Monday, February 28, 2011

Finding The John Market

A typical science fiction or fantasy plot goes something like this.
  1. A sympathetic protagonist experiences a precipitating event which threatens everything he (in this case) loves.
  2. He tries to fix things the way he's fixed them before but it makes the problem worse.
  3. He tries something new and digs himself in deeper.
  4. Thinking out of the box, and risking all...
    • He either triumphs (The Enterprise Crew all laugh) or
    • he becomes a tragic hero (A Greek Chorus sings )
  5. The End
I'm somewhere at step four with my writing.  I've been doing what writers do, which is writing and submitting stories.  This means that I've been receiving rejection letters.

A lot of rejection letters.  (Yeah, yeah; welcome to the club....)

At some point it has crossed my mind that maybe I'm doing something wrong, like writing stories then submitting them to the wrong markets.  So I'm trying to think out of the box.

Could it be that somewhere out there there is a professional market that is a "John Market" and I don't know about it -- either because I'm not recognizing an essential difference between a John Story and a science fiction or fantasy story, or else because there's a market I haven't heard of.  (Okay, it's also crossed my mind that my fiction is mediocre, or that I'm Einstein's fish trying to climb a tree.)

So here's where I'm going to use Social Networking and The Power of The Internet.  For those of you familiar with my fiction, can you think of the Ultimate John Market?  For those of you unfamiliar with my fiction here are some links:

Briallan Dreaming of Myrmidons (http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2009/04/briallan-dreaming-of-myrmidons.html)

≟Love ( http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2010/06/love.html)

The View from the Top [edit: link removed during a web restructuring] 

Up (written before the movie of the same name) [edit: Penn Cove Award, formerly the Whitbey Writer's Workshop Award, has gone defunct, and their web 'zine is no more]

Micro Fiction / "Twitterature" at Thaumatrope (http://thaumatrope.greententacles.com/contributors/JBurridge/stories/)


To avoid duplicates here's the markets I've been working with:

Abyss & Apex
Analog Science Fiction & Fact
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
Asimov's Science Fiction
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Clarkesworld Magazine Delete
Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness
Daily Science Fiction
Electric Velocipede
Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF)
Fantasy Magazine
GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator
Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine
Pedestal Magazine
PodCastle
Polyphony
Realms of Fantasy
Shimmer
Strange Horizons
Talebones
Tor.com
Whidbey Writers Workshop


So what do you think? Is there a market you think is a good match that is not in the above list? Should I just direct-release to EPUB format? Should I hang onto that day... job...?

...and, back to writing fiction.

2 comments:

Dave Raines said...

That which does not kill our career makes it stronger. By my count, you're only in the second of the three try-fail cycles; so your triumph is yet to come. Although to be honest, I haven't actually been counting.

Hang in there. You'll be an overnight success yet!

John said...

Thanks Dave,

Part of this posting was motivated by frustration at the submission process. But I always try to remind myself of the character response cycle. Since I don't want to be a part of the "The character receives a rejection letter and mopes about it" cycle, I tried to think out of the box.

It does cross my mind every so often that maybe the fantasy and science fiction markets are not a good match for me, and that I'd have better publishing luck with memoir markets.

It also crosses my mind that this post is essentially asking my friends and acquaintances to provide amateur agent services.

Anyway, I'm hopeful that a market suggestion or two might come out of it.