Advice for Writers

This may sound ironic coming from a publication that barely pays, but our objective is to encourage writers to get paid for their work.

We ask writers not to submit to us unless the story has been rejected by at least 10 paying markets. We came up with that number based on the number of paying markets that are regularly open that will accept speculative fiction stories at the high-end of our word limit. There are many more than 10 paying markets for most stories. Our first and biggest piece of advice is to keep sending your story elsewhere as long as there is still a paying market that might buy it. As one of our publishers puts it, “Hell Itself can wait.”

We will accept “market killers” with fewer than 10 rejections. That’s not meant to encourage writers to give up on these stories and send them to us sooner, but rather an acknowledgment that many anthologies have themes that are so specific, there really aren’t other markets available. If, for example, a publisher announces a themed anthology about bunnies living in underwater communities, accepts a number of stories, and then cancels the anthology, those stories now need to compete with every other story that was supposed to be in that anthology as they flood the other markets’ slush piles. Most other publications will take at most one underwater bunny story, and the others are out of luck. But we do encourage authors to try those other, better-paying, markets first. And since many anthologies are not so specifically themed as to make selling the story elsewhere impossible, we actively want writers to exhaust the other options first. Many market killers have gone on to sell to top-tier magazines. We just don’t hear about it.

Our second big piece of advice is that writing stories that people won’t publish is not an excuse for not reading widely. We want people reading Hell Itself, of course, but if your goal is to publish fiction, you need to be reading a lot of other publications as well. Get a sense of the aesthetic of the various paying markets. That will help you target your story better. Some writers like to “write to the market,” and if that works for you, that’s great. However, even if you write what you want and worry about where to send it later, knowing whether the story feels more like it fits in Magazine A versus Magazine B will help you get it in front of the right editor sooner.

And, finally, our third big piece of advice, no matter what level you’re at, is to keep working on your craft. The best writers, the ones who we all look up to, are continually working to make their work better. Most people write many stories before selling one. Even well known, award-winning writers collect plenty of rejections. Most of the stories that come to us have not only been getting shopped for quite some time, they’ve also been getting revisions along the way as the author re-reads them after a rejection and decides to fix something, something they’ve got more skill to improve now than they did when they first wrote it. That’s a boon to us, of course, but it also means that their next story is more likely to catch the eye of those top-tier publications, because each story will have been written with more skill than the previous one.

All-in-all, the magic comes from dedication and hard work. But we know that even with dedication and hard work, good stories — stories that everyone acknowledges deserve to be read — sometimes don’t find a home. Those are the stories we’re looking for. So, writers, keep writing and keep submitting.

—Art Tracy