That said — will get to the point.
If you had written 1001 short stories, how would you go about marketing / getting your work out there?
- literary agent? - build a website? - stream it on social media? (if so, which socials?)
Have written a lot of mostly fun short stories, but I don’t know how to go about “publishing” so to speak.
If you’ve any thoughts on how to potentially navigate, I’d super appreciate it.
Have a nice one
sharing a few thoughts:
- substack is probably the easiest starting point, no algorithm to fight, readers subscribe directly, and short fiction actually does well there if you're consistent. you own the list. - literary agents are mostly for novels, short story collections are a hard sell unless you already have publishing credits. better to build an audience first and use that as leverage. - if you are aiming for larger audience on social, go to tiktok/instagram if you're willing to read them out loud, even lo-fi works. people underestimate how well short fiction does as audio. x/twitter if your stories are punchy enough to tease in a thread.
Think I will definitely start with substack. Was thinking maybe Patreon but I’m not huge on social medias in general so seeking to find where to go — super appreciate it <333
If you don't care about that, just make a website and put them all on it. Maybe avoid a third party platform since you won't have complete ownership of your content. Any static site generator will work. I personally suggest Nikola but it doesn't matter. Anything that can generate a simple blog format should work.
You might also consider setting up a Mastodon account and pushing links to your stories there. I don't know how big the writing community is there but it's probably not nothing.
I wouldn't bother with a literary agent unless you're a professional looking to be signed by a major publisher and self-publishing platforms tend to be scams.
Problem is everything else is getting eaten by AI so I wouldn't even know how to market in this scenario.
The go-to site for finding markets for speculative fiction used to be ralan.com but it looks like it closed in 2023[0].
[0]Alternatives:
https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/
https://duotrope.com/
It’s the approach I’ve used in the past with places like Paged Out and 2600 Hacker Quarterly.