Robert Heinlein established the rules of writing back in 1947.

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you write.

3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

4. You must put the work on the market.

5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

In some of his other essays he also says in response to rule 3, that the editorial order better come with a check. This isn’t to say that everything we create is perfect but that significant changes to content should be after an agreement to purchase is made and only then. This doesn’t mean that we stop editing… LOL… A common take away from this rule when I talk about it with other writers. We are always editing.

I bring this up because it’s important that we writers not forget that we are selling our labor when we submit stories for publication. Good, bad, or other, it’s our labor. And finding the right markets or paying markets is a lot of the writing game. Market research isn’t my favorite thing, submitting doesn’t make me happy, and receiving rejections is… well… I don’t care anymore as I’ve received enough to wallpaper a room.

One of the aspects of writing that doesn’t get a lot of page space here is the ongoing relentless market research and submissions that are required to get work seen (and with podcasts, heard) in the wide marketplace. I follow a few different fiction opsn submission groups on Facebook where I do a lot of hunting for places to send stories. There are a few of these and they are really helpful especially if you have a specialty story or are from a specific author subgroup these are great places for REALLY specific anthologies on both sides of that coin. I have found some great indie mags there like Planet Scumm. It’s easy to find an anthology market with a cool theme that might spark a story idea, and really whatever skein of speculative fiction you write there is probably an anthology for it. Seriously! It’s almost like the, at least science fiction, short story market has become more varied on the low pay side than how current professional science fiction magazines are currently. This is good and bad. It’s good in that there are more markets that will look at your stories. It’s also good, in that I’ve seen at least some of these anthologies in actual physical Barnes and Noble bookstores so they aren’t being published then achieving only pocket sales numbers through the publisher’s website or Facebook friends list or whatever. I am sure the editors of these face the same sort of struggles that we self publishers do, namely getting these into a store, generating interest and ultimately making book sales. 

Where the anthology market has its problems isn’t in the editorial bent or style of theme of the books it is the expectation from a lot of them that authors will submit for “name recognition” rather than actual either money or copies of the anthology.

Harlan Ellison has an excellent rant about working for no pay. Every writer should listen to him and record this as an MP3 and keep a text version of it on their computer to read every time they do market research. Lately these have been soliciting stories for “charity” and often no mentioning what that charity is… But that isn’t the issue really, it’s that because these are “charity” anthologies that writers should be happy to submit for no reward other than a publication credit in an anthology that no one will read. There are a lot of them out there who offer as payment - a PDF copy of the anthology. 

How good is that? Not good at all. It is impossible to fill my car with gas on a PDF copy. It is hard to generate interest among my pocket sales group to buy anthology that I am in without even a physical one to show them. I’m in several anthologies that paid me just in a physical copy of the book, and for all intents and purposes that is at least something that is physical and has some measure of intrinsic value at the absolute lowest level of pay for effort.

Writing short stories is hard. It takes time and skill and a continuous refinement of skills and approach to stay engaged in the market until, like when you’ve landed a few pieces in Asimov’s you can get by on name recognition and can play all over the market. Until then being aware of what these markets are is really important. Depending on the rights that the publisher is buying you may be literally giving away a short story that, if you’re anything like me, has taken tens of hours to complete. But, as P.T. Barnum said, there is a sucker born every minute. There are writers who submit work that they have slaved over to anthologies that won’t sell and won’t pay them for name recognition that doesn’t exist on a science fiction anthology about, for example, sea monsters. 

To quote Harlan Ellison, “Tell that to someone, a little older than you, who has just fallen off the turnip truck. There is no publicity value of my essay being on your DVD.” Substitute in “short story” for essay and anthology for “DVD”.

Stop submitting to these things and they will go away. It is the only way to drive them out. Starve them of content, make them pay. Back when I was successful in selling stories into the podcast market there was a new editor with a new cast that advertised he wanted short stories under a certain limit for no pay and exposure only. He announced this in one of the podcast forums and was roundly corrected until he offered at least a token payment of $5.

5$ isn’t NOTHING. It’s not a lot, but it is a recognition of your work even if you are ultimately working for pennies an hour. $5 is pay. An anthology that has 30 stories in it would pay out $150 at five bucks per story. If you can’t scrape together $150 to pay for content, then stop publishing and do something else.

Short story writers, you know you can take the story that you slaved over and polished and make awesome and if all else fails put it up at the Kindle store for .99 and make a couple of bucks off of it more than you will ever make of a charity anthology. 

When writers submit their hard work for free it reduces the value in the marketplace for all of us who are actively trying to sell our work. Cut it out.

Harlan says it better than me. 

In other notes, it seems to be a week or two for arguing on the internet. This one is a Heinlein specific argument. I like Tumblr most of the time and spend some time reading and occasionally commenting on other writing content here and there. In one such case the OP was asking about recommendations for something to introduce their 14 year old non-binary child to science fiction and fantasy. I recommended Have Spacesuit Will Travel and Tunnel in the Sky along with fantasy standards Tolkein’s The Hobbit, and Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydian all of these books are good entry points for a teen to enter science fiction and fantasy reading. The reply I received was that Heinlein wasn’t “appropriate” because his writing was full of content that was “racist, misogynist, eugenic, and enemy of the LGBTQ community.”

In the spirit of discussion I asked where I might find examples of said concerns as I was a pretty avid reader and always looking for where a different viewpoint might be coming from. Was there something I missed in his writing? But alas, like so many other commenters who step in, the commenter only restated their position and told me to do my own research etc… 

I guess the short reason I’m even posting this is because it irritated me. There is always room for criticism of stuff and Jeez-Louise I am certainly always interested in another interpretation of something I’ve read and written about. At least give me that rather than the knee jerk reaction “this isn’t appropriate” with absolutely nothing but some shouted concerns that literally aren’t reflected in any of Heinlein’s books that I’ve read. I get that it’s easy to say “this was written in the 40s/50s/60s by an old white man therefore it must be everything wrong with that time in history… But in Heinlein it’s demonstrably not the case. I admit too that some of his prose can be dated, some of his interactions as well are a product of the time when they were written but to write if off wholesale is just… I don’t know… disappointing. Admittedly the commenter who prompted this makes drawings of other people’s art… so I guess it’s apropos of the state of Tumblr.

God it’s annoying sometimes.