Short Story Markets
Finding the Perfect Outlet for Your Short Stories
By Julie Tollefson
Short story markets — especially the big crime fiction publications like Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine — can be tough to crack. Mike McHone has published 29 short stories, the bulk of them in the last four years. Here, he offers five tips for researching and selling your work to today’s hottest short story outlets.
1) Step one: write the story — Before you worry about where to submit or what publishers want, direct your energy toward writing a great story. For Mike, as a reader, “great” means compelling characters and sparkling dialogue.
“Honestly, the mystery or the crime aspect is secondary to me,” he says. “I like Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch novels because of Fletch, not because of the mysteries. Same goes for Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, or the VI Warshawski novels from Sara Paretsky. You could come up with the greatest mystery of all time, you could create a plot that has more twists and turns than a tornado, but if your character is a carbon copy of a protagonist we’ve seen before or your dialogue is stiffer than a corpse that’s overdosed on Viagra, I don’t want to read it.”
2) Speed date potential markets for your work — A perfect publication match doesn’t happen by magic. Spend time getting to know the publications you think might be a good fit for your story. Each publication has its own flavor and style.
“EQMM and AHMM fall in line with more traditional mysteries. Guilty is good for noir and hardboiled stories. Rock and a Hard Place, Tough, and Dark Yonder are packed with noir. Shotgun Honey focuses on flash fiction but the material runs the gamut of gut-wrenching heartbreak to comedy and all points in between,” says Mike, who’s placed stories in all of these outlets as well as in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Mystery Weekly, and more. “Read the publications. Even if you don’t find a match for your stuff, you’ll spend time reading some good stories.”
3) Persistence pays — Mike’s short story success didn’t come quickly, and it didn’t come without a lot of hard work and second-guessing. He’s been a journalist, a freelance writer, and a published author of sci fi stories and comedic fantasy. He wrote story after story that didn’t sell and considered giving up writing for good. But in 2018, a chance encounter with Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine changed everything.
“I’d never read the magazine before and had only read, maybe, 10 mystery or crime novels in my life,” he says. “I opened Ellery Queen, read a few stories, and thought, yeah, I can do this.”
Most of his previous fiction had contained an element of mystery, so the mechanics and conventions of the genre weren’t unfamiliar to him. He decided to strip all of the non-mystery aspects — science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy — from his work and focus on the mystery.
“I went home later that day, wrote my first mystery (which was terrible), and then wrote four more stories within a month,” he says. “Out of that first batch of five stories, I ended up selling four of them, one to Mystery Tribune, two to Mystery Weekly, and one to Ellery Queen.”
Since 2019, he’s published two dozen stories, with a success rate of about 33 percent.
“Trust me, I’ve been a failure longer than I’ve been anything else. I have over a hundred stories that have been rejected, but that’s all part of the game,” he says. “Any art you create in the initial stages of your development is going to be terrible, and that’s fine. Embrace how terrible you are and grow from it.”
4) Think outside the mainstream magazine box — Despite his impressive number of short story publications (including pieces in the current issues of both EQMM and AHMM), McHone says placing short stories in mainstream magazines is hard. Many physical publications have reduced the number of issues they publish each year or ceased operation altogether. But there’s good news in the form of nontraditional online outlets.
“Tough, Punk Noir, and Shotgun Honey have given us some great content, and publications like Rock and a Hard Place and a new venture from Eryk Pruitt and Katy Munger called Dark Yonder have churned out some great noir stories,” McHone says. “Guilty is also a great place to find old-school-type stories that delve into noir and hardboiled fiction.”
Mike recommends Writer’s Market as a resource as well as Submittable online.
“Social media is a great help, too,” he says. “I wouldn’t have heard of places like Tough or Rock and a Hard Place if I didn’t start Twitter and Instagram accounts two years ago.”
(Speaking of social media, you can find Mike @mike_mchone on both Twitter and Instagram.)
5) View every rejection as a learning opportunity — “Rejection is terrible, but it’s part of the process,” Mike says. “Pick up and move on to something else, or examine the story and see if there’s something there that can be fixed.”
Often, he says, when he takes a close look at a rejected story, he understands the publisher’s decision.
“Either the story just wasn’t that good, or what ended up in the publication is rather similar either in plot or tone,” he says. “If there’s something salvageable, I might work at it and let it hang out a bit, but most times I’ll move on to something else.”