Todd’s worrying about…

Todd's worrying about markets for his story. Zak's worrying about markets for his story. Most of the writers I know worry about whether markets exist for their weirder stories and I just don't get it. There's like kazillion markets out there. And if you actually manage to work through all the pro and semi-pro markets which could plausibly take your story, then you still get to decide whether you want to try to sell it yourself off a web page. And there's also still the option of just giving it away online or in a chapbook or in a well-read amateur market and counting it as self-promotion expense which will help you sell other stuff later. Isn't the whole point for the damn thing to be read, anyway? I mean, it's not like you're ever going to make a living selling short stories, right?

I don't know -- I guess I have a fundamentally different view on all this than most of my writer friends. I have nothing against selling stuff, and even selling stuff for as much as the market will bear. But if the market won't bear, then I'm perfectly happy to give it away, and I don't think it really says anything about me as a writer, or about the worth of the story. (Not that the story might not be crap, but it's not *necessarily* crap, is what I'm saying.) Usually there's a market somewhere that'll publish it, if you're willing to just keep sending the damn thing out. Sometimes there just isn't a market, not at the current moment. Is it really that big a deal?

Hmmm...part of the confusion for me, I think, is that while there are certainly markets I'd like to be published in, I don't care what they publish of mine. So yes, I'd like to sell The New Yorker something. Ditto The Atlantic. Sci Fiction too. Ditto anything that pays me a lot. (I don't really care about selling to Asimov's, unlike most sf writers I know.) But I don't care where any particular story ends up. Eventually, they'll all end up on my web page, and I suspect that's where they'll be read the most in the long run. :-) If I have the long and fabulously successful career I hope to, anyway.