Unabashed

I’ve had it. It’s not the rejection letters, and it’s not the lengthy timespan between the moment that I mail the submission and finally receive my rejection. It’s just the process. The reformatting every story every time I send it out because this editor wants italics and this one doesn’t, this one wants paragraphs indented and that one wants flush paragraphs with a space in between. This editor wants Courier New while that one prefers Times New Roman. This one wants your name at the top of every page, that one wants your name and address at the bottom of every page, those guys don’t want anything on any page, but do give a little life history before your story is even accepted. And if you fail at any one little part of that equation, your beloved story will be thrown unceremoniously into the trash.

I realize there are millions of stories out there in competition against one another and that editors and agents are locked into a mad reading dash to get through them all as timely as they can, but I’m just sick of it.

I had a lot more fun writing when I was just writing for myself and didn’t have to endure the waiting on the edge of my seat for a rejection slip. Sure, I’ve had some acceptances, and they’re great, but you know what? I’ve been paid a whopping twelve bucks for the four accepted stories I’ve written so far (plus one contributor’s copy of the anthology my work appeared in). Considering the work I’ve invested into this game, the return is simply not worth it. Especially not now, when the Internet is re-programming the publishing industry as we speak. And besides, the acceptances I have received, along with some very well-worded rejections, just give me what I feel like I needed all along: confirmation that my writing is good. That my stories can be read and enjoyed. But also, that they may not fit in with what the publishers are interpreting as market needs right now.

I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m paying attention. I know people don’t browse the ‘Net for fiction, but I also know that a self-published novel that gets linked up on a high-visibility site (like BoingBoing) can lead to a professional publication as well (see David Wellington). Regardless, I’m throwing in the towel on the publishing industry. I’ve sent my last submission. Editors one and all, you can breathe a sigh of relief, because my circulation of twelve to twenty stories per year has just come to a screeching halt, and your slush pile is now about .98 ounces lighter for it.

None of this is to say that I’m quitting writing, although I did consider doing just that in recent months. But no, this is what I am. I have been writing for fun, as a hobby, since I was twelve years old and I don’t have the brakes to be able to stop what I am. And this is also not to say that I won’t actively seek and audience. There are other avenues now, with Scribd, CreateSpace and even upstart DeviantArt out there, it’s becoming easier and easier for the indie writer to publish their own material. If I happen to meet an editor or publisher who might be interested in my work, I’ll not hesitate to try to network them into my web. But the submissions, they are draining my soul, and I am done with them.

There is a good side to this, though, so rejoice, Internets! The good news is that I’ll no longer be restricted by what I can and cannot publish myself. Since I have nothing in circulation, I can self-publish anything I like. And that’s what I aim to do. Beginning today, mattmitchellfiction.com is genuinely going to be about Matt Mitchell’s Fiction. I am but a small independent writer in a great big world, I don’t seek to have renown or fame or wealth beyond my wildest imaginings. Earning a living for my efforts would be nice, but I have a good job, so it is not required. I am going back to writing for the joy of it, to writing for me, to writing what I want to write. I’m no longer writing for what I think a publisher might want or need. I’m not writing what I hope might sell. I’m back to being me.

Hello, me, I’m glad to see you’re back. I am, once again, the emminently unpublishable Matt Mitchell. Thank God.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: editor, Fiction, marketing, markets, publisher, publishing, self-publishing, selling my stories, writing

There are lessons to be learned over at Whatever. John Scalzi announced the winning entrants (two runners up and one grand prize) for his Zoe’s Tale ARC contest this morning and it occurred to me, as I read the entries (many of which were really good), that it might be better to be published on the Whatever than in a publication dedicated to the exact same type of material. There are a lot of creative types who read Scalzi regularly, so it just makes sense that they’ll write some really good material in response to his request. And this is where it gets kind of interesting: When the contest started out it seemed like it was just a fun little thing; you might even go so far as to call it gimicky. Someone send in something funny, entertain me, and I’ll give you this book. But then I started reading the entries. I saw mostly what I expected to see: nothing you could really call a submission, just little anecdotes and humorous quips people were writing on the fly. But a few of them are good, very good, as you can see by the winners. I began to realize that these weren’t just little humorous quips, these are stories.

As it is, they are published–on Whatever, which is one of the most-read personal blogs on the internet. Not a venue where you’d expect to find good fiction unless the author published something himself, which he rarely does.  What’s interesting to me is that, even though it was a very informal forum, we got to see the whole process unfold right there in the comments section. Every entry (or submission, as it were) is readable by anyone. The three best, as judged by the site owner, got their very own dedicated post right on the front page of the site. There is a curious lack of linkage to their websites, at least for those who provided websites to be linked to. I would have thought a winning entry would get a link on the front page too, but you have to dig back through the comments of the ARC contest post to find out where their websites are (JS must be greedy with his Technorati ratings handouts). (JS advises me this was just an oversight and has been corrected). But even without the link, that’s a lot of great exposure for a writer or blogger.

These entries may not be a fit for SF&F or Strange Horizons, but they’re no less entertaining, and I would come back and read more if I thought more would follow. This is a serious feat that I’m wondering if anyone else will pick up on. It would be interesting to see more contests like this one, basically asking for fiction (I know there have been some of these before, I just haven’t seen many done so well). Most of the time if someone asks for fiction, even if they provide the theme, they’ll get a lot of 3k-word stories that are basically just more of the same. This time, the stories responding to the theme “The evening of August 19, 1994. What can you tell me about it?” were actually interesting (for the most part). And I generally don’t like to read short fiction.

I didn’t write an entry myself, but I did keep checking back to see what was being written. Maybe next time I’ll give it a try. And yes, I’ll go ahead and say that it would be nice to see Whatever do this as a regular feature. I’d do it here if I had half his readership and, you know, some stuff to give away. The results could be looked back upon one day as visionary.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Contest, Fiction, John Scalzi, markets, stories, Zoe's ARC

Warren Ellis on the state of the big three of fantasy and scifi magazines:

ASIMOV’S, ANALOG, F&SF; they don’t think they need saving. I mean, they haven’t changed for years, have they? They’re not designed to be wanted because they don’t want to be wanted, not really. They want to be left alone to do their thing, and they don’t want any loud new people in the room. They serve a dwindling audience, and they have to be aware of that so they have to be in it to simply serve that audience, to provide that presumably cosy experience to their people until the last light goes out. Otherwise they would have done something different years ago. This is why those three magazines have a web presence that can charitably be described as vestigial.

The man has a point. I look at the covers of some of these magazines and I see images too similar to what I saw in 1985, or even earlier, cover art that wasn’t even progressive when Omni’s covers looked roughly the same in 1979. It’s sad to me, as a writer, because those are the shining three beacons of publishing success–at least in the short fiction market–for a speculative fiction author. Mr. Ellis is speculating on writing another article on what might be done to save them and I’ll be very interested to see it. For my own part I subscribe to both Asimov’s and F&SF, but I’m not particularly happy with either. Of course, I always believe they’d do much better if they’d publish some of my stuff :-)

Also see this article by the same man, and this one by someone else entirely (Cory Doctorow).

And I’ll end this in the same way Warren ended his article:

And then someone else asked me why there’s still an sf magazine called “Analog.”

Update: 10-24-07
John Scalzi has thrown his voice into the fray on this topic which has attracted a lot of attention. He’s given this useful quote, a bit of positive spin for a guy like me, who (so far) has no large readership or SFFWA publishing credits to his name:

I suspect it’s not that hard to raise consciousness of new work online to the level you’ll find in the pages of the Big Three, given their current circulation numbers. That gives emerging writers a way to build careers outside those magazines, and it means the Big Three run a further risk of isolating themselves, both from where science fiction literature is going, and from the audiences building around these new writers.

And Warren has added to his original thought with another post.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: markets, SFFWA, short fiction