Graduate Essay: “Selling Your Shorts: Submission Considerations Amid a Changing Market” by A. Katherine Black (Part 1 of 2)

A. Katherine Black is a 2018 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and a 2024 graduate of the Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. She’s served as Resident Supervisor for previous Odyssey Writing Workshop cohorts and has served as Moderator and Resident Supervisor at The Never-Ending Odyssey (TNEO), an annual workshop for Odyssey and Your Personal Odyssey graduates. She’s a member of SFWA and Codex.

A. Katherine has racked up nearly 600 rejections since 2018, and her stories have appeared in The Dark, Fractured Reveries by The Storied Imaginarium, OTHER by Bannister Press, Familiars by Zombies Need Brains, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and other publications.

A. Katherine lives in Minnesota with her family, cats, and coffee machines. She loves snowstorms, board games, and all kinds of creature flicks, but especially the ones where the creature is the good guy. Find her at flywithpigs.com or on Bluesky @akatherineblack.bsky.social.

The following essay was adapted from a lecture A. Katherine did for TNEO in 2025.

I started playing Tetris in the early ‘90s, back in undergrad, when a friend installed it on a computer tucked in the corner of a basement science lab. Whenever I was stressed or exhausted, frustrated or flustered, I’d slip down to the basement lab and relax into a game or two, or twelve, or twenty. I’ve never stopped playing, and I love applying those Tetris skills to anything and everything in daily life. Need to stuff ten suitcases in the trunk for that road trip? I’ll tetris the hell out of that packing job. Then I started writing short stories, and dude, was I excited to learn about the game of Submission Tetris!

I developed a comfortable strategy for sending my stories out into the world. My trusty spreadsheet had a row for every story on submission, columns for every market I’d ever submitted to, and lots of fun color-coding (pink for sales, yellow for on-submission, grey for closed markets, green for encouraging rejection messages). I listed markets in a specific submission order, based on my personal priorities (favorite magazines and editors, pay rate, etc.), and I’d submitted Beloved Story first to Market A, next to Market B, then to Market C, and so on. Many markets were open on a regular basis back then—some were always open, others every Monday, some every quarter. With my tidy list and a bit of pre-planning, I tetrised those submissions without too much effort, racked up a satisfying number of rejections, and leaned into the hope that I might find an acceptance in my inbox once in a while.

Tetrising submissions was pretty darn satisfying back then, a thousand years ago, before 2020.

Much has changed since the world shut down (and re-opened, and shut down again, and…), including within the short science fiction, fantasy, and horror (SFFH) market. Of course there’d been change before, with the gradual shift from paper to digital printing, and with some markets closing and new markets opening every year, but more recent changes to the short speculative fiction market haven’t ended there. From where I’m sitting now (next to a snoozing kitty, fingers on my favorite clickety-clack keyboard), I see the shape of the short fiction market shifting, shifting, and shifting again, and with that comes changes to the submission game.

The first change I noticed, not long after the pandemic hit, was that many short SFFH markets were slower to respond than usual. This was likely due to a number of reasons, such as the mental and physical health of magazine staff—which includes first readers (or as we often call them, slush readers), editors, and publishers—and the often stressful changes to the economy and job market that soon followed.

While submission responses from some magazines have slowed in the past few years, other magazines reduced their submission windows, and yet other magazines shut down altogether, sometimes for reasons that may or may not be a result of the pandemic. Magazines and anthologies have faced new funding challenges in recent years, for example, and many markets have been negatively impacted by the recent emergence of LLM/AI tools. As these industry changes piled up, one after the other, such as unpredictable submission windows and emerging debates surrounding LLM/AI tools, my once-tidy submission tetrising dissolved into a confusing mess.

But don’t despair, submitters! Yes, the short SFFH landscape has changed, but we writers can adapt with a few targeted tweaks to our submission strategies.

When it comes to adapting your personal submission strategy to the present-day short SFFH market, it’s important to consider your priorities. So before we dive deeper into the state of the current short SFFH market, let’s consider the Big Why.

Why are you submitting? How does sending that Beloved Short Story out into the world satisfy your greater goals?

Are you looking to raise awareness of your presence in the SFFH sphere?

Maybe you’re on the hunt for an agent or you’re hoping to join a panel at that upcoming con, and so you’re aiming to publish in markets popular with your writing peers? Maybe you already have a novel or three out in the world, and you’d love to find new readers by publishing in magazines and anthologies of a similar genre?

Are you seeking the simple joy of entertaining others with your work?

Maybe you’ve been reading Magazine X for a zillion years and it would be an absolute dream to see your own story in the next table of contents? Maybe a print copy of an anthology including your story would be a crazy exciting addition to your bookshelf?

Are you aiming to earn money?

SFFH story sales may not always pay the mortgage, but maybe they could fund that writing workshop you’re thinking of applying to, or keep you comfortably stocked with fresh notebooks and pretty pens to write that next inspired work. Maybe it could even allow you to cut an hour or two from the day job and spend that much more time writing. Every bit helps!

There are many reasons to send your stories out into the world, and all of them are valid! As we further discuss recent changes to the SFFH short story market, keeping your personal priorities in mind will help you build a submission strategy that works best for you.

So, about those recent market changes… Aside from the pandemic fallout, what else has happened with the markets?

Of course many writers are familiar with the relatively recent emergence of Language Learning Models (LLMs), also commonly referred to as Artificial Intelligence (AI). A number of legal and ethical issues surround the use of LLM/AI tools in fiction writing, and the question of how these tools can and should be used is still a hot topic in legal, commercial, and educational realms. Here’s a discussion about the greater legal and ethical impact of these tools with Artificial Intelligence Ethicologist Dr. Abeba Birhane on the Ologies podcast (see the links to further resources on that page), here’s writer Ken Liu discussing “Art in the Age of AI” on the Manifold podcast, and here’s a recent SFWA post addressing questions about the Anthropic Settlement, a class action lawsuit involving LLMs and copyright violations. Whatever one’s opinion may be regarding the development and uses of LLM/AI tools, it’s pretty clear their impact on the SFFH market has been significant.

Considering ethical and legal implications, many short SFFH publishers have decided not to accept stories developed using LLM/AI tools. Many markets now list their policy on the use of LLM/AI tools on their submission guidelines pages, with statements ranging from a single sentence, such as here at Nightmare Magazine, to policy explanations in greater detail, such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies discussing the use of grammar checking and editing tools, or Apex Magazine addressing the use of these tools in translations. While many short SFFH markets have updated their submission guidelines to reflect LLM/AI related policies, not all publications have made this choice.

This is where your personal priorities come into play—when selecting markets to submit your Beloved Short Story to, consider your personal stance on the development and use of LLM/AI tools. If you feel strongly one way or the other about the role of LLM/AI in fiction writing, you may decide to prioritize short SFFH markets aligned with your opinion on the issue. If this is an important factor in updating your submission strategy, we’ll discuss below some ways to sort through the long list of magazines and anthologies to find those addressing this particular issue.

The emergence of LLM/AI tools has not only impacted markets in terms of submission policies, it’s also impacted the slushing and editorial processes of many short SFFH markets. Just a couple of years ago, some of the more well-known SFFH magazines faced new challenges as they were suddenly inundated with LLM/AI-generated submissions. Neil Clarke recently posted about how the submissions process at Clarkesworld Magazine has changed due to LLM/AI-generated submissions.

While Clarkesworld was open about why they closed to submissions in 2023 as they developed a process to deal with the influx of LLM/AI-generated submissions, not all publications have explained why they’ve changed their submission windows in recent years. These changes could be for a variety of reasons, including the toll of the pandemic on the lives of editors and slush readers, or maybe due to changes in staffing or ownership, which we’ll discuss below. Whatever the reason, many SFFH magazines that used to have regular submission windows (open daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly) are now open rarely for general submissions; some have been closed for many months now, with no announced re-opening. The new lack of predictability regarding some submission windows definitely changes the short story submissions game.

And sadly, some markets aren’t just closing submission windows, but are closing their doors permanently. Magazines closing isn’t a new thing, of course—markets close every year. More recently, though, many short SFFH markets have faced new funding challenges, one of them being the blow Amazon dealt when it chose to drop magazines from Kindle Publishing, as reported in Locus in December 2022.

Neil Clarke described here the impact this had on Clarkesworld Magazine and the steps they took to regain subscriptions, concluding with: “What we have now will allow the lights to stay on. Our bare minimum line in the sand. Everything that builds on that from here forward will be put towards our continued efforts to pay our staff a living wage.”

It’s hard to gauge how other short SFFH markets fared after Amazon’s decision, as not all magazines share their business and their challenges with the public. Some wonderful markets closed this past year, including Gamut and Worlds of Possibility. Happily, though, there are always new magazines popping up, such as Night Shades and Goblins & Galaxies, which both opened earlier this year. Keep an eye out for new markets! I’ve sold more than one story to markets that didn’t exist when I first began submitting the story.

Another happy occurrence is when a market re-opens—many were excited to see Fantasy Magazine return this past June under a new publisher, after a two-year hiatus, and Fantasy isn’t the only magazine to change ownership in recent years. The long-running magazine Interzone changed ownership in 2022 and has added an online sister zine, IZ Digital. It’s important to keep an eye on markets after they change ownership; a lot can change when a new publisher takes over.

Here ends Part 1 of A. Katherine Black’s essay on selling short stories. In Part 2, which will be posted next Monday, she’ll talk about contracts, how recent changes to the short story landscape affect submission strategies, and resources for tracking submissions, connecting with editors, and staying up to date on the industry.