Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem: an RFP

Continued from: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Supplemental reading: How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!

RFP: It’s engineer-speak for “Call for Submissions”

Rather than continuing to charge ahead with what’s turned into a series of posts, I’ve decided to pause, take a step back, and really think about where we’re going with this.

Understand, I came into publishing in the 1980s, when the objective was to make enough pro market short story sales to draw the attention of a traditional publisher, and then to land a book deal. I have had such book deals, for mass-market paperback, trade paperback, and hardcover books with major publishers, and have had my books win awards and make bestseller lists, at a time when a mid-list book sold 50- to 80,000 copies and a bestseller moved six figures or more.

In 2000 I got fed up with dealing with traditional publishers and went back into working in software development, where I was mostly happy for the next 20 years. In 2010 we launched Rampant Loon Press and Stupefying Stories, in part out of intellectual curiosity and a desire to explore this brave new world of electronic publishing (which always made more sense to me than did the wasteful economics of trad publishing), and in larger part to help promote the careers of up-and-coming writers.

In the 20-teens we did moderately well, publishing e-books that sometimes flopped but more often sold, and sometimes sold thousands of copies. To my surprise I learned that a title that moved a few thousand copies was a bestseller, in this 21st century small-press e-book world, and that every time I thought I had the market all figured out, the rules changed.

The rules really changed with the COVID pandemic.

Since the pandemic, while we have released books that have gotten great reviews and even been short-listed for major awards—and when I compare the hardcover of The Princess Scout to that original first issue of Stupefying Stories, I am astonished by how rapidly the quality of the books we can produce has evolved—

We have not had a bestseller since the pandemic. 

The closest thing we have to a bestseller in the current catalog is The Midnight Ground, by Eric Dontigney, and we released that one before the pandemic. It’s getting a lot of attention now, but it had a long, sputtering, slow-burning fuse before it finally took off. The lessons we learned from this one are idiosyncratic, and not readily applicable to anything else.  

Hence this RFP. I am not looking for fiction submissions at this time. What I am looking for are success stories. So my questions are:

• Have you self-published or small-press published a book within the past three years?
  
  
• Has the book sold well? (No need to disclose numbers.)
  
  
• Are you willing to share what you learned from your experience with other writers?
  
  
• Can you think of one thing you did that really paid off and that you’d recommend others do?
  
  
• Can you think of one thing you did that you really wish you hadn’t and want to warn others off of doing?
  
  

Again, remembering that the entire point of Stupefying Stories is to help promote the careers of up-and-coming writers, I am looking for success stories, not OMFG failure stories. (I have enough of those of my own already, thank you.) Ideally, I’d like like to run a series of guest columns, along the lines of—

 

If this idea gets your interest, drop me a line at stupefyingstories@gmail.com, and let’s talk.

Thanks,
Bruce Bethke
Executive Cat-Herder in Chief, Stupefying Stories 

P. S. Yes, of course you can use your guest column to shamelessly promote your own book. 

---

In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

Categories: Writing 101