You remember back in March of 2005 when I announced my first fiction sale to Cicada? Probably not, but that’s okay.
I got the check yesterday.
For those of you counting on your fingers, stop right now. That’s a whopping 640 days between acceptance and payment. 1 year, 9 months. It’s also true that this story paid more than my other five sales combined, so maybe it’s worth the wait.
However, I’m not including the submission time. ‘Cause that adds another 160 days, or 5 months and 9 days. That brings the total time from the manuscript leaving my hand in October of ’04 to the check showing up in my mailbox in Dec ’06 to a little over two years and two months. Did I mention that I wrote this story in June of 2004 at Clarion? We won’t even get into the time from writing to payment…
This is less a knock on Cicada than it is a reflection on how long things take in this biz. I was talking to an undergrad last night and told him he should be sending stuff out. He said he wanted to wait until he had more ready to go so he could send them out together. I said, “Why? It takes forever to get answer, whether it’s a sale or rejection, and you’re not going to get answers back at the same time anyway. Better to just start sending stuff out now as the sooner you submit, the sooner that first sale will come.”
I am about 90% sure he ignored me.
Current Mood: Peachy | 
3 Comments
This is very exactly true. It takes time to prime the pump and what I’ve learned since I first started submitting in June 2002 is that it is okay to send things out before they’re “perfect” because: (1) sometimes you get a note back which puts a finger right on what you need to work on and (2) when I get it back with a rejection, I re-read it (often after weeks/months, except with Gordon at F&SF — grin) with a fresh eye and my next revision DOES improve the story. And if you DO send out the “perfect” story and it gets rejected, so what? It really isn’t a judgment against “you”.
You need to develop a bit of a thick skin for both criticism and rejection. Don’t ignore either but don’t stew either.
And congrats for getting the damned check! Maybe you don’t want to pro rate it on a per hour basis (double-entry-grin) but it’s still money you didn’t have before.
It CAN be a discouraging business, as we can both atest to.
Dr. Phil
I vaguely remember a certain big-name editor and a certain big-name author discussing another big-name editor’s theory of the best way to launch a writer’s career. It went something like this: “You get your first five or six sales to well known, widely read markets all within the space of a few months. Suddenly, for a brief while, your name is everywhere, and people take notice.”
I could be remembering it wrong, which is why I’m not naming any names. But this could be the reason your undergrad friend is holding back. It’s still probably the wrong decision; I wonder how realistic the six-quickies-back-to-back-to-back model is for _anyone_.
Congrats on finally receiving the “xmas bonus.”
That theory is valid except for the fact that it’s nearly impossible to do. Not only is selling six stories at once to top markets (because there are only a five if you include SH) but the response times vary wildly and a story that’s 2K words will run at a different time than one that’s 6K words. And it’s worse in literary markets that are usually biannual and less widely read. My suspicion is that the guy doesn’t have a realistic expectation of publishing.
There’s a weird contradiction though, because I do strongly agree with you once saying you’d rather write one “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” than have fifteen stories published at [market deleted]. The same could be true for short stories, where writing a handful of really, really good short stories would get you noticed (I think Paolo Bacigalupi fits in this category.)
On the other hand, that encourages people to work on a magnum opus that will never be good enough to send out. I’m not quite sure how you get better as a writer, but trial and error seems to be a favorite method. The “error” part is getting rejections, and lots of ‘em. It’s the rare bird whose sales outstrip (or even equal) their rejections, and I think newbie writers need to be conditioned out of thinking that they’re one of the exotic species.