOPOD or podcasts or whatever. And they are probably going to say, I'm sorry, we consider that previously published, even though they are not going to be licensing audio rights from you.
[00:52:25] It's more, the main reason first versus second rates, is we want to be the first market that offers this story to our readers, our consumers of fiction, and their response would be, That's a pretty big podcast. A lot of people have probably heard this story and some of those are probably our subscribers. If we publish your story, they're going to be ticked off. They're going to say, this has already been published. I heard this story. So you're probably, even though legally you haven't licensed first print rights or first electronic rights, they're going to view it as being published.
[00:53:01] The reverse, as I said, is not true. A lot of the audio markets actually prefer if it's appeared in some sort of text format.
[00:53:09] Matty: Another first rights question is if you have a piece of short fiction that you've been using, let's say, as a reader magnet, and now you want to offer it to publications, first rights or second rights?
[00:53:22] Doug: None. Second rights at best. But again, even the ones who take reprints might say whatever you submit cannot be commercially available anywhere. So in other words, if you've got it up at Amazon or if you're giving it to readers for your mailing list, yeah, that's why the reader magnets I use are stories, I still offer them as reprints, but only as reprints. And so just consider if you've done that, it's been published, so at best you can view it as being able to license second rights.
[00:53:55] Matty: So just to wrap up our conversation, what do you think, in this concept of the Magic Bakery, what do you think is the most overlooked I'll say low hanging fruit, the easiest thing that people should be doing with stories that maybe they've had published once that you feel is underutilized?
[00:54:14] Doug: I think a lot of people, they need to understand rights, first of all. But once you understand first and second rights, it's pretty easy to do a search of any of the market lists I mentioned to find markets that take reprints. It's found money. I mean, you've written the story. You've gone through all the problem of it, and met with the editor on the first time it was published, so he's got a nice clean, publishable story that someone thought was good enough to give you money for, you're probably going to be able to sell that again. So go ahead and look for reprint markets.
[00:54:44] Audio markets are just fun. So I think you should go after those too, and they tend to pay better than a reprint market.
[00:54:52] And again the foreign language markets, it’s a different world, but again you're probably going to have a higher acceptance rate, especially if you've published in a pro English market for these. They won't pay as much. That being said, I think I'm averaging over a hundred dollars per reprint sale for a foreign language story.
[00:55:13] One thing that we didn't talk about is collections. Once you've done this enough and you have enough stories that have been previously published, I think writers should look to as soon as possible, as soon as you have enough stories, which means at least 80,000 words you should look at putting out a collection and I go into a lot of detail about how to do that in the book. There's two options. You can go after a small press publisher, because the big traditional publishers are not going to want a collection. They don't make money traditionally. Or you can indy publish a collection. And we probably need another half hour to talk about how to figure out how to put a collection together and sequence the stories, pick the stories, sequence the stories, and then a lot of other considerations as well.
[00:55:59] Matty: Well, we need to leave some information for people to be incented to go check out PLAYING THE SHORT GAME. So I'm going to use that as an entree to invite you to let listeners know where they can find out more about you and your fiction and nonfiction work online.
[00:56:13] Doug: Thanks, Matty. Easiest starting point is my website, which is Smithwriter.com. The one advantage of having a simple last name for once, it makes for a simple website name. So smithwriter.com, and there you'll find links to where you can buy all my books, the foreign market lists, et cetera. And the book that mostly I've been taking references from is called PLAYING THE SHORT GAME: HOW TO MARKET AND SELL SHORT FICTION. And you'll find links to that too. And it's on all the various book retailers in both print and ebook formats.
[00:56:55] Matty: Thank you so much, Doug. This has been so helpful.
[00:56:58] Doug: Well, thank you for having me on. Nice to finally put a face to the name.
[00:04:08] Doug: I like that I could pick up an anthology and lot of anthologies, stories from different authors, are around a theme. And I always find it fascinating how you can give a single theme to an author and 20 authors will come up with a different approach to that one thing. So that's interesting. A lot of it is, you know, just pick up a short fiction magazine, and I'll give a shout out to the Canadian ON SPEC magazine, which is one of my favorites. You can jump into so many different worlds in a single issue. I think it's amazing how good short story writers can pull you into a universe and make you feel for their characters in a very small number of words.
[00:04:55] And that's a value, if you're a writer of short fiction or plan to be, you should also be a reader, because you'll learn how writers can do that. My God, I'm only two pages into the story. I love these characters. I'm immersed in this world. How do they do it? And go back and try to figure out how they did it. And then add that to your writer toolbox.
[00:07:54] Matty: Now we're going to jump way ahead. We're going to assume people have done their reading, brushed up on their craft and they've written a short story, and I think that what a lot of people think about is sending it off to traditional publishers. And we can loop back on that as we continue talking. But I want to make sure we allocate plenty of time to what we had talked about as the main topic, which is what else can you do?
[00:08:20] You've sent a story out. It's out there in the world. Maybe you've even gotten an acceptance. So can you just describe what opportunities are available to people once the story is done and they're starting to find ways to market and sell it?
[00:08:34] Doug: Yeah. If you allow me, I'm going to have to step back though, before they even sent it out, because that is usually where beginning writers make the first mistake. And they sent it out to markets they should not be submitting to, like ever, certainly for a new story. So I always start by talking to writers, telling them that the most important thing they need to learn about writing is the rights associated with anything, and licensing those rights.
[00:09:09] Because you and I, if we're talking about, Hey, I just sold a story. We'll say that, we'll say we sold a story to ASIMOV'S or whatever. Actually, we never sell stories. What we do is, the publisher comes back on your submission and says, Yeah, I love it. Want to publish it. You're not selling it to them. You're licensing a very specific set of rights that you own for that story to this third party in the form of a publisher. And you need to understand that and you need to understand what rights you need to license for them to legally publish your story. And you need to understand a lot of times they going to ask for more rights than they need.
[00:09:47] So my main message to writers is to understand the licensing of rights associated with short fiction because that should drive where you send your stories. And we don't have time to cover it all today but, I want to talk about selling to foreign markets. I want to talk about selling reprints and collections, et cetera.
[00:10:08] So if I could just pick a couple of types of rights that you need to know about as a writer for short fiction, the first one I call media rights. That's pretty simple. It'll be either print or electronic and it will also be modified by the type of market you sell it to, which would for short fiction, it's going to be either a magazine or an anthology. An anthology, again, is a book of different stories by different authors, compared to a collection, which is a book of stories from one single author.
[00:10:42] So if you're sending out a story and it gets accepted by one of these markets, if it's a print magazine, you will be licensing what is called serial print rights. Print is obvious. Serial means it's a magazine. That's all it means. If you sell it to an anthology and let's say they're an electronic only anthology, they only put it out in eBooks, you're going to be licensing electronic anthology rights. And any combination of those are called media rights.
[00:11:11] Now the big thing I want to talk about is what's called occurrence rights, and these are simply two types. It's either first rights or second rights. So if this story has never been published and you send it out to this nice publisher and they want to give you money for your story and publish it, you will be licensing first rights to that publisher. And that's simply means this is the first time anyone has licensed rights for this story in this language. And that's really important.
[00:11:46] So if I sell my story to ANALOG or ASIMOV's, they will be licensing, because they have both a print and electronic form, they're going to be licensing first print and electronic rights in English. And because they're a magazine, those would be serial rights. So hopefully this isn't too complicated, but the most important thing here is the fact that they're licensing first rights.
[00:12:13] So the story gets published and that's great. And now the next most important thing writers need to know happens. And what happens if you assign the right contract, the rights you license to ASIMOV's revert to you, it means they come back to you, so they're yours again, but they come back to you as second rights. In other words, you can't license first rights for that story ever again. So I can sell that story again. I can license rights for it, but it will always be licensing second rights. So I can do a reprint, sell reprints to another 20 magazines or anthologies or more. I can license second rights as many times as I can find someone who wants to buy that story and publish that story. But every time after that first time, it's going to be second rights I'm licensing.
[00:13:05] And the important thing that writers need to understand is the top markets, the really big markets that'll look good on your resume, they only license first rights. There's a few, I'm noticing, that say, Yeah, we'll consider reprints maybe, but the odds are they'd want to be offering stories that have never been published before to their readers. Their readers are paying good money to a top pro market. They expect to be the first ones to be reading the story.
[00:13:31] So the point is, if you have a new story and you send it out to a second rate market, one that doesn't pay pro rates, one that doesn't get much attention, one that doesn't look good on your cover letter on your resume for being a writer, you've given away first rights and you will never be able to get that story into a top pro market because they don't license second rights.
[00:13:56] So, this is why I start with understanding and trying to teach writers about licensing of rights. And most importantly, what first rights means.
[00:14:05] Matty: Is there a platform, a reputable platform, that would ask you never to license it beyond that first rights scenario.
[00:14:15] Doug: No, they don't have that legal right. And the only way that would happen is if you signed a contract that doesn't have a reversion clause in it, or a clear trigger for when the rights come back to you. If you do that, the rights remain with that publisher. That's something I cover under my contract section in the book. So no the short answer, Matty, would be no. And you should never encounter that. You'd never get that from a top pro market. Most of them are very reputable. They've got what are generally author friendly contracts as well.
[00:14:50] So the whole point of this, the thing I want to emphasize is before you send out your stories, your new stories that you write, you should make sure you're sending them to the top pro markets, the very best markets you can. That's my big piece of advice for new newcomers, new writers, is start at the top, find the best market that you can, the one you really want to get into, which hopefully it will be one of the big pros that pay good rates and looks good on your resume, and send it there first.
[00:15:18] If they reject it, which happens more than sales, even for someone who's been writing for a long time, you get more rejections than sales, then you should have a list of your top pro markets, and if the first one rejects it, send it out to the next market on your list and just keep going until you run out of the top pro markets.
[00:15:35] And what I do then is I just hold onto that story because anthologies come up every year. There's always new anthologies opening up, new pro markets sometimes, but anthologies are always going to be there. So basically you just keep the story until another pro market becomes available to you.
[00:15:53] That's my big piece of advice. Understand what first rights are, only offer your first rights to the best market you can.
[00:16:01] Matty: When you're deciding who to submit your stories to, if someone's writing a novel, there's all sorts of advice about not only how you research an editor or an agent, let's say, but how you approach them, make sure you're not sending them a form letter that says To Whom it May Concern, and if appropriate mention some personal connection you have with them, things like that. Is any of that applicable in the short fiction market, or is it more just upload your file and hit submit?
[00:16:28] Doug: You should have a cover letter and pretty well to your point, all of these markets now have some sort of submission portal, right? There are a few that just say, Send me an email and attach it, but most of them are a submission portal. All of those allow you to somewhere put in a cover letter. The cover letter is basically three paragraphs, and it's always the same.
[00:16:51] The first paragraph is "Dear," and find out the editor's name, again to your point. Not just To Whom it May Concern. Do your research, find out the editor's name, and you can go wrong there in another way as well. The standard now is not to use any gender-based salutation. So you don't use Mrs. or Ms. or Miss or Mister or anything like that. If it's pick, one of the most famous editors ever, Ellen Datlow, if you're sending something to Ellen and she's got an anthology she's editing, you'd say, dear Ellen Datlow. That's how you do the salutation.
[00:17:33] Then your first sentence is always, Please find enclosed or attached or whatever my X word story, in other words, my 5,000-word story. In quotes, you put the title of the story. Another thing, short story titles are always in quotes. Novel titles are always either capitalized or in italics. There's a difference. And then if this is a first rights submission, that's all you put in the first sentence. Just, Please find my 5,000 word story such and such and attach.
[00:18:08] If it's a reprint, you'd add a second sentence to that paragraph where you say, This story first appeared in and you give the name of the market and the year it appeared and all you have to do. I've got stories I've sold dozens of times. I don't list them all. I simply refer any of them, if I'm submitting as a reprint, I say this story first appeared in, and that's all I need to tell them.
[00:18:32] Your second paragraph would be your credits if you have any. And if you don't, don't worry about it because they're buying the story, they're not buying you. If you have pro credits though, you should put them in here because it can get you out of the slush pile it and get you into a smaller slush pile. Basically the one with writers with pro credits because they're saying, Bigger chance that these people actually have learned how to write. They've already sold to pro markets, that may even go directly to the editor.
[00:19:03] And I say pro credits. If you've sold to non-pro markets or markets that don't pay you anything, don't put it in because it's going to immediately flag you as a rookie, a newbie, and someone who doesn't know that they should be going only after the pro markets. It's only going to hurt your credibility. You'd actually be better not listing that as a credit, as opposed to putting it in. So if you have pro credits, just name a few. If you've got 25 of them, don't put all 25 down, pick the top four or five. My stories have previously appeared in ASIMOV'S, ANALOG, MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, et cetera. If you've won any awards or been nominated for any awards, real awards, you should list those. I have won the Aurora Award three times. I've been a finalist in yada yada yada. So that's your second paragraph. It's basically your credits.
[00:19:56] And then the third paragraph is very simple -- a polite sign off. Thank you for your attention. I look forward to hearing back from you. And that's it. So if you don't have any pro credits, it's a really short cover letter. You're just telling them what the stories length is and if it's a reprint, where it's been published before.
[00:20:16] What you don't ever do is you don't tell them how you came about to write the story. You never tell them what the story is about. And you don't even need to include the genre. And it doesn't hurt if you say, Please find attached my urban fantasy story such and such. But the problem is a lot of times beginning writers, especially, they don't really know the genre of the story they've written it in, which sounds weird. But a lot of times they don't and it's like, No, that's not urban fantasy. That's supernatural suspense or that's paranormal romance or something. And so don't try to name it. Just let the story speak for itself.
[00:20:52] Matty: If someone is just starting out with submitting their first piece of short fiction, is it worth getting the story professionally edited before you send it to these platforms?
[00:21:03] Doug: I'm going to say no. Quite honestly, writing a story and editing as best I can, and then after it accumulated a few rejections, taking it over again and sitting down and going, Yeah, okay, I can fix that. That's how you learn to write. To quote Stephen King again, the way to become a writer is you read a lot and you write a lot. It's different for novels, obviously, especially if you're indy publishing, you're going to get an editor but for short fiction, it's just not worth the cost that it would take.
[00:21:34] And I don't know any short fiction writers who started by writing their first story and then eventually started getting professionally published, I don't know anybody who paid to get a professional edit done on it. If you've got some writer friends things like critique groups they can be very good for pointing out things that you don't see. Any second set of eyes on your story is good. They don't have to be a writer. They just have to be someone who's a good reader and can communicate back to the writer, why a story didn't work for them or where it stopped working. Like, This character is just one dimensional, or, I don't understand why they're doing anything. So there you know, Okay, I need to put in some motivation here. Or, I can't see it. There's virtually no visual description of your setting and you're not pulling me in at all. So having a second set of eyes on it is great.
[00:22:30] Writers groups are good if you can find a good supportive one. A lot of writer's groups can be just a step down to hell. if they're there with a lot of egos brought to the table and they're more concerned with you telling them how great their writing is, as opposed to be willing to hear that, No, you know, this story doesn't work. You've got to try it again. If you can find a good supportive writer's group that's so important. Just be aware of that they can also be toxic. So if you're finding you're not comfortable in a situation, maybe find another group, but somehow another pair of eyes is always advisable.
[00:23:07] Matty: And I suppose that could help not only with things like I can't picture myself and the story, or the writing is flat, or whatever, but also helping you identify the genre because as you say, I think sometimes the author is the least qualified person to pick the genre. And if you find people who read in the genre you think you're writing in and you show them the story, their response might be, It seems well-written, I can visualize everything, but I wouldn't read this because it feels more like X than Y to me.
[00:23:33] Doug: Yeah. And a lot of times if you're in a group, they should tell you that, you know, Horror is not really my thing, but I'm giving you the best feedback I can, but I'm probably not the best one to comment on this. Sometimes they actually are the best one because they come to it with really fresh eyes. And they can also say, Yeah, okay, it's urban fantasy, but wow, this has been done so much, there's absolutely nothing new here and that can help you too.
[00:23:56] Matty: One of the things that I think is challenging about the traditional short fiction market is that the timeframes can be so long so that if you finish your story, you've reviewed it with a second set of eyes, you're sending it out and you're starting at the top, as your recommendation is, and then a year goes by. What is your recommendation about you've sent it to ALFRED HITCHCOCK or whatever, and now you haven't heard anything. Yes. It's just a personal example.
[00:24:24] Doug: Well for me too, I've got one that's been there over a year.
[00:24:28] Matty: Yeah. At some point, can you just say, okay, I guess they don't want it and move on to your next candidate.
[00:24:35] Doug: So generally accepted guidelines in the industry, and I had this from a number of pro editors when I was writing the book, I wanted to verify that the guidance I'm giving is correct, three months is reasonable. It's reasonable to query after three months. Read the market's guidelines. They may say, We typically take six months to get back to you. Okay. Don't worry before six months then for them, but if they don't specify, three months is very typical. And a lot of the new markets are very quick at getting back to you. So that has really changed. Electronic submission and response helps.
[00:25:13] But my main response here is, What are you waiting for? Who cares? Because if you write a story and send it out to a market, I hope, young writer that I'm talking to, new writer, whoever you are, I hope you're not just sitting back waiting for that response to that one story, because my other piece of advice is that to be successful as a writer, it's a numbers game. And that means that the writer with the most stories out to the most markets at any time is going to win. After you send that story out, you're sitting down and you're writing your next story, right? And then you're sending that out and then you're writing your next story and you're sending that out.
[00:25:56] And you should have some sort of system set up where obviously you've recorded where you sent story. So, you know, it went out to market on January 2nd. So you'd be able to track down to see how long it's been out. But the main response to after you send out a story is to write another story and send it out and just keep doing that. You and it should have 20 or more stories out in the mail. So that's the main way to react to long response times. Just keep sending out stories and every now and then, like maybe every month, check on what I would call overdue submissions, which means anything that has been out there with no response for more than three months.
[00:26:36] And then you have a decision. You can check to make sure -- Oh, okay, it's HITCHCOCK. They can take up to a year, so I'm not going to bug them yet. Or it could be, I don't know, LIGHTSPEED. Well, that's weird, because they usually come back in a few weeks. And again, I have one out there right now and I'm not going to bug them, cause I've got enough out there. Usually that's a good sign saying it's sitting somewhere with a second decider.
[00:27:03] But my main response is don't sweat it. If it gets up to half a year and this is unusual for that market, I think it's okay to send a query. Just send an email saying, Dear editor name, I submitted a story title on such-and-such a date. I'm just wondering if you could provide an update on the submission. Simple as that. Be polite. And hopeful.
[00:27:30] Matty: To get back to you would have hoped to have, maybe 20 stories out in circulation under submission to the different platforms. Makes me wonder ... you're writing both short fiction and novels, so do you have any kind of formal or informal division of, if you're sitting down in the morning and you've just finished one piece of work and now you have to decide whether you're going to work on a piece of short fiction or a novel, how does that thought process work for you?
[00:27:54] Doug: Well, to clarify, I started writing exclusively short fiction until I found all my short stories were not short. They were consistently going over 10,000 words. And there are fewer markets the longer you write. There's another piece of advice. As short as you can, there's more markets, the shorter you write. So I started writing novels and right now I'm finishing up a third book in a trilogy. So really most of my creative time is novels now. I took a break to write the writer's guide, PLAYING THE SHORT GAME, that we're talking about.
[00:28:26] When COVID hit, I just found I could be more focused on short fiction. So I went through a little spurt in the early part of 2020 where I just wrote short stories. Then I went back to the novel. I always thought that once I moved to novels, I'd kind of take breaks and write short stories, but novels are big beasts and a trilogy is a really big beast. So I generally found that I had to keep my head in that. But I know a lot of novelists who will flip back and forth and just take a break, write a short story, et cetera.
[00:29:00] I think you're, as a writer ... when I say you, I mean whoever's listening to this or watching this ... you'll have to decide whether that helps you sort of cleanse your palate and it gives you a break from a novel if you hit a tough spot, or whether it's simply so distracting that you find it's too hard to get back into the novel. I think it's really personal. I think I'll always keep writing short stories, but the bulk of my creative time now, and probably in the future, is going to be novels.
[00:29:31] Matty: I felt that for myself, the ideas that became short stories were the ones that were mainly focused on an event, like I was on a cruise, and I started thinking about the idea of somebody jumping overboard. And so I don't want to write a novel about somebody jumping overboard, but it was a great short story. I t was lovely cruise, but I write supernatural suspense and thrillers, so I can't help thinking about things like that.
[00:30:01] Whereas the novel seemed to be more focused on a theme, like acceptance or resistance to celebrity or guilt about a past event. And I'm not suggesting that that's a generalizable differentiator, but that's how it pans out for me.
[00:30:16] So is this an appropriate time to talk about the phrase, the Magic Bakery?
[00:30:22] Doug: Sure. We've covered some of the licensing of rights. I'll add one more before we go ahead because this will lead right into the discussion of selling to the foreign language markets, and that is language rights. So they're pretty easy to understand. Obviously if I sell to an English market, they're going to want English language rights. And if I sell or licensed to a French magazine or anthology, they'll want French language rights. However, in both those cases, it's going to be first rights unless it's a reprint in English. So if I'm selling for the first time in English, they want first English rights. If that story's already been published and I sell it to a French magazine.
[00:31:05] And if you and I are talking, I'd probably say, Hey, Matty, I just sold a reprint to a French magazine. I'm not really selling a reprint. What I'd be licensing would be first rights again, first French language rights. That's one other differentiator. First rates relate to the media. So it could be first print rights, first electronic rights, first audio rights, but also the language. So I might've sold first print rights in English. If I sell it to a French magazine, an electronic magazine, I'd be licensing first electronic rights in French. Still first rights. So with that one additional piece of information on licensing, maybe we can talk about the Magic Bakery.
[00:31:50] Matty: Let me actually ask you one question about that so that if you're interested in selling into a foreign language market, are you submitting in your own language? Let's say English for an American or English speaking country, you're sending your English version of it to the French publication and then they take care of the translation, I assume?
[00:32:13] Doug: Yeah. Can I defer that? It'll be the second thing I answer, but yeah, there's a few points about submitting to foreign language markets that I want to go over and that is one of them.
[00:32:27] First, the Magic Bakery term is something I stole shamelessly from Dean Wesley Smith. I quote him in the book. Dean is the partner to Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and they're both well-known speculative fiction authors, and they're also excellent teachers of both the craft and the business side of writing.
[00:32:49] Dean has coined this Magic Bakery term, and what he's talking about, and now that we've talked about rights, hopefully all this will make sense, he said, A writer essentially has a Magic Bakery. If you manage your rights correctly, meaning you make sure that the rights revert to you and they become yours again after your story has been published, you essentially have this Magic Bakery, what you can sell a cake and then magically it'll appear and you could sell it again.
[00:33:20] And of course that selling it again means everything we're about to talk about. So that's what the Magic Bakery means. If you protect your rights that you license and make sure they revert back to you, you're going to be able to resell, have your stories published again and again, in a variety of formats.
[00:33:38] And the first format, before I get into foreign language, is what we just call a reprint. And that just means I sold a story to ASIMOV'S. The rights have come back to me and then theology is coming out next year. They're looking for stories. The story is a great fit for that anthology and the anthology, they'll usually phrase it this way, We'll accept reprints. Or they might say we'll consider previously published work, something like that. That means legally they will be licensing second rights. So I'd be able to submit that story that I had published originally in ASIMOV'S, and send it to that anthology, where it would be published, if they accepted it, would be published as a reprint.
[00:34:23] Let's talk about if those markets are foreign language, and ever so many of them. If you want to know how to find foreign language markets, I'll point your listeners and viewers to my website, which is smithwriter.com. If they go there on the homepage, there's a For Writers link, and if you click on that, one of the first links you'll see is what I call the Foreign Market List. And I list 70 plus different markets, non-English markets, around the world. They're speculative fiction markets because I write the speculative fiction. But that's how you would find a market.
[00:34:59] One other recommendation is don't submit to a foreign language market before you sold that story in English. And the reason I say that is some of the top pro English markets actually have contracts in place with foreign language magazines, where those magazines have the right to select stories that come out of the English magazines' issues and translate them and publish them in their own language. So in other words, I think ASIMOV'S is one of those, FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION I think is another, and there's probably more. In other words, if you sell to one of those English magazines, they are going to be licensing foreign language rights from you as well as English. And you might say , Well, why? This is what they'll tell you. We have these agreements in place, and those magazines will have the right to publish stories that we publish. They'll do the translation, but we purchased the language rights from them and just relicense to them for nothing.
[00:35:59] So if you sell that story, instead of going first to a top pro market in English, if you sell it to a foreign language market and then say , Well, I haven't licensed first rights in English yet, I just licensed first rights in French or German or whatever, I can still submit it to an ASIMOV'S, you may be surprised because if they want to buy your story and you tell them, Oh, by the way, it has been published, not in English, but it's been published in this language, they're going to say, Oh, sorry, can't buy it because we need to license first rights in that language, and you've already given away first rights or sold first rights and that language. So my first recommendation is sell it in English, and then once the rights revert to you, look for foreign language markets that you can submit to.
[00:36:46] So you're going to find the markets via my list, the cover letter and your story should all be in English. If the markets that I flag on my market list as the ones you should go to, the green ones, they're flagged either with a dollar sign, meaning they actually pay you money, or just with a yes, meaning they don't pay you money, but they will accept the story submission in English that's been previously published in English. If it's one of those markets, they do the translation for free. And obviously they have people who can communicate to you in English and can read English and translate English into their language. So, yeah, unless it's your other language, unless you're fluent in that other language, don't ever try to submit in their language. In other words, don't go to Google Translate, type in your story, and take that and submit it. That will not end well. So yeah, you can just deal completely in English with them, cover letters, story, et cetera.
[00:37:47] It should be the same process you go through for submitting to a foreign language market as if you're submitting to an English reprint market. And the reason I say that is your cover letter needs to have that second sentence in the first paragraph. It needs to say, This story first appeared in so-and-so magazine on such-and- such a date.
[00:38:07] And there's another reason for submitting only to pro markets and English, because if a foreign language market sees that your story has appeared in a big pro market in English, that's a selling point for them. They might even put that on their cover, as, First appeared in ASIMOV'S, or something like that. So another reason to just start at the top and only target pro markets.
[00:38:27] Matty: When you say pro rates, what do you mean by that?
[00:38:30] Doug: Yeah, pro to somebody might not be pro to somebody else. So again, I'm a speculative fiction writer, so when I say pro rates, I'm using the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's definition of what a pro rate is. And SFWA, as it's called, currently says that a pro rate is, I think it's 8 cents a word. That's 8 cents US a word is a pro rate. So when I talk about pro rates, that's what I'm talking about. And if you can find something better than that, that's great because quite frankly, eight cents a word is still not that much. You're not going to retire being a short fiction writer on the money you make from a short fiction writer. So 5,000-word short story at pro rates is going to give you $400.
[00:39:20] Matty: And what should people expect in terms of reprint payments?
[00:39:25] Doug: Less. You probably guessed that. I've seen some pro markets that will pay, if they do take reprints, they'll pay as much as 3 cents a word. If you could find 3 cents a work for a reprint, you're doing well. Often it's only one cent of word. Sometimes it will be a flat fee like $25, $50, $75, $100. At that point, you as a writer have to decide is that enough to make it worthwhile, my time worthwhile, because even selling a reprint, you're going to have communication with the editor. You're probably going to have two review and sign their contract. You're going to have to go through maybe an editing process, which should be pretty light because it's already been professionally published. You're going to have to go through page proofs. So all of that is a time sink. So decide what the minimum amount you want to be paid for that time is.
[00:40:18] And also remember, even if it's only, I don’t know, $50, if you think that's enough, you can sell a reprint as many times as you can sell it. And as long as you find a market who's willing to republish your story, you can sell it again. So you can end up, even if you've got pro rates for your first sale, you could end up making more money from the reprints than from your first professional sale, even at a lower per word rate.
[00:40:43] Matty: Is there a guideline about how long you should wait between second rights reprints before you pursue the next one?
[00:40:52] Doug: It's not a guideline. It's something I cover when I talk about short fiction contracts in the book. It's the reversion clause again. So you should have a very clear reversion clause in your contract. And if there's not one there, I give suggested wording for putting one in and what reasonable reversion periods are. And it's fairly simple. If it's a magazine, your rights typically revert to you after your story has appeared in the issue. And about the time the next issue is going to come out. So if they publish every three months, your rights for that story will come back in the five-to-six-month timeframe and that's reasonable.
[00:41:28] If it's an anthology, typically it will be a year after the anthology is published, sometimes up to two years. Those are the typical ranges I've seen. You can't legally do anything with your story. You don't have the rights to the story until they revert back to you.
[00:41:44] Matty: Are anthologies usually reprints or is it just as likely that they would be a first rights publication?
[00:41:51] Doug: Actually, the reverse. They're usually not reprints. But a lot of them are. So that's why I say it's a great market to find reprints at decent rates. Most anthologies will ask for non-previously published stories. But if they take reprints, they'll say that. But again, it would be at a lower rate. Sometimes not, though, which is even better.
[00:42:16] Matty: It seems as if every time I ask anyone about how to find out about anthology opportunities, it's always, you know, Hang out at the bar at the conference or something like that. I've never really been able to get a definitive answer about a more formalized way than just hanging out with other short fiction writers who may be editing an anthology. Any thoughts there?
[00:42:38] Doug: Yeah, it's fairly simple, actually. I give a number of market sources in the book. I'll mention my top two. One is Ralan.com. It's a site that's maintained by Ralan Conley. Ralan is an English writer but lives in Denmark. And he's maintained this site for, God, probably 30 years now. So go there and he has it organized nicely into pro markets and anthology markets. And so the pro markets for magazines and the anthology markets will have a mix of pro rates and non-pro rates. But it tends to be a shorter list. So just go there and run down the current open, active anthologies.
[00:43:23] The other source is The Grinder. Just Google "the grinder submission guidelines," something like that and you'll find it. It's a long URL. It's thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com or something like that. It's a free site. Couple of neat things about it is it's got a search feature, so if you're looking for urban fantasy markets, you can actually type that in and it'll give you a list of markets by length, too. Reprints, ones that take reprints thing. So it's got a nice little search feature. And it's free. Also something that a lot of people use for it, it gives you the "report your response times." So you'll be able to type in a market name and say, Yeah, their current average response time over the last 12 months has been 17 weeks. So you'll know that. Oh, okay. Mine's only been out for 10, so I'm just going to sit on it and not do anything and not bother them.
[00:44:21] There's another one. Duotrope. It started charging a subscription fee and quite frankly, I don't know why anyone would use it. The Grinder has all the same search features and Ralan, it's not the most elegant of sites, but it's always got the markets that are relevant. So those are the only two I know I use.
[00:44:44] You also go to Facebook. Facebook groups. There's a number of groups that will post open submission calls. So if you go to Facebook, go to groups, do a search for anything that has open calls, open submission calls, anything like that. Short fiction submission calls, things like that, do a search and you'll find them. I list the ones I use in the book. But yeah, that's the easiest way for you to find more.
[00:45:12] Matty: The other platform I've heard about and actually use myself is Submittable. Do you have any thoughts about Submittable as a good platform to use? Sometimes you don't have a choice, right? The place you're submitting to specifies.
[00:45:23] Doug: Yeah. I've got probably a dozen stories out to various markets that use Submittable right now, but I've never used it myself as a source for open calls. I mean, it's a very credible site, so sure. I just prefer the other one. I can go to either one of those sites, I tend to go to Ralan and just look at his new market postings. And then I have my email notification turned on for the Facebook groups. So if someone posts a new open call, I get an email about it and it's pretty easy to keep track of things that way.
[00:45:55] Matty: We've hit, I think, most of the bullet points that we had talked about discussing, but we haven't gone to audio markets. Anything you want to add about any of the previous topics before we move on to audio markets?
[00:46:07] Doug: If you go to my website about foreign markets I have a little article which basically, I think it's called " Submitting to Foreign Language Markets," so read that and it explains not only how to use my site, but mistakes to avoid, some caveats and warnings about foreign language markets. Sometimes getting paid will be more difficult, more and more of them are using PayPal now, but when I first started submitting to them, you'd have to wait to get a check and it would usually be a check drawn on a foreign bank, and sometimes that was hard to cash when you're in your North American city. So check that out.
[00:46:43] I also have a number of translation sites that I recommend. Do not use them to translate your stuff into their language. It's meant for the reverse. Some of these websites that I list on my market lists are only in their language. So if you want to know exactly what their submission guidelines say, I usually summarize them, or do summarize them, but if you want to get more detail and you can use one of those translation sites to translate their submission page and understand exactly what they're saying.
[00:47:15] Audio markets. Great, great alternative, or another option. The cool thing about most audio markets, there are a few exceptions, but they actually prefer reprints. So they prefer that you've sold the story in English already. And I think the reason for that is it raises the quality of their slush pile. So they know they're going to be getting submissions of stories that have already been professionally published and edited. And again, another reason for submitting to pro markets, if they get a story that has been previously published in one of the top pro markets, it's going to help you get them to pay attention to you, and you're probably out of their slush pile immediately.
[00:48:02] The rates you get we'll probably be sort of the high end of reprint markets. So you'll probably get a hundred dollars plus 3 cents a word, that sort of thing. And sometimes more . Some of them ask for first rights now, which means first print rights means they'll publish both the print and the audio version. But most of them are just simply doing an audio presentation of your story.
[00:48:27] And again, go to Ralan, and go to The Grinder, et cetera, and you can find a list of audio markets. There's not all a lot. Somewhere probably nowadays between 10 and 20. Lower, closer to 10, if you're looking for one, you actually pay your money. Some of them are just for the love. If you want the coolness of hearing your story narrated.
[00:48:50] Matty: So where are listener is going to consume those stories?
[00:48:54] Doug: Usually online and usually podcasts. Originally a lot of them were downloadable audio files, but most of them are online and you just go to the newest issue and you click on that issue and it will start playing over the internet. A lot of them are strictly story anthologies formats or magazine formats, et cetera.
[00:49:19] Some of them have a talk show around the stories of there'll be a discussion of maybe speculative fiction movies, reviews, and things like that. And then they'll have a story and then they'll go back to more discussion and something like that. So they all vary.
[00:49:35] The other thing that varies is the quality of the narration. I've been pretty lucky. I tend to target the big audio markets and some of the performances have just been wonderful, just amazing. It's like, Wow, totally nailed that. That character, you got the whole feeling, you got the right voice. The good audio markets will contact you, the narrator will contact you, and say, Hi, I've been picked in area your story. Just want to go over a few of the pronunciations. Like a lot of my stories, I'll have a lot of names that, might not be English names. There'll be fantastic names or alien names, and they just want to check with me that they're going to be saying that word right, which is quite cool. So that's always a good sign if they take the time to do that, they're taking the job very seriously.
[00:50:27] So just a warning. I've had probably a dozen stories published in audio format. Probably half a dozen of those, I'm just thrilled with. I think they're amazing. Another five that are really good, really solid. And then one that just makes me cringe. You can't tell, you don't know what you're going to get, but if you pick one of the top markets, you're probably going to get a very good narrator. They have a stable of narrators and they have and unless you're unlucky to get a new one, they're trying out, you're going to be okay.
[00:50:55] Matty: Do you have any recourse in a circumstance where the product is cringe-worthy?
[00:50:59] Doug: No. Other than I don't point my readers to it. And that's about it.
[00:51:02] Matty: The audio space seems like it would start to blur the lines of first and second rights because it's a little less straightforward. Like if you had a narrator record a short story and you put it up on some platform, then obviously if you sell to someone else, you're not selling it as first rights. But if you read a portion of a work in progress and then wanted to sell first audio rights, that kind of feels like it would be okay. Is the first second rights thing trickier in audio.
[00:51:32] Doug: Yeah, I should have clarified that. So you sell to an audio magazine, they're licensing first audio rights. So again, it's first rights. It's a combination of the media and the language that determines first rights. So even though the story was published and you license first print rights, when you sell it to the audio magazine, you're licensing first audio rights.
[00:51:55] Now, if you did the reverse, if you sold it to that audio market first, technically you haven't licensed them first print rights, but if you tried to sell it to one of the top pro magazines, first of all, you'd have to tell them this story appeared on PSEUDOPOD or podcasts or whatever. And they are probably going to say, I'm sorry, we consider that previously published, even though they are not going to be licensing audio rights from you.
[00:52:25] It's more, the main reason first versus second rates, is we want to be the first market that offers this story to our readers, our consumers of fiction, and their response would be, That's a pretty big podcast. A lot of people have probably heard this story and some of those are probably our subscribers. If we publish your story, they're going to be ticked off. They're going to say, this has already been published. I heard this story. So you're probably, even though legally you haven't licensed first print rights or first electronic rights, they're going to view it as being published.
[00:53:01] The reverse, as I said, is not true. A lot of the audio markets actually prefer if it's appeared in some sort of text format.
[00:53:09] Matty: Another first rights question is if you have a piece of short fiction that you've been using, let's say, as a reader magnet, and now you want to offer it to publications, first rights or second rights?
[00:53:22] Doug: None. Second rights at best. But again, even the ones who take reprints might say whatever you submit cannot be commercially available anywhere. So in other words, if you've got it up at Amazon or if you're giving it to readers for your mailing list, yeah, that's why the reader magnets I use are stories, I still offer them as reprints, but only as reprints. And so just consider if you've done that, it's been published, so at best you can view it as being able to license second rights.
[00:53:55] Matty: So just to wrap up our conversation, what do you think, in this concept of the Magic Bakery, what do you think is the most overlooked I'll say low hanging fruit, the easiest thing that people should be doing with stories that maybe they've had published once that you feel is underutilized?
[00:54:14] Doug: I think a lot of people, they need to understand rights, first of all. But once you understand first and second rights, it's pretty easy to do a search of any of the market lists I mentioned to find markets that take reprints. It's found money. I mean, you've written the story. You've gone through all the problem of it, and met with the editor on the first time it was published, so he's got a nice clean, publishable story that someone thought was good enough to give you money for, you're probably going to be able to sell that again. So go ahead and look for reprint markets.
[00:54:44] Audio markets are just fun. So I think you should go after those too, and they tend to pay better than a reprint market.
[00:54:52] And again the foreign language markets, it’s a different world, but again you're probably going to have a higher acceptance rate, especially if you've published in a pro English market for these. They won't pay as much. That being said, I think I'm averaging over a hundred dollars per reprint sale for a foreign language story.
[00:55:13] One thing that we didn't talk about is collections. Once you've done this enough and you have enough stories that have been previously published, I think writers should look to as soon as possible, as soon as you have enough stories, which means at least 80,000 words you should look at putting out a collection and I go into a lot of detail about how to do that in the book. There's two options. You can go after a small press publisher, because the big traditional publishers are not going to want a collection. They don't make money traditionally. Or you can indy publish a collection. And we probably need another half hour to talk about how to figure out how to put a collection together and sequence the stories, pick the stories, sequence the stories, and then a lot of other considerations as well.
[00:55:59] Matty: Well, we need to leave some information for people to be incented to go check out PLAYING THE SHORT GAME. So I'm going to use that as an entree to invite you to let listeners know where they can find out more about you and your fiction and nonfiction work online.
[00:56:13] Doug: Thanks, Matty. Easiest starting point is my website, which is Smithwriter.com. The one advantage of having a simple last name for once, it makes for a simple website name. So smithwriter.com, and there you'll find links to where you can buy all my books, the foreign market lists, et cetera. And the book that mostly I've been taking references from is called PLAYING THE SHORT GAME: HOW TO MARKET AND SELL SHORT FICTION. And you'll find links to that too. And it's on all the various book retailers in both print and ebook formats.
[00:56:55] Matty: Thank you so much, Doug. This has been so helpful.
[00:56:58] Doug: Well, thank you for having me on. Nice to finally put a face to the name.
Links
Here is the information I shared in the interview wrap-up about my own approach to short fiction:
https://www.theindyauthor.com/blog/the-indy-authors-approach-to-short-fiction
https://www.theindyauthor.com/blog/the-indy-authors-approach-to-short-fiction
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