[UPDATE] Annnnd it’s submitted. Thanks for the encouragement, folks.
…I finished it this afternoon, and I’m going to give it an hour to cool down before I do a revision and send it out for the Rejection Circus. I try not to overdo my revisions; I get the feeling that a lot of people get snagged on that and spend so much time rewriting their stuff that they never actually go out and submit it for publication. I’m mostly just looking for spelling, lost text, and bad autocorrects.
I have some hopes for this particular story: I’d let you folks read it, except that doing so immediately flips it from ‘original’ to ‘reprint.’ This is one heck of a racket; I ought to host my own quarterly contest or something and rake in the cash that way. The hoops people will jump through to get even twenty bucks…
Since most places don’t charge for submissions–and most writers are wary of those who do–it’s hard to make much money on that racket. Honestly, the idea of even breaking even is out of reach for most publishers.
Fair enough. Turtles all the way down, huh? …Somebody’s got to be making money of this, though.
Novel publishers make money. Often short story publishing is a loss leader for novel publishing–hence why they mostly publish their novelists. It’s advertising for them. Sometimes short fiction magazines are supported by bigger magazine companies, who profit off of other magazines and run the short story magazines for prestige. Some are crowdfunded–Kickstarter and Patreon help support a lot of magazines. But unless your Kickstarter does really well, you’re just defraying costs, not making a profit.
And a lot are labors of love. Mysterion cost a lot of money, and it seems unlikely we’ll ever make it back, but we’re already talking about doing it again.
Good luck with that submission. I think putting your work out there to get rejected is an act of courage. Somebody somewhere said a professional writer is an amateur who didn’t give up.
Hope it sells!
Good luck, Moe.