SOYOUWANNA GET A SHORT STORY PUBLISHED?

5. UNDERSTAND YOUR RIGHTS

We hate to bring you down, but don't be disappointed if the first couple - or first couple dozen - are rejections. If you are rejected by all of the magazines to which you submitted, you should either go back to step two and re-evaluate your goals of publication or go back to the beginning and try the whole process with a different story.

If an acceptance letter does come, after you've taken a few minutes to savor the feeling of self-fulfillment, remember that you are entering into a business deal like any other, and you need to protect your own rights. These come in two categories: 1) how the story will be presented and 2) what happens to the story after it's published.

How the story is presented

It's easy to forget that your story is really your story when an authoritative editor tells you that you have to edit out the talking donkey character. Of course, there's no law against caving in to the editor's every whim, but even the most domineering editor will be disappointed if you don't stand up for your own work. When an editor suggests changes, they are almost always sincere suggestions and not commands. So make sure you're satisfied with the final text. Most respectable magazines should also let you see an advance copy of any illustrations that will accompany your story; if this is important to you, make it clear to the editor.

What happens to the story after it's published

The legal status of your story after it is published depends on what rights you end up selling to the magazine. Though you automatically own anything you write when you write it, there are several categories of copyrights and publication rights that can be sold for any piece of text.

The most commonly sold rights are first serial rights, which give a magazine the right to publish the story first and once. If you sell first serial rights, ownership of the story remains with you, and after it is published you can sell it to other publications (provided that they don't demand first-time rights) or to book anthologies, or to anybody who wants to buy it.

If you are selling the magazine or website anything other than first serial rights, it's important to communicate with the editor and make certain that both sides understand exactly what the other side plans to do with the story following publication. Other categories of rights include one-time rights, second serial rights and the lucrative category of TV and movie rights. These can make you a fortune, but it is unusual for anyone to purchase these rights to a previously unpublished short story. There is one notable exception: Francis Ford Coppola's fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, buys the motion picture rights to every story it publishes. Outside of such special cases, though, you'll probably just want to sell the first serial rights.

Then, all you have to do is relax for a couple weeks/months while the employees of the magazine lay out the issue. Soon enough, your personal story of love and betrayal will no longer be a source of comedy just for your close friends and family, but for the wider literary world.