Ray Bradbury on getting stories published
Not long ago, I dipped into Wayne L. Johnson’s 1980 book Ray Bradbury, part of the Recognitions series published by Frederick Ungar. Johnson’s literary biography groups Bradbury’s short stories by subject matter and style as a strategy for analyzing the author’s approaches to fiction. Johnson paints a picture of a man who delved deep in the human imagination (and our collective id) and returned with some fantastic stories for the ages.
Ray Bradbury was one of the most prolific short story writers of the 20th century (over 600 published by the time of his death) because he never abandoned the form, unlike other authors who move on from shorts to novel writing. Bradbury capitalized on his bounty by disguising his short story collections as novels (The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man). Even Fahrenheit 451 is itself a maturation of a shorter work first published in Galaxy Magazine.
What caught my eye was a brief aside in Johnson’s introduction about how Bradbury was able to sell his prodigious output of short stories across the spectrum of American publishing:
Convinced that most editors were bored with seeing the same sort of material arriving day after day, Bradbury resolved to submit stories which, at least on the face of it, seemed inappropriate to the publication involved. Rather than send “Dandelion Wine” (later a chapter in the novel) to Collier’s or Mademoiselle, therefore, Bradbury sent it to Gourmet, which didn’t publish fiction. It was immediately accepted. “The Kilimanjaro Device” was snapped up by Life, which also didn’t publish fiction, after the story had been rejected by most of the big fiction magazines. … Bradbury insists that he places complete faith in his loves and intuitions to see him through. [emphasis mine]
Bradbury was certainly a known quantity when these short stories were published but, as Johnson indicates, he still faced his share of rejection slips. Sending stories to places which “seemed inappropriate to the publication involved” cuts against the grain of that hoary writing chestnut: Study the market. I’m not saying Bradbury’s wanton submissions were ignorant of market conditions; he was quite savvy with this strategy. (Sending “Dandelion Wine” to Gourmet magazine is kind of genius, actually.) But Bradbury’s strategy transcends the usual framing of “study the market.”
I’ve been a front-line slush pile reader at a few literary magazines, and I can tell you, Bradbury’s intuition is spot-on. When you’re cycling through a stack of manuscripts, they soon begin to look and read the same. Too many of those short stories trod familiar paths. Too often they introduced characters awfully familiar to the last story from the pile.
A story with some fresh air in it certainly would wake me from my slush-pile stupor. The magazine market has changed dramatically in the Internet Age—and absolutely has reinvented itself since Bradbury published “Dandelion Wine”—but I imagine similar dynamics are still in place in the 21st century. Surprise an editor with your story and you just might have a shot at publication.
And if you’re banging out short stories and fruitlessly submitting them one after another to the usual suspects, try taking a risk and following Bradbury’s lead. If you can put on a cover letter that your short fiction was published by Car & Driver or National Geographic, the next editor you submit to will sit up and take notice.
Adapted from an earlier post at j-nelson.net
Backlist redux
After discussing Lawrence Block’s advice (“take care of your backlist, and your backlist will take care of you”), I picked up Block’s The Crime of Our Lives, a collection of essays on crime and mystery writers. The book is assembled from a newspaper series and introductions he wrote over the years. Block’s sharp observations on these other writers’ output is worth reading, both for a astute perspective on authors you’re familiar with, as well as an introduction to those you’ve heard of but never tried.
About a third of the way through the book, it dawned on me that its existence is further evidence of Block’s maxim on backlists. He gathered up material he wrote twenty to thirty years ago, repackaged it into an e-book, and found a way to get into the hands of new readers. He took care of his backlist, and now it’s taking care of him.
Man in the Middle is my latest novel, a modern novel of conspiracy and suspense.
Set during the first week of the pandemic lockdowns, a security guard begins to see things he’s not supposed to see: Men working underground in the dead of night on Internet lines. Neighborhood patrols enforcing the shelter-in-place order. And, a conspiracy to steal millions of dollars in BitCoin.
Man in the Middle is available in Kindle and paperback editions.
You can learn more at j-nelson.net