Triple-Threat Marketing for Short Fiction

By Bruce Holland Rogers

I've published over 100 stories in the last quarter of a century. Sometimes I think that's a sign of masochism. The short story is notoriously difficult to sell, and not simply because there is heavy competition for every publishing opportunity. Short fiction is hard to sell in part because its market is so diverse.

Consider science fiction. The sort of story that primarily values character and style may find a place in Asimov's or Fantasy & Science Fiction, where the science or futuristic story elements may function only as a colorful background. But it's a waste of time and postage to send such a story to Analog or Absolute Magnitude, where writers must take pains to get the science right becuase the science is, in effect, the point of the story. Likewise, you are probably wasting half of your postage if you are sending the same literary stories to The Sun and The New Yorker.

Short story writers can take at least four approaches to this diverse marketplace. They can choose the path of the head. They can take the path of the heart. They can blaze their own trails. Or they can deliberately mix and match these paths and trails.

The path of the head demands that the writer get to know a few markets very well. The writer then writes work specifically for that market. This kind of approach works best for markets whose preferences are predictable or even formulaic. The supermarket checkout magazine Woman's World, for instance, publishes a romance and a mystery in each weekly issue, always to a precisely determined word count. The mysteries especially follow three or four plot structures---many of them are biter bit stories, in which the villain is tripped up by his or her own wickedness. The plot structures of the romances are a bit more diverse, but are still limited to a few types.

A writer on the path of the head might read Woman's World every week, using not just the stories themselves, but the articles and advertising to get a good sense of what's expected. Then the writer writes for that particular market.

While the requirements of a New Yorker story are much less rigid, the path of the head is still a plausible way to try to sell a story to that market.

A writer on the path of the heart, on the other hand, is not so analytical. Rather than aiming at a market, the writer aims to make the story work on its own terms, however idiosyncratic they may be. On this path, the writer doesn't think about markets until the story is done. Then the task is to look at the finished story and ask, "What magazine has published something like this in the past?" To answer the question, the writer has to be broadly familiar with a great number of publications. (To supplement your own magazine reading, a good web site for magazine reviews written from a marketing perspective is http://www.sfo.com/~sarapeyton/litmags.html.)

For markets that seek highly formulaic fiction, the path of the head is probably the only way to reach them. Unfortunately, a story that is rejected by such a market may have nowhere else to go. Some of the best fiction is written on the path of the heart. Unfortunately, such fiction is sometimes so idiosyncratic that it's hard to find any market for it at all.

Writers can blaze their own trails by devising their own ways to market to their readers directly. This is, for example, what I have done with www.shortshortshort.com, an email fiction subscription service with nearly 400 readers in 29 countries. Creating such a distribution channel is hard work, but it gives me a reliable audience.

The best approach, though, is to combine all three. With a given story, for example, I may select a market that I'm aiming for. The Sun is my favorite magazine. I sometimes take the path of the head, writing a story with The Sun in mind. Before I submit the story, though, I blaze my own trail for it, sending it to my email subscribers, a form of prior publication which The Sun doesn't object to. Then I submit to the magazine. If they don't take the story, then I find myself on the path of the heart, trying to figure out what other magazines---among the many I have bought or read in the library---might be suitable for such a story.

A writer can successfully market fiction by knowing a few markets well, by reading at least a sample issue or two of many markets, or by considering unconventional ways to reach paying readers. No matter which approach you take, short fiction is still hard to sell. That's why I come at it from all three angles at once.

Stories by Bruce Holland Rogers have won a Pushcart Prize, two Nebula Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and nomination for the Edgar. Rogers is the author of Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer. He lives in Eugene, Oregon. A newspaper article about his short-short story subscription service can be found at

http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/02/01/ol.shortshort.0201.html