Writing sucks.
You spend hours staring at a blank page,
hammer out a plot, or a poem, or an essay, or a great big chunk of
history or analysis, work your ass off to make it as perfect as you
can... and no one reads the damn thing.
Okay, fine, you're
Stephen King, you're Ray Bradbury, you're Bill
Freakin' Shakespeare -- people will read your stuff. But if you ain't
them, you ain't shit. That's the case here at E2, but it's also the case
everywhere else.
This all started with The Custodian's recent
daylog, but it's something that he and I have
discussed for quite a while. And like Custo, it's something I hesitate
to say here, as someone who has sponsored multiple fiction quests and will be sponsoring at least one more soon.
But
Everything2 is a dead zone when it comes to fiction. No one reads it. No
one upvotes it. Everyone says we want great writing here, but when
someone posts a great work of fiction here, it gets ignored.
"I
can't read long-form writing on the web" is something I heard several
different people say in the aftermath of Custo's daylog -- and I want to
bellow abuse at the people who say that, but it seems to be a problem
everywhere. People don't read much anyway, but when it comes to reading
on the web, the last thing anyone wants is something that you have to
scroll through forever to finish.
I do think I'll hesitate to
post fiction here anymore, though I plan on leaving all of my previous
stories here unless I know I've found a publication I want to submit to.
I love writing stories for E2, but it's getting harder to deal with the
frustration of knowing that some of my ancient one-liners have
higher reps than work I'm actually proud of creating.
The
obvious thing to do would be to start the process of finding
professional publications that would accept my stories. Of course, there
are plenty of problems with that, too. There are very few publications
out there who pay for fiction at all, even fewer who pay for genre
fiction, and fewer still who pay professional rates for genre fiction.
The
Duotrope market listing site has current
info for 2,486 publications, both online and print, that accept fiction.
Narrow the search to those who pay pro rates and accept fantasy fiction
(because many of those also accept science fiction and horror), and the
numbers drop to 37 -- including several that specialize solely in
Twitterfic -- a whole story in 140 characters or less. It's easy to
pay the professional rate of five cents per word when you'll be shelling
out about a dollar for each "story."
And for the overwhelming majority of these publications, they accept
only one percent or less of everything that gets sent to them. There are
lots of writers out there, lots of stories out there, and not that many
places to publish.
Of course, most publications that accept
fiction don't want just anything you've got. They all want a specific
kind of story -- some want fantasy but not sword and sorcery, some want
Lovecraftian horror only, some want hard SF only. Most want something
that the editor likes to read, and the only way to figure out what they
like to read is to read a few issues of the publication, and then hope
you've got something in your catalog that matches their preferences.
Heck,
if I decided I wanted to submit any of the Metro City stories for
publication elsewhere, Duotrope lists only 11 magazines that accept
superhero fiction -- and only four of those offer even a token payment.
And
even if you can get one of your stories accepted by anyone... well,
circulation numbers have been dropping for all magazines in the past few
years. Even the big genre publishers have a lot fewer readers than they
did in their heydays. I suspect it's perfectly possible to get a story
published in an online publication that has fewer readers than E2.
So what are my best options? I really don't know.
On
one hand, as a writer, I want to write and to be read. If I had to pick
between having a small number of people reading my work for free on E2
and getting paid phat lewt to be published in a magazine that no one
reads, I would obviously choose to keep all my writing on E2.
But
on the other, E2 really is not a good place for fiction. And though
it's extremely easy to get published here, it does get a little
discouraging to be read by so few and to do it all for free.