This week, I made my first fiction sale! I sold my short fantasy story Maker of the Twenty-first Moon to Daily Science Fiction. They are a new market, so they’re not quite well-established yet, but they pay pro-rates (currently they pay 8 cents a word; pro is 5 cents and up, so 8 cents is quite good), and, from the few author names they are currently listing on their site, it looks like my story will be in good company! So I’m obviously pretty excited!
Unfortunately it will probably be a good long while until I ever write (or sell) more, as just about all my energy is currently focused on studying animation. But whenever I do write some more, I think this sale will affect me in two ways:
1) I’ll have more self-confidence. I’ll say to myself: “You sold a story before, you have it in you to do it again!”
2) I’ll have less self-confidence. I’ll say to myself: “Is this work good enough? Is it as good, if not better, than that story you already sold?”
Maybe those two effects will cancel each other out. And it probably shouldn’t affect me that much anyway, since in the grand scheme of the world, this sale isn’t of particularly significant historic importance. But I suppose one’s first ever sale will naturally go to the head just a bit.
Woohoo!
5 Comments
Anonymous · August 7, 2010 at 6:03 PM
The worst part about being unpublished is nobody may ever read your work
The worst part about being published is somebody may read your work
Steph · August 7, 2010 at 10:08 PM
No it is great! If you ever write a book and query agents you can say, “Hey, I’ve been published!”
S P Hannifin · August 8, 2010 at 1:21 PM
Yes! Though it will probably be a long while before I can write a book, it will definitely be nice to have some credit!
Anonymous · August 10, 2010 at 8:50 AM
how many words?
S P Hannifin · August 10, 2010 at 6:23 PM
my story was only 1850 words, which probably helped since DSF is looking for pretty short stuff, especially considering that they hope to be daily…