Anthologies?
This is a question for the writers/editors out there.
It's obvious to anyone browsing any bookstore these days that -- at least in the science fiction / fantasy realm -- many more short stories are being published in anthologies than in the few surviving consumer trade magazines. To my admittedly unscientific observations, these appear to be about half first-publication anthologies, and about half reprints.
The last time I tried to have a go at being a professional writer, the be-all and end-all of how to locate places to sell your stories was Writers Market. So, as I started to exhaust the publications (both online and print) that I know well, I bought a subscription to WritersMarket.com (which is theoretically the same information as is in the annual book, but inherently more current because it's online). Initially, this was good because it introduced me to a few online publications I had not previously discovered (at least one of which I now really like), but one of my admittedly not-quite-what-anyone-publishes stories has now exhausted even those.
What I've noticed, after slogging through WritersMarket.com's highly un-intuitive search functions, is that they still seem to be in the mode of "you're trying to sell a short story -- which means online or print consumer trade publications -- or you're trying to sell a novel -- which means book publishers." It seems they list the handful of recurring anthologies they know about as magazines, but there's literally only a few of them and I routinely see dozens in the bookstores. They don't seem to list the ones that are one-off anthologies and not part of an ongoing series at all. And yet most of the major book publishers now do anthologies quite regularly. It's possible I just haven't figured out how to search properly, but it's also possible that Writers Market is missing the boat here.
So, my question is this: Where can one discover who's publishing an anthology, and how do these anthology editors go about soliciting stories for submission?*
* Obviously, I don't have an agent, and plan to remain unagented until I'm both more confident that I can deliver regularly and have at least one of the novels ready to go.
It's obvious to anyone browsing any bookstore these days that -- at least in the science fiction / fantasy realm -- many more short stories are being published in anthologies than in the few surviving consumer trade magazines. To my admittedly unscientific observations, these appear to be about half first-publication anthologies, and about half reprints.
The last time I tried to have a go at being a professional writer, the be-all and end-all of how to locate places to sell your stories was Writers Market. So, as I started to exhaust the publications (both online and print) that I know well, I bought a subscription to WritersMarket.com (which is theoretically the same information as is in the annual book, but inherently more current because it's online). Initially, this was good because it introduced me to a few online publications I had not previously discovered (at least one of which I now really like), but one of my admittedly not-quite-what-anyone-publishes stories has now exhausted even those.
What I've noticed, after slogging through WritersMarket.com's highly un-intuitive search functions, is that they still seem to be in the mode of "you're trying to sell a short story -- which means online or print consumer trade publications -- or you're trying to sell a novel -- which means book publishers." It seems they list the handful of recurring anthologies they know about as magazines, but there's literally only a few of them and I routinely see dozens in the bookstores. They don't seem to list the ones that are one-off anthologies and not part of an ongoing series at all. And yet most of the major book publishers now do anthologies quite regularly. It's possible I just haven't figured out how to search properly, but it's also possible that Writers Market is missing the boat here.
So, my question is this: Where can one discover who's publishing an anthology, and how do these anthology editors go about soliciting stories for submission?*
* Obviously, I don't have an agent, and plan to remain unagented until I'm both more confident that I can deliver regularly and have at least one of the novels ready to go.