All good intentions aside, there is realistically only so much editing one can do in a day. Hell, there's only so much one can do in a week, but that would be pushing it back to being far too sporadic to count as a concentrated effort. Since I'm trying to made such an exertion, so I'm not left scrambling when the happy event of manuscript acceptance occurs, I've been trying to find something to do besides editing and posting to my blog each day to keep me focused.
A couple of months back I received the advice from a couple of sources to try submitting some of my work to magazines. This is something that has crossed my mind from time to time in the past. I have all these articles that I've already written on a variety of subjects after all, so why not put them to use?
Now the first thing I had to do was to find out what was out there and what sort of potential market for my work existed. I pretty much figured I could discount most of my reviews, as most magazines have in-house people to do reviews. I also realised that the majority of my op-ed would only be of interest to a limited market, for much the same reason as reviews.
Even before I had begun looking for magazines I began to realize the paucity of my marketable material. The whole experience was beginning to sound a little less like fun, and a little more like work. Oh well, I had said I wanted to be distracted from editing and this looked like it would be quite the distraction.
I decided to focus on a couple of specific articles and see if I could sell them to genre magazines. They weren’t actually articles, they were interviews, and I thought that might make them easier to sell. One was with an established author, Ashok Banker, author of a modern retelling of the Indian epic tale The Ramayana, and the other was with Robert Scott, whose Eldarn Sequence had just had its first of three books, The Hickory Staff, published.
My next step was one that seemingly thousands, if not millions, of people do each day, Google. It's amazing how many science fiction/fantasy magazines are in existence. I don't know what I expected, but the numbers were staggering. I decided to refine my search slightly and augmented it with the word "submissions".
Article comments
1 - Elvira Black
Richard, that's great news about the mags. It really is exciting (albeit sometimes nerve wracking) to send those babies out into the world, and it sounds like you're poised for a "hit." And good luck with the novel too; it seems like you've been targeting markets with a good "fit" there as well.
2 - Lisa McKay
Richard, pursuing a career in writing is clearly not for the faint-hearted - the glimpses you share of the seamy under-side of the writing profession are really invaluable. Cheers to you for sticking with it!
3 - John Spivey
Richard,
Try checking out The Sun Magazine. They are a highly regarded literary magazine that embraces probing, thinking pieces of writing. They also pay. Sometimes we have to look for every scrap of hope we can to keep on going. I wish you much good fortune.
John
4 - Richard Marcus
Why thank you all for your words of encouragement and praise. I must admit that I seem to think of everything as far less a "big deal" as everybody else.
My wife keeps telling me that I'm doing amazing things, and to me it just feels like doing what comes naturally. Amazing to me will be able to make a living from doing this, but for now I'm just grateful that I'm able to write and have fun doing and writing about the whole process.
thank you all for your support and encouragement.
Richard Marcus