Writing Advice: After the Story is Done

Buddy Goodboy comes to us with a question today via the Sofawolf Academy (writers, check it out): “What do you do with stories? I have trouble even coming up with a story unless I know who it’s for and what I’m going to do with it. I also realized I don’t actually know how to get a story published if I don’t just put it out there myself. I have a website with a few of my stories published on it.

Say I want to do more than post stories on my website or FA or SoFurry. I’d like to see my name on a printed cover sometime. How do I get from here to there? And what are some of my options?”

The quick, easy answer to this question is to keep up on the calls for submissions to anthologies that still happen around the furry fandom and generate your stories in response to those. That solves the problem of coming up with them and where to submit them. If you want something even lower stakes, furry conbooks are actually looking for writing submissions fairly often (for conventions that still do conbooks), and you don’t have to limit yourself to conventions you’re attending. These will also get your name in print, if not always on a cover.

Buuuuuut it feels like there’s a more philosophical question behind this: What—and who—are stories for?

There are writers who write just for themselves, for whom publication is secondary. They might share with some friends, they might post to their websites, but they’re not in it for the audience. There are some writers who write for publication, who won’t even start a story unless—as Buddy says—they know where it’s going.

(Me, I’m somewhere in between the two. I write for my own pleasure, but I also try to make sure that the things I write will have a place for other people to enjoy them. I’ve been lucky enough to build up a readership, so I can write a mystery novel homage to Agatha Christie and a gay romance jewel heist and have people interested in both, but the reason I wrote those is not because I thought they would sell, but because they interested me.)

Whatever your approach to writing, one of the most significant hurdles to writing is maintaining the interest necessary to finish and revise the story. For each of us, interest is generated in a different way. For me, it often comes with following the characters and seeing what they’ll do, finishing their story for them; sometimes it comes from the excitement of playing with the craft. For others, interest might come from knowing your story has an audience waiting for it. Whatever it is for you, I think all aspiring writers should find where the joy in their writing lies and try to chase that.

For Buddy, and others who want to know that there’s an audience, this can be tricky because that’s not something you can control. Paradoxically, the way you build up an audience is by producing work regularly. So you have to find some way to get started. Put together a writing group of friends, agree to read each other’s stories once a month. Invent themes to write to, if you need that extra nudge to write. Post those stories online and link to each others’ posts, and then not only are you getting writing practice, you’re sharing and building an audience together.

But Buddy also asked about getting stories published (moreso than on FA and SoFurry). Sadly, there aren’t many markets out there for short stories, let alone furry stories. There’s a zine or two here and there, but apart from anthology calls and conbooks, as I mentioned above, there’s little in the way of markets. That leaves novels and collections of your own stories, if you want to publish something with your name on the cover.

Self-publishing, especially in the furry community, is a very viable option. You can make e-books yourself and sell them fairly easily; you can make print books through Kindle Desktop or a similar service and sell them at cons or online (I wouldn’t recommend getting into print book fulfillment unless you’re really into that as a business). There are plenty of people who will offer the editing and cover design services you’d find at a publisher for your self-published project. Many furries have self-published, and I’m sure some will be happy to talk to you about the challenges and rewards of that path. Collections of short stories do not sell as well as novels (this is what I hear from publishers and also my experience from my own work; I have four short story collections for sale and they all lag my worst-selling novels), but you can make it work if what you have is a book of short stories. That’s still something!

I know that a lot of “seeing your name on a cover” is tied up with publishers, that it’s not just seeing your name in print but knowing that a publisher liked it and thought it was good enough to print. But look: publishers are not the arbiter of what is “good.” They are the arbiter of what they think they can sell. Sometimes there is overlap—often, even—but having a publisher turn you down doesn’t mean that your work isn’t good. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be proud of having your name on a cover from a publisher (I am!), only that you should maybe add to that the pride of having your name on the cover of a project you finished. That is a pride that is under your control, not one that depends on other people and the fickle buying public.

If you do want to be published by a publisher, go look at their tables at furry conventions and talk to them. Look at what they’re selling, and ask them what they wish they had more of. Is there a lot of gay romance in contemporary settings, but not a lot of science fiction? Are there lots of boys and not so many girls? Lots of cis protagonists but not so many trans? Furry publishers will be pretty open about what they’re looking for, even if they’re not all open to submissions all the time. And get to know the publishers and the other folks in the writing community. Don’t just come up to the FurPlanet or Fenris table with “I have a 400,000-word gay science fiction space opera would you like to publish it,” but if you interact with them like people, talk books (we all love to talk books), and they get used to chatting with you at conventions, then maybe one day when you mention that novel you’re just finishing up, someone will say, “tell me more about it.”

Maybe you’ll like the self-publishing world and stay there; maybe a publisher will get your next book. Every story you write isn’t an end; it’s another stepping stone in your journey as a writer. The path to seeing your name on a cover isn’t necessarily one story. It’s a winding road that can take a short time or a long time, and there are lots of other people on it to keep you company, if that’s something you want. What it requires from you is finding the joy in writing, writing regularly, and being as patient as you are stubborn.