Saturday, September 13, 2014

Paying Markets: Daily Science Fiction

I'm going to be starting a list on a page here to help writers find paying markets for their short stories and books.

The reasons I'm doing this boil down to this: last year, around this time, I decided that rather than publish all my stories myself on my blog, I was going to start sending them around to other magazines and other publishers.  The reason for that, frankly, was that I was no longer making that much money off my blogs (see this post back in May for how my writing career "pays").

So every short story, long story, novel, novella, etc., that I have written since last August has been sent to someone else to publish before I publish it myself, and the results have started to become encouraging, as more and more of my stuff has gotten published, and lately, that publication has paid.

This has been part of other ongoing projects of mine that I've been working on, and so I'll post from time to time the places I've found that are particularly friendly (or not) to indie writers, as well as those that pay well (or don't).

The first two would be Golden Fleece Press, which will be publishing my novel Find Out Who You Are; you'll have to read about that on my blog, Thinking The Lions , where eventually I will discuss why that novel is being published by a third party instead of by me; the second of the first two is "Daily Science Fiction."

For the past three-plus months I have been doing two things every day: First, I have been writing a short story every single day, with each day's story having one less word than the one before it.  I started at 365 words and have been counting down; yesterday's story was 248 words (I haven't written today's yet, it's still early.) Several of those stories have been published already.

The other thing I've been doing is getting a short science fiction story emailed to me every day, courtesy of the appropriately-named Daily Science Fiction.

Daily Science Fiction publishes very short stories in almost any category of science fiction you can imagine.  You can sign up to have the stories emailed directly to you; I did that and I've enjoyed getting them each day.  The short length means they can easily be read on your phone, if you're sitting waiting for a doctor's appointment or a meeting to start, for example.  Or during the meeting? Look, that's up to you.

They also keep their stories archived on the site, which is fun to browse through when you're taking a break or eating lunch; the most recent stories are on the front page, as well.

The flash stories they publish are a cut above the usual flash I see on a lot of sites, not relying so heavily on twist endings or surprises midway through.  They publish some fantasy and twisted fairy tales, too.

Submission requires creating an account; they have specific formats that are required, but  nothing too annoying (some sites are ridiculous in their formatting requirements.)  They'll publish only stories between 100-1,500 words in length and they pay $0.08 per word, so your 100-word flash story might net you $8.  That's more than I made selling books on Amazon all this month, which is one reason why I started writing short stories and sending them to other markets.

Check out their site here,  They also publish monthly digests that you can buy on your Kindle for just $2.99, and they have a hard-bound anthology for the Luddites, with 260 stories that you'll find inconvenient to carry around or read but on the other hand, which also help destroy the environment.

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My short story writing project has already led to stories being published at The Devilfish Review, among other places.  Click here to read An Alphabet of Science I Wasn't Sure Existed, and don't forget to stop by my blog, Thinking The Lions now and then.  You might just learn something about toasters.

5 comments:

  1. If you haven't visited The Grinder yet, you should. Tons of markets. Sounds like you've got a lot of stories to sell! Best of luck to you!

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  2. I'm sure this will be a good addition to the site even if I never use it.

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  3. 8 dollars is more than I've made for my contributions to 2 flash fiction anthologies, which amounts to about 30 stories. If I got $8 apiece that'd be $240! Cha-ching!

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  4. I've been rejected by Daily Science Fiction - apparently 'brilliant' isn't a genre they support.

    The only other option I could think of is that they didn't like my story, which is so ridiculous I can't seriously consider it.

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