Submitting chapters of a longer piece

You'll find more useful stuff in the short fiction forum, but in general, you sell the first rights of a short story. Sometimes there's an exclusive time before you can resell. Sometimes they ask for non-exclusive rights, such as being able to produce an anthology later, archive rights, etc.

The main thing to make sure is that the only exclusive right they get is to publish your short for the first time. What non-exclusive rights you agree to is down to you, but won't stop you publishing elsewhere. Don't let them take the copyright, rights to the characters/settings or anything like that.

ETA: A mod moved this to short fiction while I was replying, but it didn't start out there. I'm not seeing things, honest.

Many Short Story Publishers have clauses in their Submission Guidlines that exclude "chapters from a larger work".

You will also likely lose First Publishing Rights with most major novel publishers no matter what the terms of the short story publisher's contract.

Generally I've found that novel chapters don't work particularly well as short stories. However, at GUD we did publish at least one part of a novel--How Romana Saved the Ducks. My own feeling was that publication in GUD could compromise the author's ability to sell the novel, but it was their choice in the end. It's not a road I'd go down myself.

Most chapters don't work as shorts and probably won't sell, but I don't see any harm in trying. The examples I know of, being published as a short helped sell the novel, rather than hindering it.

One thing I have heard suggested by an established author is to write shorts in the world of the novel. Like write a short story prequel about a piece of history to the novel. In that way, you have a standalone short, you explore and flesh out the history of the novel world, and you don't compromise First Publishing Rights. You also create a potential fanbase who would look forward to the novel's release.

If you can find a willing magazine, selling chapters that stand alone as short stories, or just an excerpt from a novel, is perfectly fine.

Novel publishers not only do not mind this, they love it. It brings added publicity and means a built in fan base for the published novel.

You should never sell all rights to any short story unless you're dead certain all other money is gone from it, but a short story and a novel are very different things, and the rights to one do not cover the rights to the other.

An exclusive to a short story just means that story can't be published anywhere else as a short story until the exclusive is over. This covers a collection of short stories, but does not cover a novel.

But I will say this. It's a rare chapter that works both as a standalone short story, and as a chapter in a continuing novel, unless some small fiddling is done.

And this. When you do sell such a story, the magazine should be told it's going to be part of a novel, This gives you added publicity because the magazine will always bill it as such in the writer's bio, on the content's page, and/or in the story blurb.