Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

Looking for a place to publish your science fiction story? Here's a good one, though perhaps not for novice and unpublished writers. One of the top SF magazine markets, the award-winning Fantasy and Science Fiction was founded in 1949. It is the original publisher of Stephen King's “Dark Tower”, Daniel Keyes's “Flowers for Algernon” and Walter M. Miller's “A Canticle for Leibowitz”.

n Pay: 6 cents per word to 9 cents per word on acceptance

n Word count (maximum): 25,000 words

n Seeks: Character-oriented stories

n Mail to: Gordon Van Gelder, Fantasy & Science Fiction, P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030.

Tags: getting published, submitting your story

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Looking for a place to submit your science fiction short story or novella? Analog generally is considered one of the two best science fiction magazines in which to be published.

n Pay: 6 cents per word to 8 cents per word for short stories up to 7,500 words, $450-600 for stories between 7,500 and 10,000 words; and 5 cents per word to 6 cents per word for longer material

n Word count (maximum): 2,000 and 7,000 words for shorts, 10,000-20,000 words for novelettes, and 40,000-80,000 for serials

n Seeks: The writers’ guidelines says the magazine open to any brand of science fiction, but Analog really is known for its hard SF. The writers’ guidelines hint at this when noting that the magazine wants “stories in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the plot that, if that aspect were removed, the story would collapse.” The magazine is known for specializing in hard SF.

n Mail to: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, Stanley Schmidt, Editor, 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352

Tags: getting published, hard sf, submitting your story

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Looking for a magazine to send your science fiction story? Generally considered one of the two best science fiction magazines in which to be published, Asimov’s Science Fiction began in spring 1977 as a quarterly.

n Pay: Beginners get 6 cents a word to 7,500 words, 5 cents a word for stories longer than 12,500 words, and $450 for stories between those lengths.

n Word count (maximum): 15,000

n Seeks: Character stories; “all fiction is written to examine or illuminate some aspect of human existence, but that in science fiction the backdrop you work against is the size of the Universe”, according the magazine’s writers guidelines.

n Doesn’t want: Sword & sorcery, explicit sex or violence, serialized novels

n Mail to: Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sheila Williams, Editor, 475 Park Ave. South, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10016

Tags: getting published, isaac asimov, submitting your story

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So you’ve written a science fiction short story. Where are you going to send it?

The good news is a lot of markets exist for your story – far more than if you’d written a western or a mystery tale. The bad news is that you probably won’t get paid much (if at all) for your story. In addition, science fiction magazines go in and out of print faster than Jupiter rotates on its axis, so sometimes a story gets sent back marked “We’re no longer taking submissions” or “Out of business.”

Whenever submitting to a magazine, there are some general rules to follow:

n Know your magazine - Reading a few copies of the magazine so you’re familiar with the editor’s tastes always is a sound strategy. After all, you don’t want to send a hard SF magazine a character-oriented story. You also don’t want to send an editor a story similar to one he’s just published.

n Follow manuscript form - One of the quickest routes to the rejection pile is sending a manuscript that makes an editor’s eyes go buggy: handwritten, type too small (or large), typed on both sides of the paper, lacking pages numbers …...

Tags: getting published, manuscript form, sase, simultaneous submissions, submitting your story

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Getting published requires a lot of hard work and self-discipline. A long road runs between having an idea for a story and actually seeing it on a bookstore shelf or within a magazine’s covers.

Science fiction great Robert Heinlein said writers only needed to follow five simple steps to ensure they were published authors. These steps since have been coined “Heinlein’s Rules”. Heinlein often joked that he had no qualms about sharing these “secret” steps as most people lacked the self-discipline to actually work through each one.

The rules are:

n Rule One - You Must Write

n Rule Two - Finish What Your Start

n Rule Three - You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order

n Rule Four - You Must Put Your Story on the Market

n Rule Five - You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

Hugo winner Robert J. Sawyer once wrote that if you started with a hundred people who wanted to be published, fully half of them would give up writing at each step. By the time you got through Rule Five, that would leave just three of the original hundred still writing!

The moral is if you...

Tags: getting published, revising, submitting your story

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When you’re deciding where to send your story for publication, pay close attention to the directions about word counts. Editors have only so much space for a story, and if your story goes over the word count, it won’t fit the space and so likely will be rejected. It’s a rare story in a rare situation that exceeds word counts and is accepted for publication.

Determining word count is not quite as easy as hitting a button on your word processor. While that word count method is satisfactory for submitting your story, remember that editors and publishers traditionally count words in a different way. A word processing program counts a word as a set of letters with spaces around them. Because of that, your word processing program would say that the first sentence of this entry contains 19 words. In the past, however, a “word” was every five characters, regardless of where the spaces were. This gave a count that better matched the amount of physical space available on a page. By that method, this entry’s first sentence contains 20 words.

One word isn’t much of a difference. But over a 10 typed pages, the difference can cost you a...

Tags: know your markets, manuscript basics, submitting your story

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