The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

Here’s another couple things to think about.

How much time do we spend researching, and sending submissions out? In the amount of time that would be spent choosing a market, writing a cover letter, getting it bundled up, sent, again and again over and over, how much more could I have written? Quite a bit more. And when a story gets published, how long does it take to actually reach its audience? I had a story once take three or four years to get published. Genres have come and gone in that amount of time. I had even forgotten that it had been placed by then. This submission and resubmission process is similar to what the film industry calls “development hell.”

I lose the familiarity with the current market that I’d have if I kept buying and researching magazines, but I don’t really do too much of that anyway, and I don’t pay much attention to what the market does. I prefer to pay attention to what my mind does. I know, that isn’t what they recommend, but it’s how I work.

Obviously I’m grinding obsessively on this. That’s my personality. I’m going to make a decision by the end of the weekend.

So I have only begun to start promoting this website. I installed stapress on Jan. 10th as I figured out that the regular stats program was completely useless. In those 12 days, I have had 108 visitors who looked at 275 pages.If that stayed the same (which it will certainly increase as times goes on), after 3 months, a relatively average submission turn-around time, I’d have 810 visitors, with 2,062 page views. As I think about what I want to do, is it better to have had 810 people looking at my stories, maybe coming back for more, plus all of the tags and search terms that might have brought more visitors to my site, or is it better to have one editor read my story over and reject it in that time?

Let’s look at another way. I wrote a bass scale manual and submitted it once. It was rejected by Mel Bay. I put it up at Lulu.com, and didn’t really promote it, as I was working on a follow-up that I’d promote alongside it, and a lot of other projects. You’d think it would get hits, but in possibly a year, I haven’t sold a single unit. I put the same text up at scribd.com and in 19 days, had 408 people view it, 8 people favorite it, and a comment sent saying:

This is wonderful, I’ve been playing bass for a long time and I’ve never came a scales book so detailed for the instrument. Great!

What did me better?

I’m in the market of promoting myself. I’m in the market of promoting my novels and podcasts. I want to find an agent. If I have a following of 5,000, an agent or two will be among them. I can prove how many viewers I get, my following. I can show comments, actual input from fans, and interaction. I can prove that I have a core following that will translate into sales, and isn’t this all about sales in the long run? What do I gain from submitting a story to a siminishing market that is largely backwards in its practices? Sure there’s a point to getting paid, and there’s a point to getting industry recognition. If I put a story up here, it doesn’t go out for a Hugo Nomination or anything like that. But that can come with time. I can bypass the slush pile by having a following, to a certain extent.

In my thoughts, the scales are tipping towards just releasing my stories when they are ready here. Does anybody else have an opinion? Leave me a comment. Please. Somebody play devil’s advocate.

For the short term, I have some time off right now, and have completed a new short story for a collaborative anthology based on my Singularity Diner concept. I’m going to get a few more things taken care of and I’ll be in a good position to move forward again with all of the blogs, podcasts and projects. Would anyone prefer to get everything in one feed? All of the podcasts and writing? I could arrange for that to happen.

Next on the agenda, I have to do a mix-down of “Tev” for the Horror Addicts podcast (thanks to PC Haring for the fast voice recording). I have some essays to upload and record, and I’m finishing up re-writes on The Hidden. Then I move onto Inside, The Singualrity, The End of the World Times, and Walter.

Right now, I’m looking around, and seeing an industry in decline. Publishers are hurting, magazines are declining, and for a writer like me who is trying to break in, it’s looking more and more difficult. I’m going to spend some time thinking about this, but I want to market things a little differently. I would rather get my short stories out to as many people as possible than have them in a submissions queue for months or years. Isn’t that really the point? I’d rather have community than scant dollars, and I’d feel far closer to my audience. Nobody makes a living at short stories anymore, magazines are cutting back on how many they publish, how many issues they are publishing, some sci-fi outlets don’t even publish fiction at all anymore.I have to call out Escape Pod and Pseudopod a little on this one. They have probably the largest following of any of the new media magazines out there, and put out a new story every week, sometimes more, and they seem to do more reprint material than any first-run material. I often hear that a piece was first printed in a magazine in 2002, for instance. That’s a six year old story. In science fiction, genres have come and gone since then. On Pseudopod, I heard a story last week that was plot point for plot point, a throw away excercise from Stephen King’s “On Writing”. Is this really advancing us anywhere? Is this building a new market? Taking the place of the old?

Maybe I need to start a magazine site. Maybe I need to get my stuff up here, and at goodreads.com, and other places just to get my name and work out there. Isn’t that a more direct route to people, a more direct route to following? The down side is that I’m just some other putz putting things up on a site, and I have no professional editors selecting me for their publications. Maybe I should just submit to on-line magazines, with their ability to turn around a story faster, and have no printing costs. That would certainly shorten the times spent in submissions hell.

Maybe I should look at Michael Mennega’s model of offering things for download in e-book form for a slight fee. I need to eat, and my day job sure isn’t paying well enough right now.

What’s my goal? to sell short stories? I don’t really think so. To sell the novel? Closer. To get an agent? That is probably the best thing I could do. In the time frame I’d like to do it in, I won’t even have my first round of submissions back from a print magazine. But if I could say that my stories are up in so many places, being read by so many people, I can demonstrate that I’m very actively promoting myself, which is really probably more important than a couple sales, assuming my novels are good enough to be picked up by an agent, at least more important than having a couple of credits to my name.

This I have to consider. It isn’t the traditional proffesional route, I know, but what would be more effective right now? I’ve never succeeded in doing things the traditional way, and I seem to be doing really well with social media. Maybe that’s just my track. As I consider this, if you could leave in comments some good on-line venues, both public and magazine type venues, I’d appreciate it. I know of goodreads and scribd (my scale book is getting a lot of attention there). Know there’s a couple of good mags that are SF on line, but I don’t know of any horror or fantasy specific magazines. Haven’t done any looking.

As far as the future of here, I’m planning more diary types of entries, and more fiction will come up here soon. I’ll keep you posted on everything else.