{"id":2154,"date":"2019-11-26T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2019-11-26T14:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/?p=2154"},"modified":"2019-11-11T18:35:52","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T23:35:52","slug":"4-reasons-why-you-probably-shouldnt-bother-writing-short-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/4-reasons-why-you-probably-shouldnt-bother-writing-short-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"4 Reasons Why You (Probably) Shouldn\u2019t Bother Writing Short Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I started my literary career writing short stories; thought\nthat was my niche since I\u2019ve got lots of ideas for which the short form is the\nperfect medium. Turns out short stories have their uses, but establishing your\nwriting bona fides is not one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve written almost a dozen short stories and had most of\nthem published. Here are some truisms\/advice from someone who\u2019s toiled in the\ntrenches of the short story market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

1.  Short stories are great for honing your\nwriting skills\u2026 and not much else.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will never make significant money off a short story. Professional writers with established reputations might make a couple hundred bucks off one story (per a professional rate of $0.05 or more per word). If a beginning writer gets paid anything, it\u2019s a sweet miracle. One very special time I was paid $180 for a short story, but for all the other ones I was paid somewhere between $0 and $10. Two coffees at Starbucks, here I come!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, short stories are a great way to hone your craft.\nIf you really want that $10, your story needs to be tight and well-written.\nEvery word needs to be critical, every sentence expertly crafted. Crack open\nany O. Henry Prize short story anthology and read a few. Sure, most of them are\nso boring or chocked full of opaque \u201cmeaning\u201d you\u2019ll need to watch a couple\nepisodes of \u201cThis Old House\u201d for a shot of adrenaline afterwards, but they\u2019re\nall beautifully written. And that, really, is the primary benefit of short\nstories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You could in theory bundle a bunch of related short stories\nand try to market those as a collection, but anthologies only succeed when\ncoming from authors who are already well known, so don\u2019t start there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2.  Don\u2019t give your stories away for free.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You wouldn\u2019t spend dozens of hours lovingly knitting a\ngold-accented beer koozie and then just give it away to the first random\nschmuck who said, \u201cHey, cool,\u201d right? Demand at least $10 for your hard work!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most short story markets are non-paying, and cover for their\nstinginess by saying they provide \u201cexposure.\u201d This is a load of shitake\nmushroom fertilizer. I\u2019ve submitted my short stories to dozens of markets, and\nnot once has anyone given a flying rat\u2019s buttocks about my previous\npublications. The only caveat is if you were published in a very well-known\nmagazine like the New Yorker<\/em>, but\nthey only publish well-known authors, and therein lies the Catch-22.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most importantly, when you get that rejection letter from a\nnon-paying market and it hits you they didn\u2019t want your story even though you\nOFFERED IT TO THEM FOR FREE, you will be spooning that pint of Ben and Jerry\u2019s\ndown your throat faster than your salty tears of failure can dry. Don\u2019t go\nthere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3.  Don\u2019t pay for your story to be \u201cconsidered.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Save your money for the lottery. Your odds of success are\nbetter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example: per Duotrope – a literary market database I\nused regularly while hawking my short stories \u2013 one prominent literary magazine\nwhich charges a fee for every submission has an acceptance rate of around 0.2%.\nThis means for every five hundred submissions they receive, they accept only\none\u2014and rejections are underreported, so the real odds are probably even lower.\nLots of markets are very tough to get into, but they don\u2019t charge a $15-or-more\nreading fee per story, nor do they tout how \u201caccessible\u201d they are with\ntestimonials from first-time authors who had their first-ever publication in\nthis magazine \u201cjust like you can, too!\u201d Add to that the zero feedback they\nprovide when your story is almost certainly rejected, and you\u2019ve got the\nhallmarks of a racket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

General rule of thumb for any literary pursuit: value should\nflow to the author. Be very, very suspicious if that doesn\u2019t seem to be the\ncase. Don\u2019t bother with fee-based markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ONE exception I would give to this rule is a fee-based\ncontest for a very specific kind of story where one of your manuscripts just\nhappens to fit the bill. For instance, if a contest is looking for a story with\na blue-haired bisexual salesman, and a blue-haired bisexual salesman just\nhappens to be the protagonist of your latest story, and the entry fee is only\n$10, and the winner gets a $200-or-more purse, and you don\u2019t plan on using that\n$10 at Starbucks (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU), then you might want to give it a\ntry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4.  All in all, the short story market is very\nshady.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a decent chance if your story is finally accepted,\nand you do a happy dance because your big Starbucks payday is just around the\ncorner\u2026you\u2019ll never hear from that market again. This happened to me at least\nthree times that I can remember. I\u2019m now convinced two-thirds of all short\nstory markets are composed of a single literary nerd living in his or her\nparent\u2019s basement who can make a decent-looking website. And when he or she finally\ngets that job at Starbucks, the market vanishes.\n\nSo, the moral of the story is: don\u2019t bother with\nshort stories except to hone your craft, or to get out a story inside you which\nyou feel needs to be told. Otherwise, save your energy for a full-length novel.\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This blog post brought to you by overpriced coffee.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started my literary career writing short stories; thought that was my niche since I\u2019ve got lots of ideas for which the short form is the perfect medium. Turns out short stories have their uses, but establishing your writing bona fides is not one of them. I\u2019ve written almost a dozen short stories and had … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “4 Reasons Why You (Probably) Shouldn\u2019t Bother Writing Short Stories”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[498,496],"tags":[476,475],"class_list":["post-2154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-branding-platforming","category-business","tag-o-henry-prize","tag-short-story-market"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Vyi8-yK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2156,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions\/2156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}