The Aim of Dissemination
Oct. 22nd, 2019 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
essivecaseICYMI, I posted a story on itch.io. It's called Tidal Forces, and it's a fantastical work of environmental fiction that frames water itself as a central character. I wrote it intending to interrogate our relationship to nature and the earth, and to write about climate change and responsibility in a non-didactic manner. I also wrote it to experiment with giving the role of narrator to something typically thought of as being without sentience. I wrote it to flex my descriptive writing muscles.
Actually, I wrote it for an anthology. Specifically, the anthology was looking for stories about water, and more specifically, my story was rejected. I submitted the story in November 2017, and it was rejected in February 2018. As of writing, the anthology is going to be published early next year, 2020. In many ways, I'm relieved that Tidal Forces wasn't accepted. I would have been waiting two years to see my story in print, and even then probably only available via Amazon, with a cover that really evokes the Graphic Design Is My Passion meme.
Waiting four months for a rejection isn't so bad, in the scheme of things. For one anthology submission, I waited over a year, only to learn that my story was on the shortlist but just missed out for page count reasons. This rejection was almost a year ago; there is currently no publication date for the anthology. For a recent anthology competition, I found out my story didn't make the cut because I noticed a friend mention indirectly that theirs did. I am still waiting on the formal announcement. For a short story I submitted to an anthology competition at a local bookshop, there was no announcement to participants at all. They simply posted the winners on their website, and I found out I wasn't one of them by checking the site in frustration, a month after participants were supposed to hear back.
These experiences got me thinking: is this really what I want for my writing?
The problem is, publishing is slow. I understand why this is the case, and you could argue that in our fast-paced lives we all need a bit of something slow. Personally, I think publishing should catch up. We have the internet, we can release things as PDFs before we put them in print. We can recruit writers faster and more efficiently than ever. Why are we still making them wait years to let their work see the light of day? Fundamentally, I think the real disjunction between the traditionally slow pace of publishing and the fast pace of the internet is that people are using that fast pace for self promotion, not to engage in any real sense of community, and that's why people are still tied to the prestige of literary magazines and establishment competitions.
This ties in with the question of why we keep putting ourselves through this. In part, it's tradition. Look, I'm a novelist at heart. I enjoy writing short stories, but they're much harder for me. I have no formal training, no industry contacts, no Twitter clout; every piece of advice I've received is that I ought to get a few short stories published before I even try to submit novels to agents and publishers. It looks good on your CV. But who's reading them?
I've noticed something almost sinister about establishment litmags and anthologies on Twitter: they get very little engagement. Maybe three to seven retweets per tweet. They have thousands of followers and claim to have a huge readership, but... where is it? Where is the feedback cycle? My absolute worst nightmare would be to learn that this all happens on Facebook, or in the noxious sludge of the #amwriting and #writingcommunity hashtags. Here, you can find a lot of people talking about the short stories and novels that they're writing, and promising to follow back anyone who follows them. But they're not talking about what they're reading.
The short story industry is just that - an industry. Not a community of writers and readers sharing each other's work. The industry exists to manufacture a very particular sort of establishment capital. In my view, the point of writing stories should not be to pad out your CV; it should be to get your writing read. This is why I made the call to start self-publishing my short stories; maybe longer ones, eventually. The traditional method of self-publishing involves being your own business manager and managing your own website. It is also, generally, a vehicle for people to write for a living, putting out novels at a sometimes alarming rate. Though community has sprung up around traditional self-publishing, it is typically a very solitary activity.
I'm not really interested in tradition anymore. I decided to publish Tidal Forces on Itch, which is supposed to be for games, both digital and analogue. Part of why I feel comfortable posting short stories on Itch is because I'm also starting to work on analogue/tabletop games, which I'll be sharing there too. But the other reason I like it is because it allows for immediacy and flexibility, and for direct feedback. It's pay-what-you-want, which means it's available for anyone to read and brings me a broader audience, but also that people are able to give a small donation; already three people have done so, for which I am very grateful, and which really demonstrates to me the viability of this as a method for sharing my work. All I need is Itch to host it, and Twitter to spread it. That's the kind of fast pace I'm looking for.
It took me a while to get here. Actually, Tidal Forces has not just been rejected once. It's been rejected five times from five different anthologies, magazines, and competitions, after various edits in between. At first I thought there was something wrong with my writing - and don't get me wrong, the final version is miles better than the original after all those edits - but now I realise it's just a target mismatch. It's like trying to use a coin as a puzzle piece. No matter how hard you try, it's not going to tessellate.
I'm not going to stop submitting short stories to competitions and anthologies. I'm focusing my efforts on indie anthologies, self-published and crowdfunded. Often these calls for submission are quite niche, and I feel comfortable writing something specific knowing that if it doesn't find an audience with these indie anthologies, it'll always have a place on Itch. The takeaway of this is not that we should abandon traditional publishing entirely, but that we have the whole internet at our disposal, and that we can work in parallel to explore new ways of putting our work out there. We should be looking at the sharing of stories, short and long, as an act of participation in a community, not as a transaction that brings us more Twitter followers. And we can build those communities ourselves. That's what it's about.
Actually, I wrote it for an anthology. Specifically, the anthology was looking for stories about water, and more specifically, my story was rejected. I submitted the story in November 2017, and it was rejected in February 2018. As of writing, the anthology is going to be published early next year, 2020. In many ways, I'm relieved that Tidal Forces wasn't accepted. I would have been waiting two years to see my story in print, and even then probably only available via Amazon, with a cover that really evokes the Graphic Design Is My Passion meme.
Waiting four months for a rejection isn't so bad, in the scheme of things. For one anthology submission, I waited over a year, only to learn that my story was on the shortlist but just missed out for page count reasons. This rejection was almost a year ago; there is currently no publication date for the anthology. For a recent anthology competition, I found out my story didn't make the cut because I noticed a friend mention indirectly that theirs did. I am still waiting on the formal announcement. For a short story I submitted to an anthology competition at a local bookshop, there was no announcement to participants at all. They simply posted the winners on their website, and I found out I wasn't one of them by checking the site in frustration, a month after participants were supposed to hear back.
These experiences got me thinking: is this really what I want for my writing?
The problem is, publishing is slow. I understand why this is the case, and you could argue that in our fast-paced lives we all need a bit of something slow. Personally, I think publishing should catch up. We have the internet, we can release things as PDFs before we put them in print. We can recruit writers faster and more efficiently than ever. Why are we still making them wait years to let their work see the light of day? Fundamentally, I think the real disjunction between the traditionally slow pace of publishing and the fast pace of the internet is that people are using that fast pace for self promotion, not to engage in any real sense of community, and that's why people are still tied to the prestige of literary magazines and establishment competitions.
This ties in with the question of why we keep putting ourselves through this. In part, it's tradition. Look, I'm a novelist at heart. I enjoy writing short stories, but they're much harder for me. I have no formal training, no industry contacts, no Twitter clout; every piece of advice I've received is that I ought to get a few short stories published before I even try to submit novels to agents and publishers. It looks good on your CV. But who's reading them?
I've noticed something almost sinister about establishment litmags and anthologies on Twitter: they get very little engagement. Maybe three to seven retweets per tweet. They have thousands of followers and claim to have a huge readership, but... where is it? Where is the feedback cycle? My absolute worst nightmare would be to learn that this all happens on Facebook, or in the noxious sludge of the #amwriting and #writingcommunity hashtags. Here, you can find a lot of people talking about the short stories and novels that they're writing, and promising to follow back anyone who follows them. But they're not talking about what they're reading.
The short story industry is just that - an industry. Not a community of writers and readers sharing each other's work. The industry exists to manufacture a very particular sort of establishment capital. In my view, the point of writing stories should not be to pad out your CV; it should be to get your writing read. This is why I made the call to start self-publishing my short stories; maybe longer ones, eventually. The traditional method of self-publishing involves being your own business manager and managing your own website. It is also, generally, a vehicle for people to write for a living, putting out novels at a sometimes alarming rate. Though community has sprung up around traditional self-publishing, it is typically a very solitary activity.
I'm not really interested in tradition anymore. I decided to publish Tidal Forces on Itch, which is supposed to be for games, both digital and analogue. Part of why I feel comfortable posting short stories on Itch is because I'm also starting to work on analogue/tabletop games, which I'll be sharing there too. But the other reason I like it is because it allows for immediacy and flexibility, and for direct feedback. It's pay-what-you-want, which means it's available for anyone to read and brings me a broader audience, but also that people are able to give a small donation; already three people have done so, for which I am very grateful, and which really demonstrates to me the viability of this as a method for sharing my work. All I need is Itch to host it, and Twitter to spread it. That's the kind of fast pace I'm looking for.
It took me a while to get here. Actually, Tidal Forces has not just been rejected once. It's been rejected five times from five different anthologies, magazines, and competitions, after various edits in between. At first I thought there was something wrong with my writing - and don't get me wrong, the final version is miles better than the original after all those edits - but now I realise it's just a target mismatch. It's like trying to use a coin as a puzzle piece. No matter how hard you try, it's not going to tessellate.
I'm not going to stop submitting short stories to competitions and anthologies. I'm focusing my efforts on indie anthologies, self-published and crowdfunded. Often these calls for submission are quite niche, and I feel comfortable writing something specific knowing that if it doesn't find an audience with these indie anthologies, it'll always have a place on Itch. The takeaway of this is not that we should abandon traditional publishing entirely, but that we have the whole internet at our disposal, and that we can work in parallel to explore new ways of putting our work out there. We should be looking at the sharing of stories, short and long, as an act of participation in a community, not as a transaction that brings us more Twitter followers. And we can build those communities ourselves. That's what it's about.
