We're Going to Publish Your Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel
The Author's Corner No. 2
Welcome back to The Author's Corner by ECLOGUE PRESS! Since our launch two weeks ago, we've been caught totally by surprise and left eternally grateful for the outpouring of follows, subscriptions, shares, likes, comments, and restacks you've given us. We didn't expect so much so soon. You're helping us achieve our mission of connecting authors with the science fiction & fantasy audience.
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Iteration and experimentation is our advantage over traditional publishers, and we're leveraging it this week. The Author's Corner is undergoing a change in format. While we originally envisioned it as a digest from the previous week's posts on Substack centered around a common theme, last week the 4th of July taught us that some weeks are far quieter than others. Curation only works if there's enough to curate.
Going forward, The Author's Corner from ECLOGUE PRESS will focus more on commentary from us than a highlight reel of the previous week. Rather than compete with Substack's own discovery algorithm, we'll be sharing edifying thoughts for authors on all aspects of the writing process, from ideation to publication and everything around and in-between. This way, we'll also get to feature all the relevant posts to the points we're making, not just the ones put up in the last week.
Please let us know with a comment below if you enjoy the new format!
This week we've been rethinking our strategy going into our first publication as ECLOGUE PRESS. In our launch post, we laid out our view of the troubled publishing ecosystem, and how the nimble, adaptable small press offers a happy medium for your story between the twin perils of endless querying with traditional publishers and roughing it on your own as a self-publishing author. We stated our mission to help you as an author find the science fiction & fantasy audience, and help your readers find the stories that inspire rather than despair. At the end we teased a bit of our initial strategy: that we would begin publishing with a short story anthology, rather than a full-length novel or novella.
We still believe small presses are the future. We still believe in our mission to bridge the gap between the authors of science fiction & fantasy and their readers. But we're reconsidering an anthology as our best opening strategy. Instead, we think now that starting with what we always wanted to publish in the first place—full-length novels—may be our best step forward.
Short Stories Don't Sell Anymore
No matter its format, our first publication will be an experiment, just as all new titles are. However, as a new small press just starting out, that experimental aspect seemed crucial to us. If it did not pan out as well as we hoped it would, then we may as well shutter our doors early and spare ourselves any legal or financial trouble. In order to avoid all that, we originally wanted to play things as safe as we knew how.
We thought we knew sci-fi and fantasy short stories well enough to sell them. We knew a specific audience to market to who rewarded many stories handsomely with upvotes on Reddit, including some of our own. We figured a well-crafted anthology from their favorite authors (who we would invite to submit their stories to us) would be our safest, surest bet to recouping our initial investment.
But what if an anthology was the furthest thing from a safe bet? What if it was a guaranteed loss?
Science fiction & fantasy magazines like Analog, fueled by short stories, are today hollowed-out husks of what they once were last century, with subscriber bases in the millions. Those that remain, like Clarkesworld, now offer all their short stories for free, and rely on their patrons' donations to keep the lights on.
has a whole post laying out the tragic details of their decline in recent decades:
Similarly, even themed anthologies from the full heft of big publishers in the genre, like the military science-fiction anthology Dancing with Destruction from Baen Books, featuring heavyweight names for that audience like Nick Cole and David Weber fail to move sales. Dancing with Destruction has only garnered 4 Amazon reviews since release just over a week ago, and its rankings on Kindle are sluggish despite the weight of talent thrown behind it. The news of this finally tipped us over into deciding an anthology wouldn't be the best route. If an anthology with the most popular names and put up by the most popular press in the subgenre can't sell well at launch, an anthology from a small press just starting out certainly no longer feels like our safest bet.
Our idea for an anthology relied on an audience that's already reading their short stories for free on Reddit. It offered nothing but a little bit of curation, which the hungry reader already does for themselves. It put those stories in a more difficult place to access than where they usually read them (in an endless scroll on Reddit), and it put all those stories, again, behind a price tag they had never paid before.
We even missed our audience's clearly stated preferences. Most of our planned readership weren't interested in just flash-in-the-pan ideas; their upvotes went to web serials, not one-offs. They wanted to inhabit a world and follow a character. They came back eagerly week after week for the next part in their favorite story, and left disappointed comments when updates were few and far between.
Short stories are dear to our hearts as authors. It's difficult to hear that reading preferences have changed so much as to make them totally unprofitable. But even if you can't sell them, you can still use them, right here on Substack: short stories build your audience and build an anticipation for more of your work. Authors like
have already blazed a trail for fantasy short stories here. If people like your short fiction, it's not hard to sell your longer form work just by adding a blurb and a link to the end of each post.We're Going to Publish Your Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel
We always wanted to publish novel-length titles at ECLOGUE PRESS. We thought an anthology would be a safer bet for our first publication as a minimally viable proof-of-concept. But it's actually not a proof-of-concept for anything except other anthologies, and those, as we've learned, don't perform well with today's audiences. If we want a true proof-of-concept for selling novels, then we have to start with a novel.
We originally thought novels were the riskier course. We realize now there are no safe bets in publishing. Every title comes with some amount of risk to the publisher's initial investment. To us, the risk is worth the nonmonetary reward of helping another quality novel pass from author to audience. We will work as hard as we possibly can towards profitability, but only so that we can pay out the royalties our authors deserve for their work and reinvest our profit in the next title and the next author. If we just wanted to make money, we'd be in any other kind of business than publishing fiction.
Novels have benefits over anthologies for us as publishers too. It's a lot easier to market one story than a half-dozen or more. It's a lot easier to work closely on edits with one author than coordinate with many. Readers know better what to expect with a novel, and they're hungry to devour whole series of them. It's easier to sell sequels than whole new series, which is partially why trilogies are such a staple of the science fiction and fantasy genre. Of course, that also has to be balanced with not treading the same old ground for too long. Without new authors and new series, demand will dry up eventually. We will strive for a stable balance between new series and old.
So we've made our decision: our first publication will be a novel. It might just be yours. We're working toward a set of submission guidelines that we'll release alongside our open submission period. When that time comes, it's our subscribers who will hear first about it.
I was recently at a sci-fi/fantasy writing festival in Edinburgh, which included a couple of seminar sessions with representatives from some major publishers in the genre. I asked a question about short story anthologies, and the speaker (a commissioning editor for a sci-fi publisher) said basically that other than the “best of” collections of big names and classic stories, anthologies don’t sell well. So that lines up with what you’re seeing.
A question and an observation:
Will you restrict what you publish to work that is all human created?
The editor of Fandom Pulse said he uses AI for his writing.