submission grinder – Words Deferred

How to Edit Short Stories: An Example

My writing time for the past few weeks has been focused on revision. My latest story, Red Eye, has now been reworked more thoroughly than any other short story I’ve written.

Does that make it the best thing I’ve ever written? No, not necessarily. There are a million factors that determine a story’s quality. What careful revision does is help make a story the best possible version of itself.

I’ve written about revision before:

I think revision is not discussed enough. This is partly because there’s more romanticism to first drafts: the blank page, the whispers of the muse, and bringing a new piece of art into the world. The raw creative energy of a first draft.

But first drafts often aren’t that good. They can be misshapen and muddled. They may be missing pieces, or not quite sure what they want to be. Like the golem, revision takes a roughly shaped form and puts magic into it that brings it to life.

First, I’ll outline some basic principles. Then I’ll discuss how they played out in my revisions for Red Eye.

Principles of Editing

These are a few things that work for me. Use what works for you and ignore what doesn’t. I am never entirely consistent with this process. I’m always changing and trying new ways of working.

Each story also has different requirements. So even if you have a consistent general process, it may still need to adapt to each individual story’s needs.

Focus on the Core Concept

Unlike longer works, short stories don’t have much room for meandering and asides. They work best when they have a distinct core concept. This might be an idea, a plot point or twist, a character, or even the structure of how the story is told.

There are many different engines that can power a story and drive it forward. The core concept is often very close to whatever got me excited about writing the story in the first place, although some stories will turn out to have a completely different focus from what you expected when you started writing.

The core concept is the measure for everything else in the story. Anything that doesn’t strengthen, deepen, or explore the core concept should be questioned and considered for removal.

Get External Feedback

The written word is an imperfect communication channel. The author stands on one side, with an idea of the story in their head. The reader stands on the other. Between them: two cans connected with string. This is the story, and just because you think you’re sending it with perfect clarity over the wire doesn’t mean the reader is receiving it the way you want them to.

The only way to effectively reconcile the story in your head with the story the reader received is to ask them. If you aren’t used to detailed feedback, you may be surprised how many different experiences and interpretations a dozen readers can have with the exact same story.

The first challenge is finding those readers. Friends and family may be an option. Writing groups and online critiques are another. More is generally better, but the sweet spot is probably 5-15 readers. Fewer, and you’ll miss useful critique, more and it will become overwhelming.

The second challenge is parsing the feedback. Put aside ego and be as open and honest as you can be. Some feedback you will disagree with. The reader may want something that doesn’t align with your core concept. The reader may identify a valid problem, but offer a bad solution. Individual readers will inevitably miss or misinterpret things, or get confused. This isn’t necessarily a problem if it’s only one reader in fifteen. If multiple readers have the same issue, it deserves scrutiny.

The final challenge is deciding what to change. It may be helpful to start with a list of problems, and then translate those into solutions. One change may be able to fix several problems, or one problem may necessitate several changes. I like to make checklists and take many editing passes, focusing on one or two things each time.

Big to Small

Try to make big, sweeping changes before line edits and more localized changes. It’s a waste of time to polish a paragraph if you’re just going to delete or replace the whole scene later.

This is something to strive for, but editing is an iterative process, so don’t stress over it too much. Sometimes an epiphany doesn’t strike until deep into the editing process. Don’t let the sunk cost fallacy discourage changes that will make a story better.

Cut, Cut, Cut

This was a hard lesson for me to internalize. If you have a naturally flowery or verbose style, it’s perfectly fine to run wild in early drafts. However, it’s important to cut that back as much as possible in revisions. Even first drafts written in a sparse style can often be trimmed significantly.

When cutting, look at what reinforces the core concept. Compare the trimmed and untrimmed versions of a sentence or paragraph. Be honest about what is really lost when removing a word here or there. Only keep what’s valuable.

Value isn’t measured solely in understandability of the plot. It may be critical characterization, or lyricism, or structure. You should be able to articulate why a cut doesn’t work, and default to brevity.

If you’re not used to ruthless cutting, it may feel bad at first. Short stories are an inherently tight medium, and given two versions of a story, the one that can say the same things in fewer words will generally be stronger. If you’re trying to get your work published or sold, there are simply more opportunities for shorter stories than longer ones.

Take frequent breaks when trimming. Once you’ve read and tweaked the same sentence a few times, it becomes hard to look at it objectively. Time is a necessary part of the process.

Example: Red Eye

Red Eye is a sci-fi noir short story in a future where a longevity serum extends lives. In rare cases this serum makes the person a “Red Eye,” activating a latent psychic power to see the future. These visions always come to pass so long as the Red Eye is still alive, and every Red Eye sees an apocalyptic cataclysm looming in the future.

The main character is a Red Eye police detective who catches other Red Eyes so they can be given a longevity-counteracting drug, in the hope that this will stop the collective catastrophic vision from coming to pass.

Red Eye is a long story for me, generally staying in the range of 6000-7000 words through many iterations. It is also an old story that stole ideas from things I wrote in my twenties. A version of it sat in a drawer for a number of years when I wasn’t submitting my work for publication. I revived it in 2024, and that is when I began editing it in earnest.

For stories I write today, I generally let the first draft sit for a couple weeks. Red Eye was an outlier in that regard.

Initial Revisions

My first editing pass is a gut check. I try to forget everything I know and come at it as a reader. What obviously works or doesn’t work? I try to find my core concept. At first, this was the idea of the psychic who locks the future in place by seeing it.

I also noted right away that the story was long, and I wanted to trim it down significantly.

I made some initial changes, fixed obvious problems, and did my best to trim. My goal at this early stage is to have the right scenes in the right order and rough shape. (Realistically though, things can change.) Then I take a light polishing pass where I check spelling, grammar, and flow. Much of this polish will be wasted, but I do it to avoid distracting first readers with small errors.

First Feedback

My first audience is my family. They are avid readers in various genres. At face value, they are not necessarily the “perfect readers” for my work, but that’s fine. They are kind enough to give me their time and energy, and they’ll be somewhat gentle with me while pointing out any major flaws.

With their initial feedback, I hope to catch anything egregiously confusing, any plot holes, and a handful of random smaller problems. They may also bring ideas or suggestions.

For Red Eye, the feedback told me that this is a complicated plot, and it was hard to relate to the main characters. That meant I would need to make it easier to understand what was happening while simultaneously putting more of the characters’ feelings and motivations on the page. And I still wanted to make the story shorter.

I made some changes based on this feedback, and jotted a few notes for later.

Detailed Feedback

Next, I submit to Critters, which is an online writing group designed for getting feedback on works in progress. It takes a story a couple weeks to get through the queue, which provides another natural break.

If I have major concerns from my initial edits and first reader feedback, I may include a question or two along with the story. Often I do not. I find that including specific questions will cause many readers to focus solely on those concerns, and I really want this feedback to clue me into any problems that I’m completely unaware of.

The Critters critiques will dribble into my inbox over the course of a week. I usually read each one the day it comes in, but I do nothing about them at first.

Reading feedback from strangers can be emotional, depending on how effective they are at constructive criticism. I have received a good amount of critique and I like to think I’m even-keeled about it. I still think it’s normal and expected to feel good when a reader compliments your story, and bad when they dislike it or are confused by it. Reading feedback as soon as it comes in gives me space to feel any of those things without the need to take any action. It lets some of that feedback lodge in my brain and start to marinate.

When all the critiques are in, I go through them again, systematically. Any initial feelings I might have had are now blunted and I can take in the critique more honestly. I respond to everyone with a brief thank-you email. This isn’t strictly required for Critters, but it’s polite, and it forces me to consider the feedback. I’ll often write a sentence or two in my email in response to what was said.

While I’m doing this, I copy all the feedback into a single document. I may do some light organizing, like putting similar feedback together or trimming out empty pleasantries and suggestions or complaints that I’ve decided to ignore.

The feedback for Red Eye reaffirmed my concerns about plot and characterization, and provided a lot of good smaller-scale line editing suggestions. Interestingly, while I was worried about the story being too long, my readers really didn’t think it was.

The Hard Edits

This is the toughest part. I have a story and a ton of feedback. Now it’s time to make it better.

Since this story was longer than I’m used to and I received a ton of good feedback, it took me a long time to organize my document of problems, and a long time to decide how I wanted to try to solve each of them.

For this particular story, I created a reverse outline in the form of a list of scenes. I gave each scene a descriptive title and noted the pages it started and ended on. Red Eye had eleven scenes ranging from less than a page to seven pages.

I also listed all my characters. This can help to see where whole characters can be cut or combined, although I didn’t do that with Red Eye.

I then looked at my checklist of problems and solutions and placed them under the scenes where I thought they made sense. This included big things and small things, with the big things first. Some bullet points migrated between scenes as I worked.

This is the grunt work, simply going through one problem after another, sometimes finding that your idea for a fix doesn’t work and finding a new one, and rearranging, adding, deleting. This is usually where my opinion of my own writing is at its lowest, because I am working through all the worst parts of the story. It’s important to remember that the end is near, and the story that comes out of this process will be the best it has ever been.

Additional Rounds of Feedback

I will note here that you may choose to make major changes to a story, and then go back for a more rounds of feedback to get an idea of how well those changes worked.

I did not do this with Red Eye, but I certainly see stories go through Critters multiple times. It all comes down to how worried you are about the shape of the story and the changes you’ve made.

I also think that there comes a point where it becomes more valuable to move on to the next story than iterate yet again on the current one. This is just something you have to feel out and decide for yourself.

Polish and Cleanup

When the big, sweeping changes are done and I’ve addressed the major problems, I turn to polish and cleanup. The scenes, characters, and plot are solidified, and I look at the individual sentences and words. First I address small items from reader feedback. Then I read through each scene several times to find anything that sounds off.

Haruki Murakami says that you know you are nearly done with editing when you find yourself adding words or punctuation in one pass, then changing it back in the next. Some changes will come down to your current mood and the time of day.

My final step, again, is to cut, cut, cut. Tighten all the screws. Get that word count as low as it will go. For Red Eye, I allowed my word count to creep up by nearly a thousand words throughout the process of fixing all the bigger issues. Then I trimmed about the same number of words out again.

That might sound pointless at first, but it’s actually fantastic. I was able to effectively replace something like 10-20% of my words with better words! That’s what editing is all about.

Take a Victory Lap

If you get to this point, all that’s left is to put your manuscript into a word doc with standard formatting. Add the author info and title and page headers. Add the word count (and see if you can shave off another fifty or hundred).

Then stop and take in your beautiful story. Appreciate your hard work. Editing is all about finding the flaws—the negatives. Take a moment to feel the good vibes of a finished story. Be proud.

Then fire up Duotrope or Submission Grinder and find somewhere to submit that thing. And start working on the next story.

The Short Fiction Posts

In 2026, I’m once again focusing on short stories, so this seems like a perfect time to revive a series of six posts I did in 2024, all focused on short stories.

In this series, I cover why short stories are important to read and write, how they’re generally categorized by publishers, and how to revise and submit for publication. Finally, I wrapped it all up with a comparison of the two most popular websites for tracking your submissions: Duotrope and Submission Grinder.

7 Duotrope Tips and Tricks

Anyone who has been keeping up with the blog lately will know that 2024 is my year of short stories. I’ve been writing short fiction and submitting it to publications. As a result, I’ve been using Duotrope quite a bit.

Duotrope includes a database of publisher information and a submission tracker for authors. (It’s not the only one: Submission Grinder and Chill Subs are out there too. Duotrope is just the tracker I’ve been using.) So, I thought I’d write about a few tips and tricks that I’ve discovered that make the submission process a little easier.

1. Search by Title

The Duotrope publisher search has a lot of options, so you might be surprised (as I was), that there is no option for the actual title of a publication.

For some reason, Duotrope decided that this belonged in its own section. The “Find by Title/Name” option in the Search menu gives you the option of inputting a partial or exact name. If you don’t quite remember the name of a publication, you can also try searching by alphabetical index.

2. Find Publishers for a Piece

Once you’ve added a story to your Duotrope submission tracker, it will show up on your “List of Pieces” page under Account -> Pieces.

When the piece is ready to be sent out, you can always search for publishers by manually entering the length, genre, and other parameters. But you don’t have to.

Instead, just click the “Publishers” link next to your story on the “List of Pieces” page. This will automatically populate a search with the information you’ve entered in the piece’s description.

3. Publishing News

The Publishing News section of the site shows publishers that have been recently added. Since brand-new publications are inherently less well-known, they may represent a good opportunity to get a story in front of editors that are hungry for content, with relatively small slush piles.

Publishing News also has a section for publishers that have recently opened to submissions, which can be another good way to find fresh options, especially when those publications are only briefly open to submissions.

4. Track Themes and Deadlines

Some publications are only open for submissions during specific windows. This is especially true for themed issues or anthologies. Duotrope can track these submission windows and deadlines.

On a publisher’s detail page, general submission windows will be listed under the Dates heading, and specific themes will be listed under Theme(s). In each of these sections, there will be a Track link and a colored bubble listing the number of Duotrope users who are already tracking.

In the Account menu, you can visit “Themes and Dates” to see a convenient list of everything you’ve chosen to track.

5. Deadline Calendar

Whether or not you’re tracking any Themes or Deadlines, you can access the Theme and Deadline Calendar under the News section of the menu, or from the link at the top of the Theme tracking page.

By default, the calendar shows a list of all the themed submissions and deadlines in Duotrope, but you can filter by genre, payment, or your personal favorite publishers.

6. Overdue Responses at a Glance

Duotrope’s Submissions view shows information for all your tracked stories that are out on submission. It includes a trove of information, including some that makes it easier to decide if you need to follow up.

This view shows how many days each submission has been out, as well as the average response time reported by Duotrope users and the estimated response time provided by the publisher. But the status icon also has four different color options for pending responses.

Normally, the status is gray, but it will turn yellow if the submission has been out longer than the normal response time, and red if it exceeds the publisher’s stated response time. In some cases the publisher may state that they don’t always respond to submissions or don’t respond to status queries. In these cases, the icon will turn purple.

Of course, as with all things, you should confirm the publisher’s information on their website before blindly trusting Duotrope. It’s usually right, but occasionally there are discrepancies.

7. The Reports

Reports may sound dry and boring, but there are a few useful lists available there.

Authors who are sick of waiting for long response times can check the 100 fastest publishers to respond. Looking for feedback? Check the list of publishers most likely to send a personal response. Just trying to get a story accepted somewhere? Consider the list of publications with the highest reported acceptance rates.

What Else?

Do you use Duotrope? Are there any interesting features I missed? If you use a different tracker, I’d love to hear what they offer that Duotrope does not. Let me know in the comments.

Year of Short Stories —Week #2

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in progress – 1
Submissions this week – 0 (1 currently out)

An Unproductive Week, A Cool New Tool

Short post this week, as I ended up being busy and didn’t get much done in the short story department.

I did discover an exciting new tool, Chill Subs. It already provides a publication database and submission tracking tool for writers, similar to the Submission Grinder and Duotrope. Even better, it’s looking to unseat Submittable as the de facto tool for editors to receive and track submissions.

In recent years, Submittable has become almost ubiquitous among literary fiction magazines, pushing the transition from snail mail to electronic submissions for short fiction. But its pricing scheme is predatory. It charges not only a monthly fee, but a fee per submission processed. Since so many literary magazines live on the budgetary knife’s edge, this has helped to drive the now-common submission fees for literary writers hoping to get their fiction published.

I feel lucky to work in genre fiction. The fantasy and science fiction space has more than its fair share of technical people. We’re lucky to have developed tools like Moksha and the Clarkesworld submission system.

Chill Subs aims to bring its own submission manager to market some time in Fall 2024. Their delightful website even allows you to choose how optimistic you are about their chances, updating the language and graphics accordingly. It’s a small team operating with a surprising amount of transparency, and their love of the craft (and the authors and editors) shines through. I don’t know if I’m “confident AF,” but I really hope they succeed.

Goals for Next Week

Same as last time!

Revise “Pleasant Hills”
Research more publications and submit at least one drabble
Begin writing “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime”

Reference Desk #15 — Duotrope vs. Submission Grinder

The Short Story Series

It’s the ultimate crossover event! Today we have a continuation of my short story series, as well as my Reference Desk series detailing useful tools for writers. Get ready for a battle of publication catalogues and a submission tracker showdown!

Finding the right place to submit your short fiction isn’t trivial. Back in the olden days, you might have to subscribe to an actual dead-tree trade journal just to have a somewhat up-to-date list of publications. These days, the internet gives us some easier options.

The two most popular submission tools for short fiction writers are Duotrope and Submission Grinder. Both of them are designed to help you find markets for your stories and track your submissions. Today, I’ll be comparing some of the different features between these two tools to give you a better idea of which one you might want to use.

Price

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Duotrope is a paid service. After a 7-day free trial, it costs $5/month or $50/year. Submission Grinder is completely free to use, although they have numerous options to donate.

If you don’t want to pay or can’t afford it, Submission Grinder is the tool for you.

Listings

Duotrope maintains listings of publishers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and visual art. It also lists literary agents for fiction writers. Submission Grinder maintains fiction and poetry listings.

At the time of writing, Duotrope lists 5,027 fiction markets. They claim that they keep their listings accurate and up-to-date by checking each active listing for changes about once a month. They also run more thorough check twice a year, contacting the editors or agents if anything appears to be inaccurate or if there are signs that the market may be dead or on hiatus. (Websites not being updated is honestly a pretty big problem with small markets.)

At the time of writing, the Submission Grinder has 2,669 listings for fiction and poetry. It’s not entirely clear from the webpage how the listings are kept updated, although there are links for users to suggest a new market listing or suggest a correction, so it seems to be mostly crowdsourced.

Submission Tracking

Both tools let you

Add stories to your tracker
Add submissions for a story
Mark a submission as accepted, rejected, or no response
Track and search personal statistics
Track deadlines

Both tools also aggregate the statistics across their user base. This allows them to show information like what percentage of submissions are accepted or rejected by a specific market. They both have anonymized feeds of recent activity.

Duotrope has a plethora of statistics*, including the markets that are fastest and slowest to respond, and those that are most or least likely to accept (or even respond!)

_{*Note: you can see the list, but not the actual statistics, without a subscription}

Additional Features

Both tools have an optional newsletter with new listings and other publishing news.
Duotrope has transcripts from hundreds of editor and literary agent interviews—possibly useful for getting a better idea of what your favorite market is looking for, or just general good practices.
Duotrope has some basic guides for writers, especially around submitting your work. It also has guides to using their various tools.

Takeaways

Honestly, both of these tools get the job done. They make it easy to search a lot of different markets, and to track your submissions as you send them out.

Overall, I do find Duotrope to be a little bit nicer. It has a few more features and a little more polish, but that’s to be expected when they have a subscription fee. If you don’t mind spending the money, I think Duotrope is good value for the cost.

Submission Grinder feels a little more like a community project, crowdsourcing market info and relying on donations. Maintaining a popular tool site takes work, and based on their Patreon, I think Submission Grinder is powered more by love than money.

If you have a story or two that you’re looking to send out, you should definitely try out one of these services. It will make it a lot easier to find ideal markets and keep track of what gets sent where.

Submitting Short Stories

The Short Story Series

Make Sure It’s Ready

Writing a brilliant short story isn’t enough. When it comes time to submit, you’re in a competition with every other author who’s submitting to the same magazine, anthology or contest. And often, that’s hundreds of other people—hundreds of other stories—you’re going up against. Make sure to seek out critique and make revisions. Polish that story until it shines.

If your story is accepted, an editor may certainly ask for changes, but you still need to show your very best work up front if you want to get that far. Editors and readers are looking for any excuse to reject your story to whittle down that huge pile of submissions. Don’t give them an easy excuse like typos or sloppy grammar.

Where to Submit

The first thing you need when submitting a short story is someplace to submit to. Hopefully you’ve been reading short stories, because this is a great way to do field research on publications in your chosen genre(s). The publishing landscape is ever-shifting, but it’s a good idea to read widely to get a sense of who the heavy hitters are.

For example, as someone who writes a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, I know that The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction And Fact, and Asimov’s Science Fiction are three of the biggest speculative fiction magazines. They’ve been around for decades and pay professional rates for short stories. There is a prestige to getting published by them. However, there are a number of other magazines and websites that are popular and pay well, and an even larger number of smaller magazines and websites that often fill specific niches and tend to pay less.

Ultimately, what you want to do is understand your options and match your story to the places with the best chance of accepting it. The best way to do that is to read some sample stories and look at the submission guidelines.

Submission Guidelines

Most actively publishing magazines, open contests, and anthologies with open submissions will post submission guidelines on their website. Submission guidelines are just the publisher’s description of what kinds of submissions they want, and how they want to receive them.

Tools like Duotrope and Submission Grinder collect the submission guidelines of many different publications and make them easier to search, so these can be a real boon. However, they sometimes take a while to add new publications, remove defunct ones, or update guidelines that have changed. Always, always, always double-check the publication’s website, and follow those guidelines if there’s any discrepancy.

Submission guidelines typically have some subset of the following:

Genres, Subgenres or Topics – A description of the kind of stories the editors like. This can be very broad (“hard science fiction”) or considerably more specific (“steampunk,” “stories related to climate change”). Contests and anthologies often have a theme, and even big magazines will sometimes have “theme issues.”
Word Count – Most publications have hard limits on the size of story they will accept. They might also note the size of story that they prefer, even if they occasionally accept larger submissions.
Submission Windows – Anthologies and contests always have cutoffs, because they eventually have to publish or judge. Some magazines only accept submissions at certain times.
Pay Rate – Legitimate publishers say up-front how much they will pay. This is often a rate like X cents per word, although you will sometimes see a flat payment per story/poem. What counts as a “professional rate” is often decided by your genre’s professional organization. For example, the SFWA currently considers 8¢/word to be the minimum for sci-fi and fantasy.
Form and Formatting – Some publications only accept stories sent as Word documents to an email address. Others have a form directly on their website for submission. They may specify a specific font, font size, or line spacing. These may sound pedantic, but they’re designed to make it as easy as possible for the editors to wade through a sea of submissions. You do not want to be the person who makes an editor’s life a little more difficult.
Response Time – Submitting stories is slow! Most publishers take weeks or months to respond to a submission. Patience is a virtue, but if you wait for the specified response time and don’t get anything, you should feel free to reach out to the publisher, or move on and submit that story somewhere else.
Other Stuff – Submission guidelines may also say whether a publication accepts simultaneous submissions (sending one story to multiple publications at the same time), multiple submissions (sending several stories to the same publication at the same time) or reprints and translations. As a rule, don’t send any of these things unless it’s explicitly allowed.

Formatting

There is a standard format for short stories, and the incredibly detailed visual guides on William Shunn’s website have become the go-to place for writers to find them. Remember, the specific instructions within a publication’s submission guidelines should always be followed first. If the instructions aren’t specific on a particular point or leave something out, you can default to Shunn’s recommendations.

Submission Considerations

When you first finish a short story, there will probably be a number of publications that fit your story. The next step is to decide which of them to submit to first.

Consider starting with the best pay or highest prestige. Sure, I’m less likely to have my story accepted by Analog than a smaller magazine, but if they do accept it, I’m getting an excellent pay rate, and a really nice publication credit. If they reject it, I can always send it out to another.

There are other approaches, however. If you’ve found several potential publishers who accept simultaneous submissions, you can send your story to all of them at once. Simultaneous submission can really speed up the submission process, where you’re often waiting weeks or even months for a reply.

If one or more of your potential publishers has a submission window, you may want to submit to them while it’s open. If they reject it, you can submit to the others at any time.

Tracking Submissions

When you’re submitting your first short story, it may seem silly to talk about tracking your submissions. After all, it’s your baby, your pride and joy, and that publisher will surely love it. And even if it gets rejected, it’s not that hard to keep track of one story.

The truth is that writing and submitting short stories is a grind. Statistically, most publishers don’t take simultaneous submissions, it usually takes weeks to get a response, and most stories don’t find a home on their first submission. If you’re going to write short stories, you’re likely to end up with multiple short stories out for submission at once. Possibly a lot of them. You’re going to get rejections. And you’re going to have to keep writing.

Tracking your submissions ensures you know what stories are currently out, who has already looked at them, and who’s looking at them now. You’ll want to track the expected response time so you know when to check your spam folder, send a query, or give up and send to another publisher. You may want to make a list of the publications you’re interested in sending a particular story. You might also find it a useful place to track acceptances and payments (don’t forget those taxes!)

If you want to do your own tracking, Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs are infinitely flexible, and as long as you’re willing to put in the effort, you can craft exactly what you want. Alternatively, both Duotrope and the Submission Grinder have built-in submission tracking, and tracking your statistics in those systems helps to build statistics that can be useful to everyone.

Rejection

The hard part of the short story grind is the rejection. Nobody likes pouring their heart and soul into a story, only to be told that it’s not good enough. Unfortunately, the simple math of publishing is that there are far more stories being submitted than there are slots for publication. The majority of stories are never published.

The way to fight that math is to craft the best story you can, and then submit as much as you can. More (good) stories and more submissions raise your odds. You will need to build up the fortitude to be rejected over and over again and keep on going.

It’s also important to note that not all rejections are created equal. There are a few different kinds:

Form rejections – These are most common. The story didn’t pique the interest of the publication.
Higher-tier rejections – These may still be form rejections, but they usually mention that the editors were interested, or that they considered the story but ultimately didn’t find a spot for it. Some publications have multiple tiers of readers, and the story didn’t get all the way to the top.
Personalized rejections – These are rare and valuable. They are specific to you and your story, and explain in more detail why the story didn’t quite make the cut. If you’re lucky, they may suggest improvements or invite you to submit more work to this publisher.

While all rejection may seem bad, it’s a great sign to receive any personalized feedback from a publication. These people are constantly wading through the slush pile of submissions and working on tight deadlines, so they only spend time on a personalized response when they really like something. Unfortunately, due to the complexities of publishing, they may really like your story and still not be able to publish it. Take it as a win, and move on.

More Advice

Finally, I’m going to point you to Aeryn Rudel’s new author starter kit.

Rudel is an incredibly prolific short story writer who tries to make 100 short story submissions every year. His blog is a great general resource when it comes to writing and submitting stories, and his monthly recaps show just how much rejection even a successful author has to power through.

Submit!

At this point in the Short Story Series, we’ve been through all the basics of writing short stories. I’ll probably still have one or two more articles, but you know enough to get started. If you haven’t done it before, it may seem daunting to write a short story and send it off to a publisher. Great! The best way to gain experience is to try it.

Once your story is submitted you can forget about it for a few weeks and write something new. It’s the authorial circle of life. Don’t give up, and keep writing.