The Market List - A Writers Market Resource for Genre Fiction

Yes. I've been writing for about twenty years and I came to F&SF late. (They have always been a tough sell. I had sold to Galaxy, Asimov's, some anthologies and also a few novels and TV animation scripts before I ever cracked F&SF, first with a collab George Guthridge and I did for Ed Ferman, then later for Kris Rusch. Having a thick list of credits never helped me get past Ed, including a collab I did with William Gibson he bounced.)

Did you recieve a batch of generic rejections from F&SF before Kris noticed your work?

I got generic rejections from everybody before anybody bought any of my stuff. First year I was writing, the total was close to 300, most of them form letters.

If you did have prior writing credits, do you think that had anything to do with the attention she <Kristine Kathryn Rusch> gave your work (I read a quote by her that said sometimes she would let a year's worth of good submissions from a particular author slip by before she would buy one).

I dunno. Obviously if you are a Big Name, somebody is going to want your story, even though I heard tales of how Asimov used to get rejections from his own magazine, somebody surely bought them sooner or later. But if an editor sees a name s/he recognizes as a pro, they are apt to get the benefit of the doubt in that they will at least get picked out of the slush pile faster.

Any suggestions to writers aspiring to make it in the short SF/Fantasy fiction market?

Write. A lot. Keep them going out and in circulation. Read the magazine you are trying to write for. (I love reading a post that says, "Well, I haven't read F&SF for a long time, but I sent them my story and they bounced it and it was good." You don't know the market it is much harder to hit it. If you don't read the stuff, you can't write it and expect to sell it.) And if you pin your hopes on one or two stories, you might be disappointed. If you have ten or fifteen in circulation, then a rejection isn't so bad.

The professional magazines get tons of submissions every month, sometimes 600-800, out of which they might be able to buy 10 or 12 pieces. Do the math. Right off the bat, you are in major competition. Many of those submissions are obviously not good enough to pay for and a glance at them is enough to tell. Even so, there are a lot of hungry writers and established pros sending stuff in and if you can't come up with something as good as or better than what they are doing, why should an editor want it? (I did some editing. After a while, you can sometimes tell by looking at the envelope that the piece inside won't be worth reading. Don't do anything to make your submission look amateurish -- no dragons on the envelope, no funny colored paper, no cursive typefaces or fonts. Standard submission format -- one side, 8-1/2 x 11 white paper, at least 20# weight, double-spaced, clean, no more than one or two errors [corrected] per page if typed, less if computer generated. You want your editor to notice nothing but the story.

As far as I can know, F&SF doesn't have slaughter parties while reading submissions. I don't know of any book house or magazine that does. Kris and Dean and Nina and the Yorks are writers first and editors second. They know what it feels like to get rejected and they don't enjoy doing it. They are buying or rejecting stories, not the writers, and unless you do something particularly stupid, like typing the thing in red ink or writing it in crayon, they'll usually read at least the first page. If you can't show them you are a professional-class writer by the end of the page, you probably will get it back. It needs to be well-done and interesting enough to make them want to read the next page; the second page must be likewise as good, and so on. Even so, the competition is fierce. If you get a hand-written note back, you've made it into the top 10-15% -- they like what you did enough to encourage you, but don't read anything more into than that.

Hope this has been of some help.

Steve