MarketWants: Aspirations

Alright, so that last sale up-adjusted my ambition a tad (whether it's realistic or not is irrelevant...).  As I think I've noted here before, I've been haphazardly looking for a writer's group/community/anything to try to help me get more engaged in my writing and in the science fiction community, but there just didn't seem to be anything that tantalizingly tempting out there to make it worth the effort.  I participated in Critters for a few months, but ultimately felt like its quota requirements for critiquing were taking too much time away from my own writing.  I checked out Absolute Write a couple of times, but there's just nothing there that grabbed me and made me think "I want to be part of this."  Maybe it's because it feels like it's stuck in the 90s (Critters has that going for it as well, though it was improving towards the end).  Then the other day I came across Codex, which is probably not much different from the other groups, but the one thing that really stood out to me was that I recognized a lot of the authors listed as members.  Plus there's that whole mystical restricted access component.  Anyway, so I set a goal to get one pro sale so I could qualify for membership (seems consistent, seeing how it's been my goal to get 3 SFWA-qualifying sales for "pro" status anyway).  I recognize that the group is likely to either be a disappointment or just not somewhere I'd like hanging out very often, but it gives me a nice short-term goal that carries me forward toward my other goals.

Which brings me back to MarketWants--my original project of analyzing pro markets to optimize my submissions.  I ended up deciding that was way too ambitious, and not as essential once The Grinder became operational, but with my narrowed focus on publishing just one pro story, I think a narrowed focus on a select few pro markets is warranted.  So here was my plan:

- Select 5-10 SFWA-qualifying markets with sufficiently high acceptance rates and sufficiently low wait times;

- Subset the selected markets into 2-3 categories to maximize my ability to re-submit works to multiple markets;

- Analyze submissions criteria of categorized markets to identify necessary attributes for stories to be submitted to each market category;

- Randomly sample previously published stories (about 30) for each market to identify the most common features of accepted stories, and then combine those common features in a way that would enable me to hit all top attributes in each category;

- Write 3-4 stories for each market category meeting acceptance criteria for each market in each category and incorporated top attributes for each market in each category;

- Resubmit to other markets in each category as necessary

I understand that that's a lot more specific than it needs to be (though I'll admit I hadn't reasoned all that out until I just barely wrote it), and the purists would probably say, "Forget all that!  Just write better stories!"  But I really do better when I work within clear boundaries.  Besides which, I'm gonna love crunching the numbers....

Whether or not this is successful is anyone's guess at this point, and knowing my past history with such projects it probably has a slim chance of even surviving to the submission stage, but it'll give me something to work on in the meantime.  Oh, and lest anyone think it wouldn't even survive the first step, I've actually already taken the first two:

Using did a sort in The Grinder filtering down to just SFWA-qualifying markets with average response times less than or equal to 46 days (this allowed me to keep Nature Futures, which has the highest acceptance rate).  This gave me 12 results, which was a little above the 5-10 I wanted, but I knew I'd be excluding some.  I excluded Fantasy & Science Fiction because it doesn't accept electronic submissions and Grantville Gazette: Universe Annex because they have weird guidelines and I'm not sure they actually qualify for SFWA (I haven't found the gumption to look into it very far).  Then I excluded Asimov's, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons for having acceptance rates lower than 2% according to The Grinder (up to 50 submissions to get published is a stretch).  This left Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, EscapePod, Flash Fiction Online, and Nature Futures.  I then broke those six markets into two categories: three markets for flash fiction (DSF, FFO, and Nature), and three markets for longer short stories (Apex, BCS, and EP).

And there you have it.  So next steps will be to look at the submission guidelines for the three markets in each category and put together a requirements list.  Then I'll sample the stories and look for common attributes, which I'll add to the list.  And after I finish all that work, all I'll have to do is write the stories....