For a time, just after I made the decision to treat self-publishing as my main avenue, I wondered if I'd even bother to submit things to any traditional venue. I was pretty much done with the large publishers and the agents that basically enabled one to pursue them, but what about smaller publications - in other words, the magazines?
Well, apparently I'm not done with them yet. I've decided to rack up a few more rejections and have been sending some short work off to such prestigious rejectors (shut up, it's a word now) as Asimov's and Clarkesworld. I'll probably stick to a smaller number of reliable and successful magazines. Researching the others bulk of the sector, with many magazines which tend to rise and fall pretty quickly, takes more time than I'm willing to give it. And each one will have separate formatting preferences. If there's one thing the industry needs to standardize...
In any case, I'm aiming for maximum efficiency in time, even if the trade off is minimum likelihood of acceptance. Now that I've relegated traditional channels to the backburner, I can afford to keep my standards high. The time I'd otherwise spend researching and sending off story after story can be better spent writing.
There is one other project I'm looking at submitting to, though. Antimatter press is running a little novelette pitch contest, and given the (relative) success of my Wandering Tale series I think dabbling a little more in the short-form pool couldn't hurt. Only problem is, now I have to look through my catalog of "stories-to-tell" and figure out which one would work best as a series of novelettes, rather than as a novel. Though as I found with the Wandering Tale, switching the format can be rather invigorating to the story, so I'm looking forward to the experiment.
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