So your little story that your nurtured and wrote and edited turned out to be a lot bigger than you expected, oops! You had your heart set on sending it to a certain magazine, because you just KNEW it would be a perfect match.
The only problem is, the magazine doesn’t take stories over 5,000 words, and your story is closer to 6,000. What do you do?
First Step, Read The Guidelines
I cannot stress the importance of this piece of advice enough. Most magazines will have some version of submission guidelines posted. Read them! In Shimmer‘s guidelines, we ask that if your story is more that 5,000 words, you query us.
Why? Why Must We Make Things So Complicated?
Here at Shimmer, our sweet spot is a short story usually below 5,000 words. However, we don’t want to miss a fantastic story that might happen to be 5,250 words, but we have to have some kind of limit. The most efficient way to accomplish this is to allow queries, which we can process a lot more quickly than a whole story. It saves time and energy for the magazine staff AND the author.
Picture this. Say there is a magazine that only publishes a certain niche in the genre, and they have a word count limit of 5,000 words, but an author wants to submit a story to them. The slush wrangler gets a query and sees that the story is a 13,000 word epic fantasy.
Nothing wrong with that! Except, it really isn’t a good fit for the magazine. Why waste the author’s time, and the slush reader’s time with a story that is clearly not a good fit for the magazine? And yes, an editor really can tell from a query whether or not it will be a good fit for the magazine. Check out Associate Editor Sophie’s post about slush for a more in-depth discussion about this slushy side of publishing.
That Sounds Like Me! I Want To Query For Length. Er, How Do I Do That?
As always, not all magazines want the same type of query from you. So read the guidelines to find out how to query for a particular magazine. For Shimmer, we’d like you to send a brief paragraph describing the story and the first page. Here’s what that means. Send us just a few sentences telling us the main points of your story. Then paste the first page into the body of the email.
I’ve seen a lot of people panic about what does “first page” mean. I will make it simple for you. Send us the first 250 words of your story. That’s it. That’s all we need.
Can You Show Me A Sample Query Letter?
Of course. Here is a query letter that would go over very well at Shimmer:
Dear Ms. Wodzinski,
Would you be interested in reading my 8,000 word story, “Attack of the Evil Robot Monkeys”? In this near-future apocalyptic science fiction story, my intrepid heroine, using only her wits and a stolen laser rifle, must find a way to survive the monkey apocalypse. I’ve attached the first page for you to review.
May I send you the full story?
(If applicable, this is where you would put the information about where your fiction has previously been published. If not, don’t worry, just leave this part blank).
Thanks for your consideration,
Your Name
That’s it! Just send the query, paste the first page of your story into the body of the email, and wait for a response.
That Sounds Scary What If Something Goes Wrong?
Relax, it’s not frightening at all. Either the slush wrangler will say “sure, that sounds like it might be a fit. Please send the whole manuscript,” and so you do. Or the slush wrangler might say “sorry, this doesn’t seem like a good fit for our magazine.” Don’t be discouraged, it doesn’t mean the story was bad, just that it wasn’t the right home for it.
Your Turn!
How about you? What has your experience been with querying zines? Leave a comment or question below.