The short lives and tragic deaths of semi-pro short story markets.

A tongue-in-cheek examination of small but fleeting victories as a fiction writer.

(Your mom crying over your deleted stories.)

I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life. I’m a Gen X’er, so that should give you an idea of what kind of timeline we’re talking about. As a kid, I’d tried to write. I swear. But TV got in the way. As a teen, I wrote terrible poetry, some of which I still have and desperately need to burn next camping trip. In my twenties and thirties, writing disappeared from view. It was the road less traveled that I wanted to go down, but couldn’t. I was busy establishing a career, then maintaining my career, until entering the final stage—loathing career.

But in my forties, writing circled back around in the form of a useful midlife crisis. And of course, having barely bothered to actually write most of my life up until that point, I dove right into the deep end and attempted a novel.

It went better than expected. I managed twenty thousand words, completed the first act, and had a solid outline for the rest of the story… but something wasn’t right.

During this process, I snooped around different writing forums and picked up a few tricks. But the more I learned, the more I realized how damaged my manuscript was. That realization felt overwhelming. I trudged along a little further, but when you are only able to churn out a meager few hundred words a day, it feels like death by a thousand cuts.

And that’s when I switched to short stories. Temporarily. At least, that’s what I told myself.

My plan was solid. The writing forum I was lurking on held monthly writing contests, combined with rounds of critiquing by the other members. I’d take a year, write some short stories, learn, and then come back to my novel.

And to my surprise. It worked. Sort of. Mostly.

There is a lot to be said for taking a much smaller piece of writing through the process of drafting, revising, editing, critiquing, crying, followed by more revising and editing. And then immediately taking everything you learned and applying it to the next project.

My first story, Dwarves, Elves, and Consultants, was under two thousand words, and in the course of a month or two (it’s hard to recall exactly all these years later), I learned a metric fuck-ton. (A metric fuck-ton is about half of an imperial fuck-ton, for any American readers.) The process started to make sense. My craft improved. So I wrote more short stories.

I started to submit to various fiction markets. Because, dammit, if I was going to go through the gauntlet pounding out all this brilliance, I sure as hell was going to torture as many faceless editors with it as possible. I earned a whack load of rejection letters, and much like Stephen King hung his from a nail, I did the modern digital equivalent and banished them to a folder in my email.

But then the damnedest thing happened. I received an acceptance. (I have a special folder for those, too, but it’s much smaller.) The crazy bastard on the other side of the equation paid me $100 USD for my story, which, to a Canadian, is like being paid in gold doubloons. It took three years to get that first sale. But then shortly after, I sold a few more.

Now let’s be clear. I was never able to land an acceptance from a high-paying prestigious pro-market. I am a mediocre word-writing guy, and semi-pro is the lane I drive in. I’m fine with that.

Being a published semi-pro short story writer was fantastic. All my writer friends were familiar with all the markets I was submitting to. They were envious when I landed a sale. I assume. I’ve never been anything less than envious when one of them beat me out for a particular anthology call. I could look in the mirror and call myself a writer. I mean, readers were reading my stories. Right?

Well, maybe.

Here’s the cold, hard truth about semi-pro short story markets (as I see it; your results may vary). Almost no one is reading small, token, and semi-pro fiction markets. It always felt like the audience was other writers—the ones who made that issue alongside you, writers looking to submit in the future, and the writers who got rejected. Those, especially, are reading your story, cursing your name, and sharpening their pencils. And they are not sharpening those pencils to write with… they have keyboards for that.

Other writers were the only people commenting online about my stories. They were the only ones liking or reposting on social media. So I did some mild off-the-cuff half-assed research and concluded that there is, in fact, an easy way to calculate how many people read your story at any given semi-pro e-zine or anthology.

Take the number of acceptances for that anthology and multiply it by two. The writer of the story and their mom. And then generously add in the entire number of rejected authors that submitted alongside you. (Angry and bitter readership is still readership.) And that’s it.

Let’s put it into a proper mathematical formula:

Writers + Writers’ Moms + Rejected Authors = Total Readership.

“Now I feel sad,” you say.

Well, hold on to that thought, because it gets worse. (This is where the “tragic deaths” come in.)

It turns out that when you have a barely read semi-pro market, the editors grow weary of the constant slush and the grief of dealing with writers and their moms. At some point, they close their doors. After all, many of them are writers themselves with their own dreams to pursue. Sure, they keep the website live so readers can still find your story… for a time. Until they stop paying the website hosting fee. Then one day, you click through the links of your published work on your author site (which also doesn’t have any readership), and you find your story has been cast aside into the nether—error 404, not found .

But do not despair, fellow word-writing person. As with all things in life, it’s (mostly) about the journey and not the destination, although the destination is pretty sweet too, even though it is destined to die.

Short stories are about learning the craft in small bites. It’s about growing a thicker skin, a thousand words at a time. You’ll develop a nice hat collection along the way: writer, editor, marketer, PR person, therapist (you’ll get very good at this last one as you will have many writer friends). The pay will be cheap, the readership will be your mom, and the glory will be fleeting. But with all that said, you should consider putting yourself through the gauntlet. Take your licks. Cut your teeth. Become a better semi-pro writer.

Besides, I bet your mom loves reading my stories.