by Elizabeth Blue

Created on: May 08, 2007

The Waiting Game: Things the Beginning Writer Must Know

So, you've written a story. It's a good, story, too. You've revised it and revised it some more, ideally after having received constructive criticism from several respected people. You've polished the story, and now you'd like to have it published. You want people to read your story and like it. You might even wish to be paid.

Before you embark on this journey, there's something you should know: writing and publishing is time consuming, and I don't just mean the writing part. Why, that takes practically no time at all in comparison. There are also important things that, if you decide to submit your work for publication, you should do and things you should not do.
If you want to submit your work for publication, you're going to have to develop the patience of a mother of quintuplets. There are markets that have a reputation for replying quickly, but these are few and far between. Be prepared to wait from one hour to two years. In the six years during which I have been submitting my fiction regularly, I have experienced both extremes of response times and everything in between. Neither of the two extremes happen often. The average seems to be between two and eight months.
That doesn't sound so bad, does it? If a magazine replies to you two months after you sent them your story? Not bad at all, in my opinion, especially if they accept your story.
But what if they reject it? Well, then you move on to the next market on the list. (You do have a list of potential markets, right?) But then you start the waiting process all over again. And again and again until someone writes you back and says something like, "We like your story and want to publish it."

Acceptance is not the end of waiting, though. Sometimes you'll sell a story to a webzine who updates regularly and frequently, and your story will see publication within a month or so, and in some cases, within a week, and less often, within a day. A print publication will take longer. This could be anywhere from a couple of months to a year or more, depending on how far ahead the editor has bought and the frequency of the publication's issues.

So, do you see why I said you need the patience of a mother of quintuplets? It gets worse.

Suppose you wrote a story, you shopped it around to, say, four different markets before it was accepted, waiting four months for each response. That's sixteen months total to sell your story. Say you sold it to a quarterly publication with

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>