C.H. Campbell said:
Personally, as a relative newbie to writing, I'm not submitting anywhere that doesn't accept simsubs. My reasons for this, are as follows. If my stories are being rejected by the smaller ezines and such, then my chances of being accepted at a more prestigious magazine are greatly reduced. Also, I find it helps to keep in good spirits if you're getting feedback (even rejections) on a regular basis as opposed to having to wait 4-6 months. I've finally got a story thats due to be published in a smaller ezine, and that encourages me to write on. Unless you are the king of patience, start small and work your way up. Every story you place in a smaller mag makes you more attractive to the big ones. However, if you read Glimmer Train or another of it's like, and honestly feel that your writing is of the same calibre, give it a shot, sit back and wait. I've been making it a point to read authors that I know have a massive list of legitimate publishing credits, and can see what separates me from them, and I'm getting better for it. We all have different approaches, but that has been mine so far.
Starting small and working your way up is the worst possible thing a writer can do. It guarantees that any story you sell will go to the worst possible magazine that wants it.
Few things are less important than how a writer feels about the quality of his own work. Not one writer in a hundred is objective enough about his own writing to judge it. Either teh writer see his writing as better than it is, or much worse than it really is. Either way, he's wrong. It's an editor's job to judge the quality of the writing, and the only way an editor can do his job is if the writer sends him the story and lets him read it.
It's a serious, and often deadly, mistake to think small magazines will buy bad stories. A story good enough to sell to a small magazine is probably good enough to sell to a top magazine, if you give the editor there a chance to read it.
Many a story has, in fact, been rejected by numerous tiny magazines, only to find a home in a national glossy. If a story has no quality at all, it won't sell anywhere. If it has quality, however, it will sell to the magazine where it fits best. Fit is the issue, not size. I've sold a couple of stories to national glossies that were rejected by well over a dozen tiny magazines, some that offered no pay at all.
Stories in small mags do not, in any way, make you more attractive to editors at large magazines. This is a myth. The only thing that makes you attractive to the editor at a large magazine is writing a story that editor believes his readers will love. If anything, having only a bunch of credits in small magazines makes you less attractive to editors at large magazines.
One fact is irrefutable. If you start at the top and work your way down, your story will sell to the best magazine that wants it. But if you start at the bottom and work your way up, your story will sell to the worst magazine that wants it. It can't work any other way because if you start at the bottom and work your way up, the worst magazines will see your story first, and they'll accept it before the better magazines ever see it.
It takes one heck of a lot more patience to start at the bottom and work your way up than to start at the top and work your way down. By starting at the bottom, odds are good you'll never reach the top.
Writers need to eliminate such words as "waiting," "patience," etc., from their vocabulary. They always mean the writer is concentrating on the wrong end of writing, and usually mean teh writer is doing everything possible to increase the need for patience, and the overall waiting time.
The way to win this game is to forget all about waiting time. If you write constantly, and submit constantly, it won't be very long before you're hearing back from one story or another pretty much every week. Sometimes two or three times per week. If you aren't writing and submitting constantly, not much else matters. All the patience in the world won't help.
Trust your ability, and stop comparing yourself to writers in Glimmer Train, or anywhere else. Editors already have those writers, and contrary to popular beief, they are not looking for more writers just like them. Start your stories at the top, pay attention to any feedback you get every step of teh way down the ladder, write and submit constantly, and if you have any talent at all, you'll break into the top magazines one heck of a lot faster than you will by starting at the bottom.
An awful bunch of stories have been published in tiny magazines that would have sold to large magazines, had the writer just given the story a chance, instead of betraying it. As an editor, I see this happen often.
And an awful bunch of stories do not sell to top magazines because the writer can't resist simsubbing, even though it's clearly against the magazine's policy.
Forget patience on the submission end of the business. If the time lag bothers you, it can only mean you aren't writing and submitting nearly enough. If you were, you wouldn't even notice response time.
If, on the other hand, your goal is to amass a wonderful collection of rejection slips, start at the bottom, and practice simsubbing regularly.
Trust me. As an editor, I want to see your story, and just because you don't think it measures up in no way at all means I'll feel the same.
