What
Happened to the First-Time Author Idea?
In our last
issue (and a few newsletters ago) we discussed the idea of
reserving a spot in our magazine for the best story by an
unpublished author. We asked for our readers’ advice first,
of course.
Did we ever get it!
Most people are at least somewhat in favor of the idea. But
discussions with everyone who responded raised two sets of
difficult questions.
1) What if, in one particular contest, no unpublished
author sends us a story that meets our standards for
publication? Would we publish a not-very-good story just to
fill the slot?
2) What does “unpublished author” mean? If someone has
never sold fiction before, but they’ve written five
best-selling non-fiction books, are they unpublished? What
if they’ve had plays produced, but no prose? (And
where
have those
plays been produced?) What if they’ve flooded the chapbook
market with self-published poetry, some of which has gotten
positive reviews? What if they’ve been a professional
editor for a long time but only now are seriously trying to
write their own fiction?
We could try to pin down concrete answers to these
questions, or we could take a step back and ask what our
real goal was all along. Our real goal was to help people
who are seriously trying to improve their fiction writing
write something we’d be proud to publish.
So that’s what we’re going to do. We found a story in
Contest #9 that we loved despite its problems and helped
its author fix it, then published it under our “Guest
Writer” category. It turned out that author had been
published before. Oh well! We liked the story, so we stuck
with the plan. (In case you’re wondering, the story
was Cot.)
We found a similar story in Contest #10, and are working
with its author over the next couple of months to
get that
story fixed up.
This time we’re pretty sure the author doesn’t already have
a serious publication track record. We plan to publish the
story in issue #11.
So this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep an
eye out for one
story per
contest that we can’t accept in current form, but which
thrills us anyway for some reason, and then we’ll try to
strike a deal with the author. If they agree to our deal
(which will vary depending on the story), then we’ll work
with them on the story, and if we can get the story to a
point where both sides are happy with it, we’ll make that
author a guest writer. Because we’re serious about helping
those who aren’t quite there yet, whether they’ve managed
to sell fiction before or not.
If you have an opinion on this idea, send it to
Feedback@OnThePremises.com. In the
meantime, please enjoy this issue, and don’t forget to
check out the cartoons drawn our
cartoonist, Matt Howarth! (He even has his own section
on “Who We Are” now.)
Keep writing and reading,
Tarl Roger Kudrick
co-publisher of On The
Premises magazine