Happy Anniversary, Niteblade!

Writers are – let’s make no bones about this – an odd bunch. No surprises there – we all know that. Moreover, what is particularly fascinating about writers as a group is the sheer diversity of their oddness.

However, there is one particular subgroup that I can’t get my head around, and it’s the writers who read out their work to a group and then put it away in a drawer for ever. The ones who, when you say to them “Hey, that was really good – why don’t you try to get it published somewhere?” say, “Oh, I’ve no idea where I could send it to” or “There’s nowhere to get anything published these days, is there?”

I have met a surprising number of these people.

The fact is that – thanks to places like Niteblade – there has never been a better time to get your work out there. Yes, I know you can self-publish, either for free on your own blog or on Kindle if you’re feeling more ambitious, but unless your amazingly talented AND amazingly lucky, you’re not going to build up much of a reputation that way.

Small magazines like Niteblade play an absolutely crucial role in bridging the gap between complete anonymity and getting your work in front of the general public. First of all, if you manage to get something published by them, you are getting anonymous validation by a complete stranger – someone who has absolutely no interest in you as a person and is prepared to assess your writing on its merits, and – crucially – someone who has seen an AWFUL lot of writing (and that last adjective is moveable, incidentally). Secondly, if you don’t happen to make it through to being published, you’ll get your first experience of dealing with rejection, and in some ways that’s the most important lesson to learn if you’re ever going to get anywhere.

Almost a year ago I wrote a guest post on the blog of Niteblade’s editor, the lovely Rhonda Parrish, as part of my tour to launch my first book “Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens”, and it amplifies a lot of what I’ve said above. One of the things I said then was that a lot of these small magazines fold after a short time (I was particularly sad to see the end of Dog vs Sandwich, if only because it had to be the daftest name ever for a publication), but some of them keep on going. And some of them, like Niteblade, even get to see their fifth anniversary. So go and take a look. Buy a copy. Submit to them. Keep those small presses turning over.

Happy Fifth Anniversary, Niteblade!

(You can find the previous link on this blog train at Amber Stults’ blog, and the next one will be back at Niteblade‘s site itself.)