When I made my first tentative submissions in late 2015, I did so with a belief in my own ability to write a good story, while being under no illusions when it came to the competitive nature of the market. Selling stories is not easy, it took me four months to make a sale, and four months more for it to appear in print before the door seemed to creak open just a bit, and the placements began to flow. At that point I could not have seriously looked ahead to being able to report that I have now placed over one million words of short fiction.
This morning Hiraeth Books in the US picked up a reprint of my fantasy short “The Fall of the Dark God,” which first appeared in Lovecraftiana back in early 2017. This is the first of my “Avestium” fantasy series, and was actually my first fantasy story in total, written longhand (if memory serves) back in the 1990s, and polished a great many times over the years. This placement takes me to 1, 004, 417 words that have been accepted for publication, including all reprints and indeed a couple of pieces accepted for print but which failed to appear due to markets folding before the edition could be released. The point is, the stories got past the gatekeepers, and that's what's important here. Stories actually in print will be a whole other running calculation, and it'll be interesting to see what figure I've reached actually on paper (or digits) too.
I am closing in on my two hundredth placement, which will be the next major milestone, but a million words placed feels like the ultimate round figure. A million. Imagine substituting “dollars” for “words.” That gives you some idea of the volume, when you think of the buying power. A dollar for every word that has got past the gatekeepers in the last seven years would buy a very nice home indeed.
Unfortunately, the pay scale, averaged out, is about one percent of that. Pro markets pay very nicely, but accept very rarely, and while all writers are eternally hopefully of making it past those particular gates, the odds are correspondingly low. I know folks who have been in the game a lot longer than me and can't get into the top end of the market. Heck, yesterday I had a rejection from Analog which came personally from the editor in chief, and that's an accolade for me as it seems to say I made it past all the first-readers!
I wonder if the next million words will take seven years? We shall see—and maybe there'll be a few more lucrative sales along the way!
Cheers,
Mike Adamson
Header image by LuminaObscura from Pixabay
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