The other day I received an email from Delos Books, an Italian publisher, informing me that they have accepted a short story of mine. This is a resale and is, in fact, the first such I’ve made to a foreign market on my own. The story in question is Flesh Trades which appeared originally in Tales of the Unanticipated, the fall/winter 95/96 issue. Ten years later I’ve managed to resell it.
I should have been pursuing foreign sales all along, but it’s one of those details that, until you get comfortable with it, you just tend to neglect. Besides, it can be confusing. Foreign magazines are often worse than American magazines, like mushrooms after a spring rain, popping up everywhere and fading almost as quickly. Going through the market reports, gazing at the submission requirements, can be daunting. Until the advent of email submissions, you had to deal with odd postal rates and so forth, and you could never be really sure it would be handled the way you want.
But a couple years ago I bit the bullet and sent out a score of second-rights submissions. A couple of years. This is the first one to strike any kind of gold. I’m pleased. It will be in issue # 55 of Robot Magazine.
I do have other foreign offerings. Mirage is available in Hungary and I’ve been told there is a Russian edition of Compass Reach. But I have done rather poorly in foreign markets. This is a lapse entirely on my part, a breakdown in discipline. I can make excuses, but to what end? They aren’t buying because I’m not submitting. This will change now. This has inspired me.
I have 55 short stories published. If I sold each one two or three times to a foreign markets I could make a fair amount of change. Not huge, but nothing to sneeze at. And, more importantly, I’d grow my audience. That’s the grail quest. More readers.
So–to work.