Friday was an admin day, unfortunately. The baby woke up early from her nap, and the plumbers were working on the house most of the day, so no progress on nanowrimo.
Saturday should be better. I’ve got a few errands to run, but after that the day is totally clear. Now if only the baby will take a nice, long nap!
So after moving into my in-laws’ house to house-sit for them while they’re gone for the next 18 months, and hosting a ton of family in June when they came through for summer vacation, I’ve decided to get back into writing by doing Camp NaNoWriMo this month.
Just like last year, I’ll be doing short stories instead of a novel, only my goal will be 30k words instead of 50k. That comes to just under 1k words per day, which is actually a leisurely pace compared to a typical nanowrimo. But we’ve also got a lot going on this month, including new renters moving in, a family vacation with my in-laws, family from my side moving into the state (and needing help moving in), etc.
The first story I’m working on is actually an old trunk project of mine, that I feel I need to either buckle down and finish or else trunk forever. Part of that is because it’s about the breakup of the United States of America, which means that it’s going to feel extremely dated in another decade or so, no matter how current events play out.
After revising through about 1.5k words which I already wrote in the story (and which I’m not counting toward my camp nanowrimo goal), I put in about another 1k words and called it a day. I don’t think this story is going to be much longer than 4k words (maybe as many as 5k), so with luck I’ll be able to finish it on Friday. But the plumbers are also coming, and that has the potential to wreak havoc on the baby’s napping schedule, so… we’ll see.
At least things are off to a good start!
So I really love how China Mike Glyer cherry-picked the excerpts that he quoted from my last blog post, leaving out how I said that it’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt, or how you can’t take diversity statements at face value because of all the elitist signalling language. But the thing that I especially love is the way he characterized all of what I said as an “opportunity to learn from a professional why he’s self-rejecting from these short fiction markets.”
There are so many things wrong with the phrase “self-rejection.” On its face, it sounds empowering, but the underlying assumption is that submitting your short stories to the traditional markets is your best/only option, and therefore you’d be a fool not to follow that path. Is that really an empowering message? Or is it actually more empowering—not to mention, straightforward—to say that it’s not you rejecting yourself, but you rejecting them?
For a long time, though, I really did believe that choosing not to submit a story to a high-paying market was tantamount to rejecting my own story. Even as an indie author, I still believed that for a short story to be successful, it had to be traditionally published first.
That was the thinking that informed my old short story strategy. Submit to the traditional markets first, and don’t self-publish until all of the high-paying professional markets have been exhausted, or (hopefully) until the exclusivity period of your contract wears off. You might spend years sending your story out to the markets, only to find that self-publishing is the only way to get it out into the world, but at least you have the moral victory of knowing you didn’t “self-reject.” Except, in a world where it’s possible to be your own publisher, you did reject your own story all those years, simply by choosing to keep it on submission instead of publishing it yourself!
To be fair, when it comes to short stories, self-publishing and traditional publishing are not mutually exclusive. And years of experience with self-publishing short stories has taught me that it’s very difficult to earn significant money with them. As I put it a couple of months ago:
…short stories can be useful to do just about every other thing except make money selling them directly. If you price the singles at $2.99, you might sell as many as one or two per year, making less than $5. If you price them at 99¢, you may sell as many as a dozen per year, if you’re lucky—again, making less than $5. I didn’t have much luck getting bundles of 3-5 to sell, but larger collections of 10 to 12 stories do occasionally sell, and at a decent enough rate that I’m earning more on those stories than I would if I’d sold them individually as singles. But short story collections don’t sell anywhere near as well as novels.
So if you can expect to sell a short story to a high-paying market in a reasonable period of time, it certainly makes sense to put it out on submission instead of self-publishing it first. But as I’ve established in the last two posts, when most of the high-paying markets have gone totally woke, that changes the equation—especially if you are a straight white male who refuses to bend the knee.
To review, here are the potential benefits of submitting to the traditional short story markets first:
And here are the potential drawbacks:
In short, the biggest potential drawback is all of that lost time where you could have self-published that story, but didn’t. Tell me again how that isn’t self-rejection?
So if you can’t really expect to make any money self-publishing short stories, what good are they anyway?
In my previous post, I compared short stories to pawns in the game of chess. The pawn is the weakest piece in the game, but many chess masters still consider it the “soul of the game,” not because of what each piece individually can do, but what they can accomplish when taken together. A strong pawn structure is key to both openings and midgame strategy, and in the endgame, pawns become critically important as they threaten to advance to the final rank, where they can be queened.
Short stories are similar to pawns in this way. Taken individually, they’re not particularly significant, and if you’ve only written or published one or two of them, they’re probably not going to have a huge impact on your career. But when you have a bunch of them and get them to work together, they can build your career (not to mention, help you develop your craft) quite effectively. And there’s always the chance that you can get one optioned for film, just like advancing a pawn to the back rank.
About a year ago, I did something very unconventional and made all of my short story singles free. Here was my thinking behind that decision:
As a short story reader, I’m already used to paying for anthologies—and I’m more likely than other readers to buy them, since I’m the kind of reader who seeks out short stories. So if I pick up a handful of free short stories from an author and come to really enjoy her work, I’m already primed to buy her collections when I finish each story—and that makes the backmatter of each free single the best place for her to advertise her collections.
It’s a bit like first-in-series free, except instead of the one free book pointing to the rest of the series, there’s a bunch of free short stories all pointing to the same one (or two or three) collections. The typical reader is probably going to need to read a few of an author’s short stories anyways to really become a fan, so making all of the stories free could really be the way to go.
Of course, the big downside to this as an author is that you probably can’t sell reprint rights to the stories that are available as free singles. Why would an editor buy your story for their publication if it’s already available for free? So you would have to make the singles free for a limited time, if selling the stories to the reprint markets is part of your strategy.
But if you’re going to eventually bundle those stories into a collection, that’s not really a problem. Publish them as free singles as soon as the rights revert back to you, and then take down the singles when you have enough of them to put into a collection.
In the past several months since embarking on this experiment, I’m happy to report that it’s been a success! Not only have these free short story singles brought in new readers by giving them a wider sample of my work, but they’ve also been quite effective at building engagement among my newsletter subscribers and driving sales of my other works.
So here are the benefits I’ve seen by publishing free short story singles:
There are still a lot of things that I still want to tweak, both to drive organic newsletter subscribers and to drive sales of my short story collections, but in terms of overall strategy I think I’ve got the self-publishing end down pretty good. So what are the drawbacks?
Because most of the high-paying short story markets only purchase first publication rights, the cost is that you give up what you could have gotten by going with the traditional markets first. But if all of those markets have gone too far woke, that changes the equation considerably:
With all of that in mind, here is my new short story strategy:
The goal here is to publish something new consistently every month. Every time I write a short story, I immediately put it on the publishing schedule for a month where I don’t have a novel or a bundle already scheduled.
At a minimum, I should have enough stories to fill out the publishing schedule for at least the next six months. That way, if one of them sells to a traditional market, I can bump all the other ones forward, or have time to write something new. And ideally, I should fill out the schedule for the next 12 to 18 months, in order to have more time to put new stories on submission.
But unlike before, I’m not going to wait until a story exhausts all the potential markets before I self-publish it. If the story hasn’t sold yet to a traditional market and it’s slotted to be self-published next month, self-publishing takes precedence.
Before, my plan was to submit to all of the available markets that paid at least 5¢ per word, starting at the highest paying ones and working my way down until all of them were exhausted. But since most of those markets have gone incurably woke and it no longer makes sense to hold out for the pay, I’m now willing to submit to any market that pays at least 1¢ per word.
Since time is the key factor here—and the most relevant cost—instead of starting with the highest paying markets and working my way down, I’ll prioritize markets that allow simultaneous submissions and hit them all up at about the same time. Of course, if the story sells, I’ll promptly inform all of the other markets and withdraw my story. The same holds true if the story is still out for submission when I self-publish it.
For markets that allow simultaneous submissions, I’ll submit to any market that has an average wait time of 90 days or less, but for markets that do not allow simultaneous submissions, I’ll only send my story to them if their average wait time is 45 days or less. Again, time is the key factor here, and the most relevant cost. If a market can’t turn around my submission in less than six weeks, and still demands that I give them the exclusive right to consider my story, free of charge, I’m probably better off submitting elsewhere.
This part of the plan remains exactly the same as before. But since ideally I’m turning around stories faster, that means I can put out short story collections faster as well. I’m not sure when I should decide to keep the short story single up while it’s also bundled in a collection, but that’s a publishing decision that has little to do with navigating the woke SF markets, so I’ll mull it over for now.
Again, this part of the plan is largely unchanged, with the caveat that I won’t be submitting my stories to any market that’s gone totally woke. Because of this, there may be times when my previously published stories aren’t on submission at all, but since that’s already the case, I’m not too worried about it. Besides, submitting to the reprint markets isn’t a high priority.
Thank goodness we live in a time when independent publishing is a viable option! If not, there’s a very good chance that none of my stories would have an avenue for getting out into the world, simply because I’m a straight white male who refuses to bend the knee to the woke establishment’s lies. In spite of all the insanity—and in spite of the fact that most of the major SF&F short story markets have gone completely woke—this is still the best time in history to be a writer and a reader.
So a couple of hours after I published my last blog post, China Mike Glyer of File 770 infamy picked it up for his daily pixel scroll. Hi, China Mike! I thought you might be looking for some red meat to feed your readers—aside from the Chinese clickfarms, of course—but I was especially pleased that you included my affiliate links with the excerpt you copy-pasted! Not only does this bring in some extra cash (thanks, China Mike!), but it also gives me some metrics to compare File 770 with, say, some of the other indie authors that I do newsletter swaps with. And wow… let’s just say there’s a reason why they call you China Mike Glyer and leave it at that.
So in today’s episode of red meat for China Mike, I’d like to pick up where I left off with the last post and pose the question: when is a science fiction market too woke to be worth submitting to? But to answer that question, we first need to answer: why bother submitting short stories to traditional markets at all, when self-publishing is an option?
It’s a good question, because there are a lot of good reasons to self-publish short stories. In my experience, they don’t earn particularly well on their own, but they are quite useful as newsletter magnets to gain new email subscribers, free ebook giveaways to let readers sample your work, and giveaways for newsletter subscribers to remind them that you exist and keep your books in the forefront of your mind. I make all my short story singles free on all the ebookstores, and keep them up until I have enough to bundle them into a collection, at which point I take them down and submit to the reprint markets. It’s a system that’s worked pretty well for me so far.
So why submit to traditional markets first? Why hold off self-publishing in the hopes that you can sell first publication rights? Here are a few of the reasons:
I suppose you could also include “awards” and “SFWA membership” on that list, but frankly I don’t care much about either of those. Contrary to the impression that China Mike wants to give you, I’m really not much of a drama llama, and as for awards… we’ll get there.
Importantly, there are several potential drawbacks to putting your stories out on submission, especially if you have a viable self-publishing strategy. Some of those reasons include:
So those are the potential costs and benefits that you have to contend with when writing and publishing short stories.
Now, let’s get to the first question: when is a short story market so woke that it isn’t worth submitting anything to them? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few days, and while I don’t think it’s possible to come up with an objective, impartial standard, I do think that it’s important to draw the distinction, because wokeness changes the cost/benefit analysis substantially.
It wasn’t always this way. Traditional sci-fi publishing has trended to the political left (sometimes to the extreme political left) of mainstream American culture since the New Wave era back in the 60s and 70s. It seems that the campus radicals took over much of the field, not to mention the fact that American traditional publishing has always been centered in New York. But until just the last few years, it was still possible for left and right to coexist in our pluralistic society. People of different political persuasions could agree to disagree amicably, and while there may have still been whisper campaigns and secret author blacklists, you could still expect to see a healthy mix of opinions and perspectives in most places that published short stories.
That is not true today. Certain subjects and opinions have been deemed verboten, while others have been exalted to the status of eternal truth, and any story that questions or challenges the politically correct narrative doesn’t have a chance in most of these markets. In other words, science fiction has gone woke.
(As a side note, this reminds me of a review that I received for my short story “Payday,” in which the universal basic income leads to runaway hyperinflation, causing society to unravel and forcing the protagonist and his family to flee. Sound familiar? In the author’s note, I mentioned how the story had been rejected by all of the pro-paying science fiction markets, and the reader found that even more disturbing than the story itself.)
“Woke” is a slang term describing a basket of socioeconomic and political ideologies that are incompatible with and antithetical to individual rights and liberties. Taken to their logical conclusion, they end in the sort of totalitarian horrors the world saw in the 20th century (and continues to see today in communist China).
I recently listened to an episode of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast where he interviewed Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector and human rights activist. It was an incredibly powerful interview—well worth listening to in its entirety. One of the things that really struck me was the fact that nightmare dystopian societies can only endure so long as everyone, in their own little way, tacitly supports the lie. In such a society, declaring the truth is itself a supreme act of insurrection, because (in the words of Solzhenitsyn) “one word of truth outweighs the whole world.”
In the science fiction markets that have been taken over by wokeness, the truth is silenced by vicious accusations of white supremacy, transphobia, post-colonialism, and a hundred other virtue-signalling examples of doublethink. If George Orwell published 1984 today, they would probably pan it as anti-Asian and push to get it cancelled or banned. There can be no compromise with these people, as there is no room for discussion or debate. These woke ideologies possess people, who cling to it like the worst possible kind of religion.
I used to think that a story from someone like me would still be able to slip through, if it was good enough. But then I spent a year subscribed to every science fiction and fantasy market that had a free podcast. Most of the stories were poor to mediocre, but the authors hit all the woke intersectional checkboxes—and made sure to tell you that in their author bios. There were some exceptions, of course, but that was the general rule. Whenever there was an exceptionally good story, it was usually from an author who only checked one or two of the boxes—but their story would usually check off a couple more, such as having an LGBTQ+ romantic subplot, or having mostly POC characters. And in the wokest sci-fi podcasts, the editors always made sure to pound you over the head with an explicit political message, sometimes even before the story itself.
Of course, there are still some short fiction markets that care more about the strength of your story than upholding the woke establishment narrative, or making sure all their authors hit all the right intersectional checkboxes. But not generally among the professional-paying markets.
So how woke is too woke?
The events of the past year have convinced me that wokeness is like a cancer: no matter how small or innocuous it is when it starts, if left untreated it will metastatize and grow. The only way to treat it is to remove it from your life. No compromise. No discussion or debate. The woke care nothing for right or wrong, truth or falsehood: only narrative and power. When they look at me, they do not see a person: they see a heirarchy of identities. And if my stories are any good—that is, if they serve the truth—then they see those stories as a threat. After all, “one word of truth outweighs the whole world.”
Therefore, it cannot be a question of degree. If a market has gone even slightly woke, then submitting your stories is an exercise in futility if you don’t hit the right checkboxes or will not bend the knee. And I will never bend the knee.
So now, with a working definition of “woke” (promoting ideologies incompatible with and antithetical to individual rights and liberties) and the determination that wokeness is toxic in any degree, how can I tell if a market has gone truly woke?
First of all, I think it’s important to give everyone—and every market—the benefit of the doubt. There are still people on the political left who can break bread with and hold reasonable conversations with those on the other side of the aisle. Likewise, there are still short story markets that tend to lean left, but will still publish good stories by authors across the political spectrum.
Second, it’s also important to point out that just because an editor hits one or two—or most—of the woke intersectional checkboxes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the market itself is woke. This isn’t a matter of balancing transgender people of color with straight white males—that’s merely wokeism in reverse! People are people are people, no matter how they identify. Anyone can become ideologically possessed, just as anyone can choose not to be.
So with that in mind, what are the red flags?
1) Has the market won any awards that have gone completely woke?
Specifically, I’m thinking here of the Hugo Awards. They were trending to the left for a very long time, but 2015 was the year that they specifically went woke by voting “no award” over several deserving authors and editors. The transformation was completed in 2017, when the new rules shut out the Sad and Rabid Puppies, and both of those movements died out.
Therefore, if a short story market has won a Hugo since 2015 or been nominated for a Hugo since 2017, I’m not going to bother submitting to them. And if a market has had stories that have won or been nominated for a Hugo in those years, I’m going to ignore the market as well, unless it appears to be a fluke or a one-off.
2) Does the market have an explicit diversity statement in their submission guidelines?
Diversity statements are not actually about reassuring minority authors that they are welcome to submit their stories. Instead, diversity statements are all about signalling. You can see this with the term “latinx.” The vast, vast majority of actual latinas and latinos have either never heard of the term or absolutely hate it, but because it’s a gender non-binary term, the woke absolutely love it—and use it primarily as a signal to other woke people just like them.
Therefore, if a market has an explicit diversity statement that contains woke signaling language, it’s going on the blacklist. Even if the market only put out a diversity statement to keep the woke mob from descending upon them, that’s still a sure sign that they’ve bent the knee.
Occasionally, a market won’t have a separate diversity statement, but will include language like “we welcome submissions from authors of all races, genders, and backgrounds.” In that case, it’s probably best to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they use the word “latinx,” even once (or “folx,” or “black bodies,” or “indigenous,” or…), then that’s a clear signal that they’re woke.
3) Does the market publish content that is explicitly woke?
Editors always say that the best way to know what they’re looking for is to read a couple of issues or listen to a couple of episodes or stories. That seems like a reasonable standard, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t hold them to it.
Do the editors ever go off on explicitly woke political rants, or try to explain the message of the story in woke ideological terms? Do the author bios read like a checklist of woke intersectional identities? Are the stories themselves often thinly veiled rants about woke issues? Again, it’s important to apply the benefit of the doubt here, but you can tell a lot about a market by what they choose to publish. I won’t be wasting my time with the markets that regularly publish any of those things.
I believe that the culture is changing, and an anti-woke backlash is forming that will shock the people who are too deeply esconsed in their echo chambers (here’s to you, File 770) to see it coming. If I had to guess, I’d say that we hit peak woke in our culture about a year ago, and now that the pendulum is swinging the other way, nothing will stop it until it goes as far to the anti-woke side as it did to the woke side.
I’m not yet sure if this is good or bad. If we reject the lies that wokeism is built upon and embrace the individual rights and liberties that informed our founding documents, it could be very good indeed. But a lot of damage has already been done, and if we merely exchange leftist-flavored collectivism for rightist-flavored collectivism, it could be very, very bad.
That’s why writers and creators like me have a very important role to play—that is, those of us who aren’t afraid to speak one word of truth. That alone is reason enough not to waste one moment of time on these woke science fiction markets whose great day of power is swiftly coming to an end.
My short story strategy has changed a lot in the last year, much like our country. I still need to work through all of the implications of this change in order to formulate a new publishing strategy. But I’ll leave that for another post. This is sufficient for now.
Last year, I had a short story published in the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction. Not only was it one of my highest paying short story sales to date, but it also made it onto the Tangent Online 2020 Recommended Reading List with a *** rating, their highest tier. Only 13 out of 293 stories on the list received that honor—and making the list at all was an accomplishment!
But a funny thing happened after the anthology came out: for a stretch of several months, I stopped receiving personalized rejections for my short story submissions, and instead got only form rejections. Normally when I write a cover letter for a short story submission, I mention the last three markets that I was published in. For example: “My stories have recently appeared in Again, Hazardous Imaginings; Twilight Tales LTUE Benefit Anthology, and Bards and Sages Quarterly (forthcoming).” In a typical month, I’ll get maybe a dozen or so form rejections and a couple of personalized rejections, depending on how many stories I have out on submission.
Back in March, I started to notice that I wasn’t getting any personalized rejections. Suspecting that my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings wasn’t helping me, I decided to change things up and only list my publication credits for stories listed in Locus Magazine’s Year In Review issue. My thinking was that all of the Hugo and Nebula eligible markets give their yearly reports in that issue, and since all of the editors want to acquire stories that are likely to win awards, a publication credit in one of those markets is more likely to get them to pay attention.
Lo and behold, I started getting personalized rejections again.
Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, I exported my data from The Submission Grinder and made a quick table of my submissions returned for each month going back to July 2019. Before “The Promise of King Washington” was accepted in February 2020, I was getting roughly one personalized rejection for every 5-8 form rejections. Then, for most of 2020, I went through a dry spell where I didn’t have many stories out on submission. Towards the end of the year, I got back in the saddle, and my personalized-to-form rejections ratio returned to what it had been earlier… but then Again, Hazardous Imaginings was published in December, and for the next three months, I received no personalized rejections at all. Then, around March-April, I stopped mentioning my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings… and I started getting personalized rejections again.
So what happened? Is there some sort of unofficial blacklist for stories published in Again, Hazardous Imaginings? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know if any of the other authors in the anthology have had a similar experience, nor do I know for certain that mentioning the anthology in my publication credits caused this particular issue. It could be that I was submitting to higher paying markets at the beginning of 2021, and those markets just happen to be more stingy about personalized rejections. It could be that the pandemic has just sapped everyone’s energy.
But now that I’ve made this table, the one thing I cannot say is that the whole thing is just a figment of my imagination. There was a three-month period where I saw significantly fewer personalized rejections than usual, and it just so happened to coincide with the publication of the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings and my mentioning it as a publication credit in all of my cover letters.
It’s no big secret that most of the traditional short story markets in science fiction and fantasy trend somewhere between liberal and super woke. All you have to do to get a sense for this is subscribe to their podcasts or read their stories online. For most of 2020, I was subscribed to every science fiction podcast, and I frequently ended up skipping episodes because either the story was too woke, the author bio was little more than a checklist of intersectional victimhood groups, or the editor went off on some sort of political rant (typically of the “orange man bad” variety) that had little or nothing to do with the story. You can also get a good sense of the woke-ness by looking up these magazines’ submission guidelines and reading their diversity statements.
So for the last couple of months, I haven’t been listing Again, Hazardous Imaginings as a publication credit in any of my cover letters, and the response to my stories appears to have returned to the old normal… but it doesn’t sit right with me. Why should I have to hide that I was published in that anthology? Why shouldn’t I be proud of it? It did make Tangent Online’s recommended reading list with three stars, after all. Why should I waste my time submitting my stories to science fiction and fantasy markets that would see that publication credit as a black mark?
In other words, why not blacklist the blacklisters?
When an author decides not to submit their stories to a particular market, it’s often called a “self-rejection,” since the author has already decided that the story won’t be published before the editor gets a chance to consider it. But this is a little different. It’s not my own story that I’m rejecting, but the market as a whole. It’s making the conscious decision that if a magazine is too woke, I’m not going to have anything to do with it.
Here’s another way to think about it: why should I hold out for a year or longer, hoping to earn a couple of hundred bucks for it, when most of the markets that pay that well either aren’t interested in publishing the kind of politically incorrect stories that I tend to write, or aren’t going to publish an author like me who isn’t demonstrably woke enough? Even if I only end up selling it to a semi-pro market for less than fifty bucks, if it only takes a few months to make the sale because I’m not wasting time with the woke markets, does that make it worthwhile?
Or here’s yet another way to think about it: what other benefits do I get with my short story sales, besides how well it pays? If short stories are essentially advertisements for my other work, does it actually make sense to seek publication in the super woke markets, whose readers are mostly woke? Or does it make more sense to be published in the more conservative-leaning markets, with readers who are more likely to enjoy the other stuff that I write? And what about networking with similar-minded authors and editors? I made some really great connections through the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings, and even brought Andrew Fox, the editor, onto my newsletter for an interview. It was great!
All of this is happening as we’re starting to see an anti-woke cultural backlash gain momentum. Smarter people than me with a finger on the pulse of the culture say that the Snyder Cut is where the tide began to turn. The thing that tipped me off to it was the surprising waythat Coca-Cola walked back their critical race theory training after the “woke-a-cola” scandal. To my knowledge, there was no organized boycott, yet for a large corporation to backpedal so quickly tells me that they really took a hit to their bottom line.
In the coming months, I think we’re going to see a huge cultural shift against the woke moral panic that has gripped our nation for the last couple of years. That in itself is a subject for another post, but what it means for SF&F is that a lot of these woke awards and woke short story markets are well on their way to going broke. The few that endure will become niche markets for a very small audience that has completely divorced itself from the cultural mainstream—including the vast majority of SF&F readers.
Is it really worth hitching my wagon to such a horse? Or is it better to take a gamble on the up-and-coming markets that might not pay as much, but also aren’t carrying all the woke political baggage as magazines like Uncanny or Lightspeed?
Of course, if the answer to all of these questions is “yes, Joe—go for it!” the next big question is how to determine if a market is too woke? Because some of the markets have diversity statements that are fairly conservative-friendly, like “we welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds!” and don’t use any of the woke value-signalling terms like “folx,” “latinx,” “QUILTBAG,” “indigenous,” “black bodies,” etc. In fact, I’m pretty sure that many of these markets only put out diversity statements to pacify the woke moral crusaders, in the same way that many boarded up stores and restaurants put up BLM signs hoping that the rioters sorry, the “peaceful protesters” would spare them.
One way to determine this is to look at which markets are chasing the wokest awards. The Hugos went woke in 2015, when “no award” swept the categories dominated by Sad Puppies nominees. That was really the moment when the fandom split, and the anti-woke readership abandoned the Hugos in disgust. The Rabid Puppies swept the 2016 nominations in what amounted to a hilarious sabotage operation (“Pounded in the Butt by Chuck Tingle’s Hugo,” hehe), but by 2017 that had all come to an end.
With that in mind, I went through all of the Hugo Awards to see which markets had either won an award or published a story that had won an award since 2015, and which markets had either been nominated or published stories that have been nominated since 2017. Here is what I found:
Hugo Winning Markets since 2015
Markets with Hugo Winning Stories since 2015
Hugo Nominated Markets since 2017
Markets with Hugo Nominated Stories since 2017
The counts for nominated markets/stories do not include the winners, but do include all of the nominations for 2021, even though the winners have not yet been decided.
I haven’t yet settled on a standard for deciding which markets are too woke for me to submit to. I suppose that’s something I’ll have to decide on a case-by-case basis, and for any who choose to follow my lead on this, it will have to be an individual decision. But I am rethinking the way I submit and publish my short stories, based on this experience. This post has already gone too long, and I still haven’t worked my new strategy out, but if you have any suggestions or ideas I’m interested to hear them.
Every couple of years, I get the short story bug and write maybe half a dozen short stories in the span of just a few months. Then, I get really excited about putting them up on submission, and for the next couple of years I systematically send them out to all the professional markets… and then the semi-professional markets… and then, when only a couple of them actually sell, I self-publish them. My enthusiasm gradually dies down, until I catch the short story bug again, and the cycle repeats.
When I caught the short story bug last year, though, it was immediately after NaNoWriMo, where I wrote 50k words of short stories instead of 50k words of a novel. That was so much fun that I think I’m going to do it every year. In fact, I may try out Camp NaNoWriMo too, just for the fun of it.
But this post isn’t about whether short stories are worth writing. That’s an artistic question, and the answer for most writers is probably some version of “yes, but…” The big question on my mind, however, is whether short stories are worth publishing—that is, are short stories worth it from a career/business perspective?
Several years ago (during one of those times when I’d caught the short story bug again), I wrote a blog post about whether it’s possible to make a living as a short story writer. I speculated that if you spent a year writing two short stories a week, that would give you a hundred stories by the end of the year. Keep it up, and after a few years you would have so many stories that by sheer numbers alone, you could do it.
Dean Wesley Smith came to a similar conclusion back in 2016, and again in 2018. The basic idea is to write like a madman out of hell, keep each one on submission for a couple of years, and self-publish them on a shoestring budget so that even if each one only brings in a few extra dollars, by sheer numbers alone, you make a decent living.
There’s just one problem.
There’s a site called The Submission Grinder that crowdsources writers’ rejection letters and acceptances to produce a lot of useful data on all of the various short story markets. After crunching this data, I discovered there are between 30-50 science fiction and fantasy markets that pay better than 5¢ per word. Most of them are temporarily closed at any given time, and very few of them accept multiple or simultaneous submissions. Furthermore, they all average about 25-30 days to respond to submissions.
What this means is that if you write faster than one short story a month, after only about a dozen stories or so, you will start to run out of available markets. Unless you write under multiple pen names or across multiple genres, you will very quickly develop a backlog of stories that won’t get submitted, simply because there aren’t enough places to submit to. So instead of taking one or two years for each story to work their way through the markets, it will take several more years or perhaps even decades, during which time those stories aren’t making any money for you at all.
As for self-publishing, I am currently experimenting with a lot of different ways to publish short stories, but what I’ve generally found is that short stories can be useful to do just about every other thing except make money selling them directly. If you price the singles at $2.99, you might sell as many as one or two per year, making less than $5. If you price them at 99¢, you may sell as many as a dozen per year, if you’re lucky—again, making less than $5. I didn’t have much luck getting bundles of 3-5 to sell, but larger collections of 10 to 12 stories do occasionally sell, and at a decent enough rate that I’m earning more on those stories than I would if I’d sold them individually as singles. But short story collections don’t sell anywhere near as well as novels.
So if you’re going to publish short stories, the best way to maximize earnings is to submit them to all the professional markets first, and to work your way through those markets as quickly and efficiently as possible. But that requires throttling your output, otherwise you’ll soon end up with a massive backlog of stories waiting for a place to send them. And self-publishing them all isn’t a panacea, because it’s very difficult to make money selling short stories directly. They can be useful for other things, like building your email list, converting readers to fans, and marketing your author brand, but all of this requires making those stories free—at least the singles, if not the collections.
But when you think about it, that makes sense, because most short stories are published for free anyways. When you sell a story to a professional or semi-pro market, it usually ends up on a podcast feed or a website somewhere, available for free in some form. These days, an avid short story reader doesn’t need to spend a dime to find high quality stories produced very well. If they do spend money, it’s usually because they’ve made a conscious choice to support an author, or a magazine, or an anthology that they love.
So is it worth publishing short stories? If you can break into the professional markets, probably yes, otherwise I’m not so sure. And while the best career writing advice is “be prolific,” I do think there’s a point at which the marginal cost vs. marginal benefit of writing another short story really doesn’t make any sense. I suspect that threshold lies somewhere around the point where the submissions backlog starts to build.
I’ll still keep writing short stories, because I do want to crack into those professional markets, and I do think the ancillary benefits of self-publishing short stories makes it worthwhile. But at best, it’s going to be a sideshow compared to everything else I do. Most likely I’ll reserve short stories to NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNoWriMo, and not even bother writing them for the rest of the year.
For the last several months, I’ve struggled to put my thoughts together into something that I felt was appropriate for this blog. Even though I allow myself to be political here, I’m also keenly aware that I have many readers who might enjoy my books and yet disagree with my politics. I don’t want my politics to become a stumbling block or a litmus test for them, and yet, with all that’s happened since November 3rd (and indeed, is still happening), it’s been very difficult to figure out how to put those thoughts into words.
First there was the election. I expected voting irregularities, but not on such an incredible scale. Then, the Great National Gaslighting, which has been ongoing ever since. To be fair, there was also a great deal of conspiratorial nonsense spewed out by the Qanon folks on the Right, which only served to obfuscate and confuse the issue (for that reason, I tend to believe that Qanon was a psyop from the beginning).
And then, the mostly peaceful protest* at the Capitol changed everything.
I was disappointed by the storming of the Capitol, but not surprised. Disappointed, because tactically, it was the stupidest possible thing that the folks on Team Red could have done. It accomplished nothing of lasting political value, completely sabotaged the lawful and legitimate efforts to question the legitimacy of the election, and gave Team Blue all the ammunition they needed to close the Overton window on the election irregularities, weaponize the surveillance state against their political enemies, and bring the War on Terror to American shores.
I wasn’t surprised, though. From November 3rd to January 6th, the news cycle was filled with the sort of stuff that color revolutions are made of. The mostly peaceful protest* at the Capitol fit the script perfectly—almost too perfectly. Anyone who keeps an ear to conservative media could have told you that the MAGA folks weren’t going to simply bend the knee—not with all of the voting irregularities and other shenanigans.
(*And I use the phrase “mostly peaceful protest” deliberately—not to excuse the storming of the Capitol in any way, but to point out the hypocrisy and Orwellian doublethink of those who unironically used that phrase to describe the George Floyd riots over the summer, and who now call the riot at the Capitol “sedition” and “insurrection” perpetrated by “domestic terrorists.” 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual!)
And then, Big Tech cynically took advantage of the moment to crush Parler, silencing and deplatforming the conservatives who had migrated their from Twitter. “If you don’t like what we’re doing, build your own platform,” they said. So we did, and then… this.
You know, I’m actually not all that concerned about Joe Biden taking the White House and the Democrats controlling the House and Senate for at least the next two years. Am I happy with that arrangement? No, of course not—but on a certain level, the hyperbolic rhetoric on both the Right and on the Left is all just part of the same grift. Politics is what got us into this mess—it’s not what’s going to get us out of it.
But the crap that Big Tech is currently pulling? That stuff genuinely scares me, not the least because my livelihood depends on it. Without Amazon, there would be no indie publishing right now. So for AWS to take down Parler on woke ideological grounds, while flagrantly violating contract law and antitrust—and now, for the chief of that department to replace Jeff Bezos himself—yeah, that doesn’t bode well for authors like me.
I do have some hope for remedy in the courts, but not much. If we do get recourse through the law, it will take years or even decades to get it, and an ugly, uphill battle against corrupt, partisan judges in every level of the judicial system. Ultimately, I think the only thing that will take down Big Tech will be a majority of Americans simply refusing to use their services, deleting their social media accounts and getting smart about their personal data. But I don’t have much hope for that, either.
So what can we expect in the short to medium term? Where do we go from here?
First, if the storming of the Capitol genuinely surprised you, buckle up. When people feel that they have no recourse through peaceful, democratic means—that no one on the other side is listening to them, even as their way of life is being systematically destroyed—they turn to violence. But where the Left sees political violence as a dial that they can gradually turn up, the Right sees political violence as a switch that gets turned on. A lot of people on the Right are now thinking about flipping that switch.
It will start with a series of high-profile political assassinations. I do not condone or encourage this in any way, but I expect that many prominent Democrats will not survive the year. If the violence continues to escalate, we will see more unrest and chaos, ultimately culminating in either a mutiny of the nation’s armed forces, or the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Possibly both.
The “sanctuary state” phenomenon will expand dramatically as red state governors challenge the unconstitutional dictates of the Biden administration. To put it bluntly, red state America is going to become ungovernable. There will also be calls for secession, at first just to extract certain political concessions, but depending on how things go it could become a serious movement.
The migration from blue cities and states to red parts of the country will accelerate dramatically, and may turn violent. States like New York and California are trapped in a death spiral, where rising taxes are causing the rich to flee, which causes the politicians to raise taxes even more. The pandemic has made this much worse. I don’t think New York City is going to survive the coronapocalypse, and will go the way of New Orleans or possibly even Detroit. This will have interesting implications for the traditional side of the publishing industry, which is New York centric to a fault.
At some point in the next two years, I think the other shoe of the economic collapse is finally going to drop, and all of the cans we’ve been kicking since 2008 are going to hit the end of the road. In response, I expect the Biden (or at that point, probably the Harris) administration to make a hamfisted attempt at turning our Economic Impact Payments into some sort of permanent UBI, but it will either be too little, or it will lead to the sort of runaway hyperinflation that I wrote about in my short story “Payday.”
Ultimately, I see only three ways that all of this insanity ends:
1) A peaceful (if messy) divorce. Red states go their way, blue states go theirs, and the Great American Experiment comes to an end with a minimum of bloodshed. I consider this the least likely outcome, and not a very desireable one.
2) A civil war or revolution of some kind. We may already be in the opening phases of this, where the starting factions vie for position before the shooting begins in earnest. We may be reaching the end of the opening phase right now.
3) Everyday Americans from across the political divide join together to reconcile their differences and oppose the social and cultural forces driving us apart. I want to believe that this is the most likely outcome, but it requires that people leave their echo chambers and genuinely listen to those they see as the enemy, and I don’t think that’s going to happen unless something changes dramatically with Big Tech. It wasn’t just politics that got us into this mess: social media played a role in it, too.
What does all of this mean for our family and my writing? I’m trying to work that out right now. Even in a worst case scenario, I think that where we live here in Utah is a good place to weather the coming storm. And in a best case scenario, I would like to be a part of the reconciliation that brings this country back together. But in the meantime, I expect that I’m going to have to find alternative platforms to publish and sell my books, because the ban lists are coming, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that I’m already on one of those lists.
In the long term, though, I’m grimly optimistic that things will work out. I’m not quite sure how they will work out, but I know that the forces driving this chaos will ultimately be undone by their own pathologies. The important thing is to find the strength to get through this moment without falling into any of those pathologies yourself. Even with all of this talk of violence and civil war, I have hope that the Great American Experiment is more resilient than anyone gives it credit, and great faith in the goodness of the American people, regardless of political affiliation.
First off, before you read anything else in this letter, go and buy the following items:
Got that? Okay, good.
Second, don’t panic. You are (mostly) already prepared for what’s coming, and you’ve been expecting it for some time. And actually, things won’t be so bad for you, if you stay smart and take the proper precautions. Also, remember that the collapse isn’t evenly distributed, and everyone’s experience of it is different. You have positioned yourself and your family quite well to come out strong on the other side.
This is the year when the collapse—which has already begun, as you very well know—really begins to accelerate. Hemmingway said that bankruptcy happens in two ways: slowly, then quickly. Well, it’s about to get quick real soon. However, this is not the year when we finally hit the ground. Remember, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.
Enjoy yourself at LTUE 2020 as much as you possibly can, because you won’t be going to any other conventions anytime soon. In fact, don’t even worry about making a 2020 conventions plan. And your goal to read every issue of Locus Magazine this year? Yeah, you won’t be going onto campus all that much, so don’t worry about it. Besides, the February issue where they do the 2019 roundup is really the only one worth reading.
You really need to cut back on the political podcasts. Remember how, in your Washington Seminar internship your senior year of college, you learned that you actually hate politics with a deep-seated passion? Yeah, you’re going to be reminded of that before the year is up. At most, you should spend about 1-2 hours per day listening to political stuff, and maybe (though probably not) another 1-2 hours on current events and culture. But really, you should spend most of your time reading books, especially science fiction and fantasy.
Your in-laws are much better at home renovations than you realize, and are willing to help out generously if you ask. Also, you will save an important friendship (and a lot of time and money) if you rely on them instead of hiring on your friend as a contractor. Then again, you’ll learn a lot from that experience as well, and it’s better to risk losing a friendship than to risk stirring up bad blood with your in-laws. Do with that as you will. I’ve probably said too much already.
You are not a libertarian: you are an anti-communist. The distinction is important. Keep listening to alternative media channels, especially Tom Luongo, Chris Martenson, Tim Pool, Eric Weinstein, and Viva & Barnes (who you haven’t discovered yet, but soon will). They may be wrong about a lot of things, and their track record for predictions isn’t spectacular, but their hearts are in the right place and listening to them with a critical mind will give you the proper perspective more than anything else.
Pay attention to the UFO story. I’m not sure what’s actually going on there, but it’s probably more important than anyone realizes.
You have over-estimated the control that the powers that be have over our lives, but you have under-estimated the degree of their stupidity. Seriously, it ranks right up there with all the fools who turned World War I into such a magnificent clusterfuck. Possibly worse. Don’t put your faith in Trump—he is, at best, a speedbump to these people. Read The Fourth Turning, it will teach you a lot.
With all of that said, though, don’t be afraid. There is no reason to fear, especially if you are prepared. And you are prepared—not perfectly, but better than you realize. Most importantly, don’t let the craziness of the outside world keep you from all of the good things going on with your family. You and Mrs. Vasicek are going to have an incredible year, in spite of all the insanity. You will both become parents for the first time, with all that that entails. You will experience a lot of challenges, but you will lay the foundations for that strong and happy family that you’ve both always wanted to have. Recognize your blessings and thank God for them every day, and you will all come out all right.
Good luck, and God bless!
Your 2020 self
I’m subscribed to just about every major science fiction and fantasy podcast on the internet, and one of the most annoying things they do is use the author bio to virtue signal about how woke or intersectional they are. So just for fun, I thought I would get in on that action and write an insufferable author bio of my own:
Joe Vasicek is a fourth generation immigrant whose ancestors were slaves a thousand years before the Native Americans discovered Europe, but because they were white he’s still a racist bastard who has yet to check his privilege. Until the 1970s, it was legal in the state of Missouri to kill him because of his religion, so it’s a good thing he was born in the 80s and has never had a desire to live there. Besides, he’s a Mormon, so the law was probably justified. His preferred pronouns are His Majesty and His Greatness, but he will answer to anything, including racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, Islamophobe, Nazi, or hey stupid. He lives in MAGA country and owns a lot of guns.
It’s done! I did it! Hit the big 50k word mark in thirty days! The T-shirt is on the way!
Here are all of the stories that I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2020:
The difference was made up by six stream-of-consciousness character interview exercises that I did for the main viewpoint characters in my current WIP, Queen of the Falconstar. Final word count for NaNoWriMo 2020: 50,044.
My favorite story to write was probably “The Scales of the Space Whale,” an upbeat humorous space opera piece, but “The End of Elysium” was a close second. That one is a post-apocalyptic piece, very reminiscent of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and I wrote both stories with help from the Mythulu cards.
All of these stories are going to need some serious revision before I feel that they’re ready to submit. But at a rate of 1-2 stories per month, that shouldn’t be too hard to do.
This was a lot of fun! I definitely would like to do it again next year.