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| SFReader Forums > Writing > Brag! > Sale! | Forum Quick Jump
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erazmus
Master
      
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4539
| Posted 7/26/2005 6:49 AM (GMT -5) |   | As many might have noticed in my thread in gripe, I got a little upset at the response Ed K. got when he posted a request for subs at another board. Not wanting to run my mouth without putting up something tangable I got into my story files and looked around for something to meet his guidelines at Amazing Journeys.
I didn't think it would be that hard. The biggest points of contention were that he wanted G and PG material and nothing that had a lot of vulgar language or promoted homosexual lifestyle. And no sexual content, etc. You guys know his guidelines and if you don't well, look them up.
So I got to looking at my stuff. I had never really looked over my work as a whole in reguards to content vis a vis ratings. I was stunned. I couldn't find a story.
I'd thought the story which almost made it into Diakaiju, _Joni Jetpack and Mantagon_ would be a sure fit, its written as a juvinile/young adult sf-adventure story. But no, its promoted homosexual life style (its a twist I used for the POV characters background). My urban horror stuff I wrote trying to get in at City Slab was right out, on most counts. My Mistress of Mayhem stuff that I'm putting together a novel out of was the same, no profanity but sex, homo or at least bi sexuality and situations that were just not right. I had one horror tale that might have fit but its out already.
I dug real deep and found the third or forth story I ever wrote a fantasy piece that reflected on the nature of war. It met the criteria but was very, very short. I'd written it under the advice that it was easier to get sales with really short stuff. It was a good story but I'd gotten rejected at the few markets I'd tried, twice because it was just "Too Darn Short" as one editor put it. (Actually it wasn't an editor, it was J. Adams at F&SF, an assistant.) I'd stopped sending it out because I was moving in other directions, I went back to occasionally digging it out and tweaking it.
And Ed, bless his heart, bought it!
_Two Ravens_ is going to Amazing Journeys. I could in no way be more pleased. Ed puts out a beautiful magazine (one I can tell my mother about, so she can get a copy to put on her "my son's writing" shelf.) that I really wanted to be in. (Do you know how embarassing it is to tell your Mom "I sold a story but you may not want the magazine in your house."?) AJM is a very good place to be in and a very good place for this story. I'm so happy its found a home, and I hope everyone gets a copy to see my baby for themselves.
Woo Hoo!
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com | | Back to Top | | |
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Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 7/26/2005 7:05 AM (GMT -5) | | Two Ravens_ is going to Amazing Journeys. I could in no way be more pleased. Woo Hoo!
Mike
***
Big congrats, Mike!!!
Ed's moving to trade paperback format, too.
Daniel
www.pitchblackbooks.com | | Back to Top | | |
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jonesha
Adept
Date Joined Jun 2004
Total Posts : 655
| Posted 7/26/2005 7:21 AM (GMT -5) | | Congratulations, Michael!
best,
Howard
Managing Editor
www.swordandsorcery.org
Flashing Swords E-Zine | | Back to Top | | |
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Raph
Stubborn Scholar
Date Joined Oct 2004
Total Posts : 260
| Posted 7/26/2005 7:28 AM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4539
| Posted 7/26/2005 7:29 AM (GMT -5) | | Daniel,
I'm somewhat nervous about Ed's move to Trade format. I don't know of any "Paperback" magazine that ever succeded in the long run. Jim Baen tried it twice, Destinies and New Destinies. Andy Offutt tried it with Swords against Darkness, lasted five issues.
Of course those were all coming at it from the other side of the industry. Small press distribution already sucks and it could very well be that Trade Paper will provide more opportunities, from a small press point of view, than regular magazine format. I know that the "poor sales" that Jim had with the last few issues of New Destinies would about quadruple or more Ed's current numbers. Depending on where you put your desk a project could be a rousing success or a dismal failure with the same numbers. If J.K. Rowlings last book had 'meerly' outsold 'The Davinchi Code" by a factor or three to one, it would have been a collasp of a dynasty.
If my next (first) book sells a third as well as Dan Brown's D-C, I'll be "A Major new Force in the Fantasy Field." That's the same field, mind you. Expectations are everything.
So maybe it will work out for him. I sure hope like hell it does as I want and need an editor out there who like my work! I know I'll be doing all I can to promote AJM.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com | | Back to Top | | |
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Edward Knight
Jack of all Trades and Master of None
Date Joined Jan 2004
Total Posts : 1039
| Posted 7/26/2005 7:52 AM (GMT -5) | | Folks, you really should read this story. Sure, it takes five minutes for a really slow reader, but it's a great piece off flash. Imagine a conversation between a knight who has been dealt a death blow by a foe and two ravens who have come looking for a warm meal. I'm telling you. it's a cool story. As I told Mike, it's grim in a comical sort of way. It should have been published long ago, no matter how "darn short" it is.
Glad to have you in this one, Mike.
Now, I still need about three good stories to fill the issue. I'm rejecting about five subs a day and can't find what I'm looking for. Any of the rest of you who have a story that's been rejected multiple times, even though you know it's good, might find that I think so too.
Edward Knight
Editor
Journey Books Publishing
Amazing Journeys Magazine
http://www.journeybookspublishing.com
http://www.journeybooksonline.com | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4539
| Posted 7/26/2005 8:07 AM (GMT -5) | | Ed,
I already told my writing group. After I made the sale but I told them.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com | | Back to Top | | |
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SC Bryce
Aspiring Hammock Tester
Date Joined Jan 2005
Total Posts : 1106
| Posted 7/26/2005 8:09 AM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4539
| Posted 7/26/2005 8:47 AM (GMT -5) | | Thanks guys.
Ed, I also just posted the story about the sale on my other board, Baens Bar. Not just a simple "I made a sale" those aren't much fun to read. The whole "I got pissed off at Ed getting dissed at critters and sent him a story" tale. I praised your product lavishly. Baen's Bar has ten thousand members, eleven hundred regular posters and gets about three thousand posts a day. It takes six moderators to keep the peace, I know, I'm married to one. I don't post much there but am well known, so I expect much responce and hope that at least some of the folks there will look you mag up.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4539
| Posted 7/26/2005 9:24 AM (GMT -5) | | Nathan,
Actaully Half-Blood Prince outsold Dv-C four to one, in its first day of sales. It takes about twenty five K copies sold in a week to make the NYtimes Best seller list, thrity fiveK or more in a week to top it usually. Dan Brown topped it for something like thrity weeks or more, lets say seventy weeks. 70X 35000 is 2450000. Thats two million four hundred and fifty thousand copies. HBP sold six million copies in the US the first day, and two million in Britan. In just one day.
As to dark fiction in a writers work, look at Ralan's listings, there isn't dick in the horror market as far as news stands go, even Weird Tales and Cemetery Dance don't get that much distribution, but there are ooodles and oodles of small press markets for it. Paying, sort of paying and no pay at all, I mean a heck of a lot of them. When I started trying to write and get published I looked at the market listing and decided that, If I was going to try to get sales while I learned the craft of storytelling I had better put a lot of my stories on the dark and scary side, because that was what I'd have to have for a lot of the markets I could reasonable expect to be able to sell too.
As it turned out, I was wrong. That's because I just don't do scary well. I do creepy, eerie (and Vamperella) okay but not much truely frightens me outside of politics. So I don't scare other people easily, except in person. after a couple of dozen stories I realized this and went back to just writing stuff I love. This is working well for me, see this thread topic.
And Oh yes, my mother's shelf. Have you ever seen a copy of City Slab? I love the magazine but my mother, a sixty-three year old widow who teaches insurance claims processing at a dental assistants school isn't going to get it or think its cool. Or if she does, _I_ don't want to know about it. Somethings you shouldn't know about your parents. Besides, she couldn't show it off to her students in class, the school would have a fit.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com | | Back to Top | | |
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UnclePete
Weasel Overlord
Date Joined Dec 2004
Total Posts : 311
| Posted 7/26/2005 1:00 PM (GMT -5) | | quote:
Do you know how embarassing it is to tell your Mom "I sold a story but you may not want the magazine in your house."?)
[:D] Know that feeling -- my mom was here recently, and I was nervous enough giving her the books I've published through CGP with other people's work -- she does NOT get to the see the antho with MY stories in it. [:0]
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.-- H. L. Mencken | | Back to Top | | |
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C.Cevasco
Paradox Forum Moderator
Date Joined Sep 2003
Total Posts : 967
| Posted 7/26/2005 1:15 PM (GMT -5) | | Mike,
Congratulations on the sale! [:)]
Chris | | Back to Top | | |
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Red Viper
Acolyte
Date Joined Mar 2005
Total Posts : 439
| Posted 7/26/2005 1:42 PM (GMT -5) | | Mike: Glad to see you sold one to AJM! I am looking forward to seeing your work!
Red Viper, aka Steve Goble | | Back to Top | | |
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ghostposts
Acolyte
Date Joined Apr 2005
Total Posts : 323
| Posted 7/26/2005 3:00 PM (GMT -5) | | Sweet! You done good.
boo
http://www.tstone-shadesofgrey.com/
Thomas Stone's website
http://scubadoc51.proboards41.com/
Bear's Den: A nice group of writers
Almost every writer knows of Ralans' Webstravaganza, one of the best market lists on the internet. He puts out a monthly newsletter, featuring the latest updates. Check out his site at: http://www.ralan.com/ and sign up. From the newsletter:
"* Read SFReader.com's Firebrand Fiction Review of the 2004 Grabber Contest winners at http://www.sfreader.com/db_ff120304.asp (reviewed by Daniel E. Blackston) * Read SFReader.com's Firebrand Fiction Review of the 2003 Grabber Contest winners at http//www.sfreader.com/db_ff010404.asp (reviewed by Greg Beatty)
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MichaelEhart
Sage
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 2336
| Posted 7/26/2005 4:43 PM (GMT -5) | | grats!
Faust-- How comes it then that thou art out of hell? Mephistophilis-- Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. | | Back to Top | | |
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Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 7/27/2005 4:49 AM (GMT -5) | | Daniel,
I'm somewhat nervous about Ed's move to Trade format. I don't know of any "Paperback" magazine that ever succeded in the long run.
***
Mike,
There've been disreputable distributors operating that may have had something to do with the demise of so many promising print pubs. I don't think Ed is going to wind up with thousands of supposedly shredded AJM's that actually sold through, or other permutations of the distribution nightmare.
Ed, are you talking about POD-ing the quarterly issues of AJM? Or are you going to print through a thousand or more copies each issue?
Black Gate is a "paperback" magazine. If you think about it: the trade-paperback format just makes more sense, now that nobody is going to seriously attempt putting out a monthly magazine. Bi-monthly, even, sounds too ambitious these days.
I just can't imagine having to put out monthly issues of any magazine. Especially a fiction mag.
At any rate, AJM's content rates trade-paperback publication. I wish Ed a bunch of luck with the upgrade.
Daniel
www.pitchblackbooks.com | | Back to Top | | |
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Edward Knight
Jack of all Trades and Master of None
Date Joined Jan 2004
Total Posts : 1039
| Posted 7/27/2005 7:56 AM (GMT -5) | | We've established a deal with a printer who will make a short first run for us of 200 copies at a fair price. We can order additional runs in sets of 50 or more. If we sell out, we just order more. So, in that respect we are taking advantage of POD technology and we don't have to have warehouse space to put them. But unlike some POD publishers we won't be running them 5 books at time either.
300 copies of AJM is roughly what we've been selling of each quarterly issue of the 8.5 X 11 magazine. Considering we went from 50 copies of issue #1 to 300 of issue #8, that isn't bad (I think). We made one short, expensive print run and when they were gone that was it. The problem is that we don't develope a backlist that way. In this format, we can develope a catalog. Two years from now if a customer wants a copy of AJM #9 so that he can read Two Ravens, we'll probably have one. It's kind of the best of both worlds, magazine/book. We're still going to publish quarterly, but it will be in book format. The page count will be small (100-125 pages) but the price will be low, $6.99, about the price of a mass market paperback.
The setup work is tough. Being a one man crew for the most part, I'm setting type (electronically of course) doing the cover design, and still reading subs as they come in. I've got 24 pages left to fill, btw. I have a few stories I'm thinking about and several I haven't read yet. To stay on schedule, I have to have the stories sellected by Aug. 1. Yeah, publishing a print quarterly (beit magazine or book)makes for a hectic shedule.
Personally, I'd rather make 500 direct sales than 2,000 distributed sales. The money is about the same from a publisher standpoint, but I also know that to grow we need distribution. We'll get to that at some point, but distribution is tricky. You'll loose your shirt with any distributor if the books don't sale once they're in the store. That and the discounting they require makes most small publishers cringe. Roughly, they take 50% of the cover price. That means if I sell AJM through a distributor there's no way to keep a price like $6.99. It would have to be $10.99. That makes that bookstore sale even tougher to make when you can buy a 300 page mmpb for $6.99.
It's a tough business. We're trying to go at it in a non-traditional way. Short runs and direct sales is the ticket on the front end for Journey Books. Long runs and distribution will follow.
Edward Knight
Editor
Journey Books Publishing
Amazing Journeys Magazine
http://www.journeybookspublishing.com
http://www.journeybooksonline.com | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4539
| Posted 7/27/2005 8:09 AM (GMT -5) | | Daniel,
I was going to shine on with a "nothing but love" post but I think I'll amplify on something instead.
In the "old" days distributors, heck retailers in general would pull all sorts of stupid and costly tricks and all a publisher could do was whimper and pay. The internet and other technology has changed that drasticly.
A publisher I know (Okay, it's Jim Baen, everyone knows he's the only one I know) paid the usual sum to get one of his company's new releases placed on the tables at the front of every Barnes and Nobles store in the world. That sum is substancial, a hundred thousand dollars a week. When the book came out our local store put it in the front, but not on a table, on the floor under the tables across from the cash registers facing the stacks, where _no one_ could see it. I had to hunt to find it. I e-mailed Jim. Others in other cities found similar set-ups, and they e-mailed Jim, some with pictures from their camera phones. Jim hit the roof, then he hit the phone first to his lawyers then to B&N. Turns out the local managers have 'discretion' about placement. It also turned out that Tables doesn't mean floor. Jim got all the books moved to a much primer space and for an extra week, by the end of the first day it was out.
In the old days the release would have been over before he'd ever heard of problems. And his 100G's would have been wasted and he wouldn't have known why.
Its the same with magazine distributors. A newstand/smoke shop in town tries to carry everything and let me tell you everything fiction sells there. Everything they can get. I ask for a mag they don't have, I tell them the distributor they look on that distributors order forms and its not there. The publishers, usually small press gets told that nobodies ordering their magazine, that its not moving that its getting returned when actually they never updated the order books (A lot of places still use paper for that) or they didn't put it in the web site. An e-mail from me, or the news stand, to the distributor and the publisher and the magazine is on the stands next tuesday. Never would have happened before internet.
What bothers me about magazine distribution is that its so poorly marketed. Throw 'em in the racks, cart off last weeks. No presentation or style to it. A new magazine gets thrown in with the old ones to sink or swim, as if the distributor had nothing to gain from it doing well. Has anyone ever seen a "New Magazines" section with a sticker or something, to show what's there that wasn't before? I have, overseas in the military exchanges. The exchanges do their own distribution over seas, its contracted in the states of course. Hmmn, that might be a thing to do, sell directly to AAFES and NES for overseas distribution on military bases. I bet very few fiction publishers do that, I know there was dick-all for fiction in the exchanges, until I got done with them. (I got three or four magazines in Okinawa and Osan. Amazing, F&SF, A couple of others) But those places deal world wide, there are hundreds of bases with exchanges serving millions of GI's. And they distribute their own magazines, from what I understand.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com | | Back to Top | | |
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