Can publishing be a handicap to publishing?

[Marc Joan]

If you first publish in the wrong place, that is....? My dilemma is this; I have a significant number of short stories ready for submission. I am always told that virtually all mainstream publishers are not interested in short story collections, especially single-author collections; apparently they don't sell. However, I am also told that publishing short stories in magazines may be useful in terms of building one's credibility, getting a loyal readership, and hence eventually landing a deal for a 'proper' book. So I have put together a long list of magazines that may, in principle, be interested in the short stories that I have written. But I get the strong impression that the quality control of some of these magazines is, ahem, variable. My question to all of you out there who have been through this process is: can you harm your reputation by being published in a magazine which habitually publishes poorly-written material? Or is any publication, no matter where, a Good Thing for a previously unpublished writer?

 

[Marc Joan]

Thanks very much for the reply to this. I would have 'liked' it, but it's gone. Seems like there as many sharks in the literary sea as there are in other waters (sigh). Incidentally, I wonder if it would be better to have a password-protected, non-public forum dealing specifically with legal matters including contracts?

 

[AgentPete]

You can always take discussions “private” by starting a new “Conversation” (see box top right of page). This gives you quite a bit of control as to who you wish to invite into the discussion, and obviously, it’s not public.

 

[Carol Rose]

You can always take discussions “private” by starting a new “Conversation” (see box top right of page). This gives you quite a bit of control as to who you wish to invite into the discussion, and obviously, it’s not public.

Thanks, Peter. I didn't know we and that feature on here.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Don't mind the 'public' seeing this. In 2007 I had a short story published in an arts council backed anthology. The anthology got a slating in its few reviews. My contribution escaped slating but did not attract attention either. What I got from it was the experience of doing a reading in public at the Durham Book Fair, which I did from memory, to do it as a performance, so to speak, rather than reading with my head down on the page. You can get away with that if the story's short enough. I revised it, in January it was published on-line with 'Litro' magazine . Years ago an agent had tried to sell it to a TV company in the market for new drama material. They sat on it a while before declining...I was so encouraged that he thought it even worth the go. He encouraged me to try my hand at a novel for the very reasons you describe, Marc.

I love the short story form myself, and novellas; I'm sick of doorstops, I think it's time to bring them back. 'Don't Look Now' and 'The Turn Of The Screw' ...so many enduring power gems.
Peter's the expert. I've come to feel if where you submit future work won't bring you literary/market credit on being published there, or may bring adverse associations it won't help later, while you might compromise your chances of trying it elsewhere. It's great for confidence to start with, any offer to publish, but having once broken through that tape, it's better to aim high, I feel, and get ready to fail a few times or a lot of times.

 

[Brian Clegg]

I'm sure you are right about publishers not liking short story collections - even big name authors seem to struggle to get them out. The funny thing is, I know lots of people who like and buy short story collections (me included). But magazines are generally the way to get them published (and if you look in the short story collections to do make it into book form, many if not most of them were first published in a magazine). I don't think the magazine has to have great literary merit, as long as it's not got a reputation for being bad. The only short stories I've had published so far were actually in scientific journals - two in Nature and two in the Communications of the ACM, so not exactly literary vessels, yet I still think they add to the fiction credentials. (And they paid. In fact the only place I've ever had a better payment per word than CACM was Playboy.)

 

[Marc Joan]

So glad that there are others who still love the short story. Turn of the Screw is definitely one of my favourites.
Brian: very interested that you had short stories published in Nature - I didn't realise that they did that, though I haven't read it for a few years, so I'm not up to speed. The reason I am interested is that a subset of my short stories, while (hopefully) readable by those without a strong science background, are based on (somewhat contentious) issues and themes relevant to current biomedical research. May I ask if you submitted your stories to Nature on spec, or were you commissioned, or did you have a chat with the editor beforehand to gauge interest?

 

[Brian Clegg]

Nature has run a short story as its final page (called Nature Futures) for many years - you can see more here. These are short shorts, around 850 to 950 words. I submitted them on spec, though they do commission a fair number of them, but it's worth reading a few of the existing stories to get a feel for what they like. Here's the submission details.

 

[Marc Joan]

Thanks - I don't have anything suitable of that extreme shorty shortness, but I will keep it in mind.