QOTD: Chances of Selling

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting Fri, 20 Aug 1993 18:00:04 JST

From "On Writing Science Fiction" by George H. Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer, and John M. Ford, Owlswick Press, 1981. p.7

"What are your chances of actually being published?..."

"If you write prose that is at all competent, if your ideas show any novelty, your characters any believability, your backgrounds any color, then your chances are very good indeed, because you will be better than 90 to 99 percent of the people who think they are writers. Any writer of good science fiction will have no difficulty selling virtually all the material he can create."

Who are these people, daring to contradict the folk wisdom that selling fiction is hard, and the chances slim?

The subtitle of the book is "The Editors Strike Back." These are working editors, who I suspect know what they are seeing... Further, while they refer specifically to SF, I suspect the same is true in every writing arena (except, possibly, poetry...).

So - write, finish, and submit. Those editors are waiting for competent work, let alone the sparkling wonders we have around here...

(sorry, gotta get back to work on my next potboiler...:-)