Hey Guys,

Music to write by: “Lazy Eye” by The Silversun Pickups

Welcome to the first post in my “Markets for New Genre Writers” series. First up: Raygun Revival.

Background

Raygun revival was founded by Johne Cook, Paul Christian Glenn, and L.S. King in April of 2006. They founded the magazine because they believed that “space opera has fallen on hard times, and [they] intend to revive it.” Although the magazine falls under the umbrella of Double-Edged Publishing and its editors are Christian, don’t be afraid that your story must focus on religious themes. They admit that their preference is on good storytelling rather than religious overtones. In fact, I cannot recall any overtly Christian stories being published in the magazine.

Why is the magazine attractive to you?
They are always putting out calls for more submissions and have been known to publish debut stories from a variety of authors.

As a plus, their magazine covers look awesome and your name goes right on the front. Definitely something you can brag to your friends about.

Final words
My one caveat about the magazine is that they run serial fiction written by the editors, which is usually a negative. The quality of the serials runs from “needs improvement” to “quite good”. I’m not sure how many readers come back from week to week just for the serials, but your story is sure to get some “spill-over” from those that do.

Since the magazine is published in an aggressive bi-weekly schedule, your story won’t languish for too long before seeing print, and might even get podcasted by Raygun Radio. All of these bonuses make this magazine a great market for new writers

Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” by The Headstones

Being a first time writer is daunting. There are lists of markets available online like Ralan’s Specfic and Humor Webstravaganza or Duotrope, but they contain precious little information about the market itself. Writers don’t want their babies to disappear into some webzine that is only seen by a handful of people. They want a professional looking product, exposure, and most of all, a market they can brag to their friends about.

The purpose of these posts is to highlight markets that accept work from unpublished writers, that publish material that is entertaining rather than literary, and that look professionally presented and edited. I’m going to start with the three webzines hosted by Double Edged Publishing simply because I’ve been published in all three, but I’ve made myself familiar with a vast number of other magazines over the years, so you can look forward to quite a few posts.

If you’re the editor of a small market magazine that accepts work from new writers, please e-mail me the address of your site, the names of a few authors that have debuted at your site, and any statistics you might have, and I’ll make sure to post about it. If you’re actively soliciting submissions, you might even get some traffic from this blog.

Next post: Raygun Revival! See you then!

Music to write by: “Just Because” by Jane’s Addiction

First novels advances are notoriously low these days, yet new authors still have dreams of being able to quit their day jobs. Story of six figure advances abound, but how much, really, are new authors making? Tobias Buckell has compiled a list of first novel advances and nicely categorized them into sections (such as agented and unagented) and genre. He’s been doing this for a couple of years and amassed a pretty accurate picture of the kinds of advances being doled out. He’s currently soliciting more stats, so if you’ve recently recieved your first advance, drop by his blog and let him know.

According to Tobias, the average first novel advances break down thusly:

Career Advances are a little better:

*Extrapolated

Brenda Hiatt has done virtually the same thing for romance novels, but she’s broken it down by publisher. She’s got a clever trick which prevents me from deep-linking to the list, but it’s highlighted on the left side of her blog under the title Show Me the Money.

Looks like Pocket and HarperCollins are tops in Romance at 15,000 and 13,500 respectively with advances ranging all the way down to zero (Wings E-Press).

What does this mean for us? Don’t quit your day job. Of course, you could always hope you get lucky. Stephen King’s “Carrie” sold for 200,000 back in the 70s. Who knows? That could be you!

Hey guys,

Just experimenting with a new theme. Unfortunately, we’ve lost the dancing bear for now. This theme, I’m told, is much easier on the eyes, and it’s more attractive to search engines.

Right now, a method to comment isn’t readily apparent. Until I get that fixed, just click on the post’s header and the comment box will appear at the bottom of the post.

Sorry for the hassle! Hopefully we’ll get things under control in the next couple of days.

So you’ve probably noticed, I’ve changed the title of this blog. There were several reasons for doing this, but before I go into them I’d just like to apologize to everyone that links to this site for making them change the names of their link.

Hopefully you can see why I changed the title:

1) The previous title was too long. How To Succeed as a Writer (without even trying) wasn’t fitting on a lot of blogrolls very comfortably and usually looked hideous.

2) People weren’t reading the “About the Blog’s Title” page and thus assuming that I was posting on a subject I knew nothing about. If you haven’t read the post, I’d urge you to do so now.

3) Without Really Trying is catchier .

Once again, apologies for anyone that has to change the names of their links. In the next world I’ll buy you a beer or ambrosia or nectar of the gods or whatever they have over there. Hope you continue to enjoy the blog!