A Writer’s Gripe

Image by Lukas Bieri from Pixabay

So I’ve learned that I can’t post stories here, and also submit them for publication. This is not only a colossal pain in the ass, which fundamentally alters my approach to this website, but it also highlights a frustrating contradiction of the publishing world.

My plan thus far has been to post regular, quality fiction to my Short Stories section, while getting feedback, and eventually submitting these stories for publication. But now that I’ve been able to dig more into the world of traditional publishing, I’ve learned that they do not look kindly upon submitting stories you’ve “already published” on your personal website.

Now, part of me understands where they’re coming from. Who wants to publish something that’s already been seen? However, these same traditional publishers would be the first to tell you that publishing something on your personal website is not the same thing as really being published. Suppose, for example, that in a cover or query letter, I were to include my own website in my author bio as proof that I’ve been published before. Would that impress traditional publishers? I don’t think so. Anyway, I don’t see why you can’t submit a story from your personal site, and just take it down from the site when it’s accepted for publication.

And the world of publishing is full of practical and theoretical contradictions like this. There are any number of stories about authors who started publishing their novels or stories online, and then got a traditional deal. I understand that ultimately money talks, and that those authors probably had tens of thousands of committed readers before an agent swooped down and scooped them up, hoping to cash in on an established platform, but then the same logic ought to apply in reverse to a much smaller website with much fewer readers. Why can’t a guy try out his stories on a personal audience before expanding? If the audience is small enough, it’s really no different from a writers’ group. If it’s large enough, you get a publishing deal anyway. That makes no sense to me.

The practical consequence of this is that I’ve got to make some tough decisions going forward. 1) I will probably have to self-publish my existing online stories. Some of them have similar themes, which will help, but others are quite different from each other, which will make putting them in the same volume potentially awkward. 2) Going forward, my personal time constraints mean that I can’t both write full-length short stories for this website and full length short stories for traditional publication. And I really do think that getting my work into traditional short story publications will help a lot with the querying efforts for my Tredder novels.

So what now? Do I stop posting fiction to my website? Was all that time and effort spent writing fiction for this site wasted? I’ve written 148, 929 words of fiction alone on this website! I suppose it could be a good opportunity to learn how self-publishing works, and I can still podcast these stories, which can draw readers to my website, and to whatever books or stories I publish or self-publish. I’ve put too much effort into this to abandon it, but I’m feeling frustrated. I simply don’t have the time to write twice as much, and work on my next novel, and query.

I suppose the best solution going forward is to write flash fiction for my short stories page. I’ve never done this before, and I don’t relish the idea, but it’s a solution that splits the middle. On the one hand, it’s potentially time saving, assuming you can actually write good flash fiction in less time than it takes to write a whole short story. On the other hand, I could “double-up” on stories this way without – I think – violating the “no prior publication” rule, since a 500 word story would not at all be the same thing as a 5,000 word story, especially if it went a different direction than the full piece.

But I’m just spit-balling here. One thing that’s become clear to me is that I need to know more people in the industry. There are too many rules, and hidden rules, and ins, and outs, in this world of writing to go it alone. I dislike writers’ groups intensely, but maybe I ought to join one for the sake of making connections. And none of this alters my plan to start a story podcast. It just means I’ll probably be publishing my existing stories myself.

One downside of all of this is that the new story I’ve been working on, and have just finished, cannot be posted on my site. It’s really good, and I have already submitted it for publication in a mainstream science fiction magazine. See the newsletter for details about that.

Thank you, my few, faithful readers. May you multiply and divide.