Books or short stories?

Assume, I guess, that you've sent your short to F & SF or Asmiov's, or Analog. One of the big ones, anyway.

And that you've sent your novel to a well known publisher like TOR that takes inquiries of unagented, unsolicited authors.

And here is another question. I know hundreds of stories a month get sent into those big magazines. What is the difference between mine and the rest of the slush? How do I know? Workshops, sure..but how many folks are in workshops, get their work critiqued, rewrite it and still it is unpublishable.

And here is one. I recently read a story by Ray Bradbury in the anniversary edition of F & SF (which, BTW, was in the arts and hobbies section. Do only writers read this anymore?). It was intriguing. But it never answered the mystery it posed and had no plot. I found myself quite irritated after reading it. If I had written it, it surely would never have been published.

"It's not a lottery. If your submission is as bad as 99% of what they get your chances aren't 1 in 100 or whatever, they are zero. If your story shows any signs of life, the chances are much, much better."

Let me pose a similar question: does anybody know how it spilts up by genre? It seems like almost everybody here is writing fantasy.

For example: does that mean my hard-science-with-all-the-equations-balanced stories are easier to publish, because I have less competition, or does it simply mean there's less of a market for them?

..still unpublished myself, maybe I'll go practice...

There is a little more fantasy published by professional publishers at novel lengths (and series lengths) than there is science fiction, but I understand that professional editors would like to see more good science fiction novels than they are seeing.

There is quite a bit more science fiction published in professional magazines than there is fantasy, however. There, too, editors probably see more fantasy than they do science fiction.

I'm not sure how horror is doing, but there aren't very many professional markets long or short for horror, so far as I know.

I suspect that more people are writing fantasy because more of them feel comfortable with it than they do with science fiction. (They may think it doesn't require as much knowledge or research as science fiction, for one thing.)

I remember hearing OSC say one time that he doesn't write science fiction. Instead, he writes fantasy with science as the magic.

I think a lot of "science fiction" writers do that--and they get away with it because the readership has grown to include other people than those with the kind of science background that would make them picky about science in the fiction they read.

Don't stop writing science fiction. There are still readers out there who want to read it, and the professional magazine editors prefer it over fantasy.

Let the fantasy writers write what they feel most comfortable with, and you keep writing what you feel most comfortable with.

I would say that if you send in a story that is equally as good as the things you see in print, you have a better chance of being published if it's a novel than you do if it's a short story.

Book publishers are more willing to take a chance on a new writer who is as good as their usual writers than magazine editors are.

To put it another way, if you want to sell a short story, it has to be BETTER than what the established writers write for it to get published. But I think a book only needs to be just as good as what the established writers are writing.

This is partly due to limited space in a magazine, and partly due to magazines selling by the names of the authors who have stories in them. People are more likely to pick up a copy of a book by an author they don't know than they are to pick up a magazine full of stories by authors they don't know.

In a way that doesn't make sense because a short story is a much smaller time investment and a magazine gives you more stories for the money, but it seems to work out that way.

The problem with books, though, is if that first book doesn't do well in the bookstores, the publisher is not likely to buy a second book. So if you want to keep writing and selling books, you really have to write books that are better than the other books being published.

And how can you be sure a book is better?

I work and teach in the quality field. The first lesson I give my students on the first day of class is this:

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In the whole world we have only one instrument for detemining subjective evaluations like good, bad, better, or worse. That instrument is called human judgment.

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The trick is always finding a way to harness that human judgment. That is why we have judges, juries, elections, focus groups, surveys, and polls.

When a company wants to see if potential customers will like a new product, they get together a focus group and ask them. If they want to know if their current customers are satisfied with their current product, they conduct a survey. The company selects the subjects of the focus group or survey so that they represent all current and potential customers. This is how they measure better products and services.

If a writer wants to find out whether a book is better than other books being published, the best the writer could do is to get some potential readers to sample the book. Their human judgement will be the instrument by which you measure better books.

A Writers Group might suit this purpose for you, provided all the members of the group are potential consumers of the type of book that you are writing, and they have all read a sufficient volume of the books against which yours will be judged.

quote:

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In the whole world we have only one instrument for detemining subjective evaluations like good, bad, better, or worse. That instrument is called human judgment.

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I have often lamented the fact that "good" or "bad" fiction cannot be treated as a calculus of optimizations problem -- that I can do! This art and human judgment sh... stuff gives me problems.

I once read -- I must have been ten or so, many moons ago -- a story where a musical composer protested the use of computers in music. They convinced him to try it out, and he programmed it to compose for him, thus making humans obsolete.

Or something like that.

I don't know maybe I am just rambling what do you guys think?