So a story will likely be rejected several times before it finds a home. A few people can sell pretty much anything they write based on their name alone, but for most of us, a 10 to 20% success rate is pretty good.
You need to be persistent and understand that rejection happens more than anything else. Thousands of stories pass through editor’s slush piles every year. There are so many online and print magazines and anthologies these days, that you’ll surely find somewhere eventually if the story is good enough. Tell the stories only you can tell in the way only you can tell them, then go looking for markets to sell them. You need to write the stories you want to write, the stories you want to read. This applies to novels too, but it bears remembering. You don’t have to tell your readers everything about a person’s history, but you need a good idea of it yourself, so that the small hints you do seed throughout the story are assured and authentic. You need to know everything about all your characters and your story so that you can write with confidence in a tight and succinct form. What finally makes it onto the page is a distillation of the ideas, world-building, characterization and so on that you started with. You need to know way more about your story than you tell to your readers.The skill is in only telling enough to keep it short, but retaining all that’s required for a satisfying read. To sell a story, you need to tell a whole story. Anything else is a vignette, or something experimental. Understand that a short story is different to a novel, but it shares a fundamental similarity: it needs to have a coherent beginning, middle, and end.However, if you do love the form and you want to make a go of short story writing, here are my ten tips for writing short stories that sell. So there’s definite benefit to writing short fiction, but only if you love the form and want to add it as one string among many on your writing bow. A successful short story career can also work wonders to spread your name and open other doors of opportunity for you.Īnd it can serve as a gateway to your novels. You can also make money from short stories by selling reprints to podcasts, having collections published (or publishing them yourself), and so on. While you can certainly work your way up into the realms of pro-rate paying magazines and anthologies, that won’t happen overnight. Some people manage this feat, but most don’t.Īs with the majority of writing, a variety of different income streams contribute to an overall living. Writing and selling short stories is not a great way to pay the bills. In today's post, award-winning short story writer and novelist, Alan Baxter, gives some of his tips.įirst of all, I feel like there needs to be a small caveat at the start here. I've found short stories to be some of the most challenging writing I've done, and some of the most fulfilling. They can be entered into anthologies or submitted to magazines, and they can be repackaged into collections by the single author. Short stories can be a creative exercise used to explore a new idea.
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