by Laurence Raphael Brothers
You’ve been writing for a while now. You’ve got a story folder, you’ve been submitting to magazines and anthologies, and then—Nice work! Congratulations on the publication! And commiserations, too, because there have undoubtedly been a lot of rejections along the way to that first sale.
This post is about the secretarial side of writing, and in particular, how to manage your stories over time. It’s a complicated subject, and everyone has different goals. Here are some points to consider.
Safeguard Your Work
Back everything up frequently. Cloud services are great, but it’s risky to rely on a single service provider. If all you have is a Microsoft account and Microsoft decides to suspend your account, what recourse do you have? It’s prudent to archive your work across multiple providers. Common choices include Google, Apple, and Dropbox, but there are many others to choose from. You can save your entire writing folder into a single zip or other archive file and then post the archive to your secondary providers. Losing a manuscript can be an excruciating experience, but losing access to your entire writing history would be far worse.
Track Submissions and Publications
I recommend using both spreadsheets and submission trackers to record submissions. Here’s an excerpt from one of my own spreadsheets:
Each row in this table is a submission. Tracking is a link to the market’s submission manager, if they have one. Ans Date is the date of their response. Pub Link is the published online link to the story. Strike it through or delete it if the publisher goes out of business or takes down the story. Rep Date is the date your contract says the story will be available for reprinting. You might also want to add a Fee column to track your income, a Rights column to indicate which rights were sold, and a Contact column for the market’s email.
I also use The Submission Grinder to manage my story portfolio. You could rely on them (or Duotrope, the Grinder’s for-pay competitor) exclusively, but I prefer to use my own spreadsheet, not only because something could happen to the site or my account, but because with my own spreadsheet, I can add custom columns and data.
Manage Your Contracts
You should retain all contracts associated with your publications. Contracts are the ultimate reference for exclusivity periods, rights sold, reversion terms, fees, and all the other minutiae associated with publication. Simply archiving your email is great, but if that’s your only reference, you might wind up wasting a lot of time looking for the email with a particular attached contract. One simple method is to drop all contracts into a single folder, with the contract files renamed using a standard convention that includes the story title. Another approach is to create a folder for every story, into which you can put manuscripts, revisions, edits, contracts, and anything else relevant to the publication.
Submit Reprints
Reprints can offer you fresh readers for your stories, restore a story that is no longer online to greater availability, and they can even make you money. Submitting a reprint is just like submitting a story for the first time, with a few important provisos.
- Make sure the rights are available. Some publications demand a lengthy period of exclusivity before reprint rights. If you are submitting to a “best of” anthology, most editors will be happy to grant you a special exception to their exclusivity period if you ask, and many contracts have this exception already written into the terms.
- Declare the story’s status. Always tell the new editor you’re submitting a reprint in the cover letter. Always name the original market and the date or issue of publication. It’s extremely unprofessional to conceal a past publication, and may be a civil offense, to boot.
- Set your expectations. While there are some markets that pay the same fee for reprints as for first publication, for the most part, even markets that pay relatively well for original publications will only pay token rates for a reprint. That said, sometimes you can get lucky. My top-earning short story generated four payments of $500 apiece, one first publication, one award payment, and two reprint fees, all coincidentally the same number.
- Best-of anthologies. I mentioned these anthologies above, and they’re easy to forget about because you can’t submit to them until the story sells, and then you have to do so during a one-year period. You can find some of them by searching The Submission Grinder for “best” in the name field.
Translations and Foreign-Market Submissions
While many readers of this article are not native English speakers, it’s still the case that an English-language bias exists for SFF writing (though various Chinese markets are coming on strong). The sad fact is that the satisfaction of knowing your English-language submission was accepted for translation and published abroad may be your only payment. That said, there are occasional exceptions to the rule that pay well, and when your story’s exclusivity period ends, it’s worth considering markets worldwide for reprint submissions. One note of caution is that if there is a dispute over rights, payment, or other contract terms, you may have little recourse outside your own country.
Short-Story Collections
Unfortunately, most agents and traditional publishers won’t consider short-story collections except from established authors. Not only is self-publishing an option, but some small presses accept submissions of story collections, either in book-length volumes or in chapbook form. If you’re interested in testing the self-publishing waters and you don’t have a novel in hand, publishing your own short story collection may provide an opportunity to learn the ropes. Such collections also provide some of the benefits of reprints sold to magazines.
Film and Video Options
For the most part, this is only available to writers with agents. However, on rare occasions, even unagented authors may receive solicitations from someone who read their story and wants to know if options are available. Unfortunately, there are many shady operators out there, so always look at such communications with a jaundiced eye. If the soliciting party seems legitimate, now would be a great time to get an agent, because agents will look favorably on a writer with an offer in hand.
Managing your portfolio isn’t all that much work, but it can pay many dividends as you continue to write and sell your stories.
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Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and a technologist. He has published over 50 short stories in such magazines as Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, and The New Haven Review. He has worked in Internet and AI R&D for Bellcore, Verizon, and Google, written professionally for Toptal, and is currently employed as a US patent examiner. Check out his books and stories at http://laurencebrothers.com/bibliography. Pronouns: he/him.