Foreign markets. Okay, you’ve sold a story, and now you hope in a year or three (or six, or nine) it’ll be picked up by some reprint anthology. Is there anything else you can do with it?
Well, yes—you can submit it to a dozen or more foreign markets. The beauty of this is that the editor, who may or may not be all that fluent in English, knows (because you have told him, and perhaps even e-mailed him a copy) that an American editor, one who is fluent in English and works for the biggest science fiction market in the world, has already bought it, which means that it’s a very saleable story. Is it by an unknown? Sure. But many of our established writers are unknown—or nearly so—to foreign markets.
So how do you contact these markets? Who’s buying and what are they looking for? There’s a web page that’s been around well over a decade that will give you what you need to know: it’s www.smithwriter.com/foreign_market_list.htm
Simple, believe it or not, as that.
Word counts. This should go without saying, but every editor in the business can get an exact word count once you send him your electronic submission. So it should go without saying (though of course it never does) that you should never lie on the word count to get an extra five or ten dollars. Editors have excellent word-counters and even better memories.
Lag time. Lag time is the length of time between the day your editor buys your story and the day it is published. The thing to keep in mind is that while lag time varies, it is rarely less than six months, and often as much as two years. So there is not much sense writing about, say, the 2020 election (which is held in November) in August. Ditto any other thing that’s likely to make headlines, from a particular Super Bowl match-up to the first spaceship to wherever, that figures to make your story obsolescent before it’s even published.
Meeting editors. If nothing else, you’ll feel more comfortable dealing with someone (by which I mean an editor) you know than someone you have never met. You’ll also be able to discuss what he or she is looking for, and what you’re working on and will soon be working on, and it never hurts (always assuming you make a good impression) for you to be known to/by an editor.
So how do you meet them, short of flying to Manhattan and staying in a run-of-the-mill $350-a-night hotel and dining on run-of-the-mill $75 midtown Manhattan dinners?
In the traditional way, of course. You go to a convention and meet them there. And no, not just any convention. There are more than 100 of them every year just in the United States.
The biggie, in terms of editors, remains Worldcon, which these days is far outnumbered by Comic Con, Dragon Con, and other “general interest” (by which they mean general interest in the fantastic) conventions. Just about every publisher and most editors show up there, so you’ll go to their panels to listen to them generalize, and then at nights you’ll go to their parties to meet them personally and, if the room isn’t jammed, get a little face time with the ones you want to deal with.
World Fantasy Con isn’t quite as big, but it has damned near as many editors, and the procedure is the same: go to their panels and parties, and without being pushy try to get some face time with the ones who most interest you.
There are smaller regional cons (Worldcon and World Fantasy Con move around the country each year) that are properly located for you to meet a goodly number of editors: LunaCon in New York and Boskone in Boston (or, in both cases, occasionally just beyond the city limits).
And if you read Locus or any of the printed or electronic newsletters of the field, you’ll see when an editor you want to meet has been invited to a convention that is within commuting distance of where you live, and of course you’ll try to get to those when the right names come up.
Agents. I won’t say that no competent agent handles unsold writers, but it’s relatively rare for the good ones to do so. Reason: they’ve got dozens of sold writers vying for their services.
More to the point, a lot of the better agents prefer to handle novels—well, books—exclusively. Fifteen percent of a short story just isn’t worth their while, especially if they pay a carrier service to deliver it fifteen blocks away. If you can find an agent who wants you as an unpublished or barely published writer of short fiction, fine—but make sure he or she has some Names in his stable, and find out what his policy is on short fiction, both original and reprint (and foreign) sales.
Anyway, these have been some tips on selling. As for writing good enough to sell, that’s what Writers of the Future is for—and indeed, what it specializes in.
Lost Robot
written by
Dean Wesley Smith
inspired by
BOB EGGLETON’s One of Our Robots Is Missing
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In the 35 years since his first story in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 1, New York Times bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith published well over two hundred novels and hundreds and hundreds of short stories and nonfiction books. Considered one of the most prolific authors in modern fiction, he has over twenty-three million copies of his books in print.
At the moment, he produces novels in four major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the Old West, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, and the superhero series starring Poker Boy and superhero detective Sky Tate.
During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies.
He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from X-Men to The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown.
Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as executive editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series. He took over the editorship of the acclaimed Pulphouse Magazine in 2018.
Lost Robot
A SKY TATE MYSTERY STORY
ONE
Finding clients just never seems to be an issue for me. Not sure if that stems from the vast number of total idiots in the world or my ability to attract those infected by idiocy. Not saying all of my clients are idiots. Most aren’t, but most seem to be dealing with stupidity of one sort or another.
In fact, lately, my clients have been wonderful women, attractive women.
My new client’s name was Jean. Her full and real name was Jeanette King. No middle name, no initial, nothing. Just Jeanette King. She went by Jean. And first time I saw her walk into the Rocky’s Bar in the strip mall off Flamingo, her beauty made the place heat up, even though the Vegas weather was nice at eighty and Rocky’s air conditioning was working just fine.
Jean had a full head of bright red hair that flared out from her head like a nova and ran down over her shoulders like a lava flow. (So sue me, I get a little descriptive when it comes to Jean.)
She had the standard green eyes that went with bright red natural hair and the fair skin covered with a sea of light tan freckles. The freckles went down her neck and vanished under her white silk blouse.
I got all that detail and she hadn’t even started across the small bar yet. Being a superhero detective and super observant of everything had its advantages and disadvantages at times.
Jean had on jeans (go figure), running shoes, and a smile that seemed to light up her red hair even more as she came toward me across the small dance floor of the bar.
She had been referred to me by a friend at the main police station and I knew instantly I was going to have to send him a bottle of fine whiskey for
the referral, no matter what her case turned out to be.
I had been sitting at the bar, working on a Diet Coke, waiting for her, when she came in. She reached me and my open mouth and staring eyes and stuck out her hand.
“You must be Sky Tate,” she said.
“I am,” I said, managing to get my hand into her fine-skinned grip.
“Oh, you’re a woman,” Jean said.
Then she blushed.
I loved the blush. It lit up the trail of her freckles.
“I noticed that too when I took a shower this morning,” I said.
She blushed even more.
The bar got warmer.
Lots of people thought I was a guy because I had a habit of wearing the standard detective gray trench coat and a gray fedora. The hat tended to hide my longer hair because I kept it tied up and covered when working, and the trench coat covered what assets I did have without any issue at all.
Plus my face was long and I had what many call a Roman nose. I call it a beak.
So with all that, being mistaken for a guy with the name Sky Tate wasn’t anything new. And I often used that to my advantage in cases.
“I’m sorry,” Jean said.
“Don’t be,” I said, taking off my hat and coat and letting my hair fall down over my shoulders. “I tend to hide some. A detective thing.”
She nodded to that. Amazing how using the detective-thing excuse allowed me to get away with a lot.
I motioned that we should move to a small table off to one side so we could talk in private, even though Rocky was the only other person in the place and most of the time he was hard of hearing. One reason I liked the place.
One of my superpowers was being able to completely read a person’s problems by simply shaking their hand. When I shook Jean’s hand I saw her problem and why she wanted to hire me.
Her father, Carl, was dying. Nasty cancer. He didn’t have long, that much was clear.
Now I might be a superhero, but I sure didn’t have the power to keep anyone alive or bring them back from the dead. But her problem was that her father, who seemed to be clear in the head with all other matters, had started telling her this wild story that back in the 1960s, when he was just out of college and before he headed to Vietnam, he had found a gigantic sentient robot up by Lake Mead.
And for a time, he and the robot had become friends. From what her father had said, the robot could read his thoughts, kind of like I was reading Jean’s thoughts when I touched her hand. It seems that the robot had gotten separated from the others of his kind and was hiding. It had sworn his father to secrecy.
Then her father had been drafted into the war in Vietnam and by the time he had returned, the robot had vanished. Her father had told no one, not even his wife, until he finally told his daughter as he was dying.
Now I am sure that any normal detective, or anyone for that matter, would have laughed, but I was no normal detective, and over the two hundred years of my life, I had seen a lot of really strange stuff. Granted, no giant robots, but just about everything else.
“First off,” I said to Jean, “I am sorry about your father’s illness.”
She looked startled.
“Another detective thing,” I said, smiling at her. “So you want to tell me what I can do to help?”
She nodded, took a deep breath, and then basically told me the story I already knew about her father and his tale of a giant robot in Lake Mead.
I nodded all the way through the story, not saying a thing.
Finally Jean said, “You’re not laughing.”
I wanted to say that I would never laugh at a woman as good-looking as she was, but instead said, “I take all my client’s stories seriously.”
“Thank you,” she said, blushing slightly again. “All I really want is to let my father know I am taking him seriously and looking for his lost robot.”
She looked like she might burst into tears at that moment, but managed to hold it together. I could only imagine the courage this was taking for her to tell anyone such a wild story.
“I understand,” I said, wanting to reach out and touch her hand, but resisting.
She nodded and I gave her a moment to compose herself. Besides, I loved just staring at her. Not very professional for a detective like me, I must admit, but I didn’t often face someone as beautiful as Jean.
“I would like to meet your father,” I said to her after a long moment. “Would that be possible?”
“So you will help me?”
“I will do my best, and nothing less,” I said. “We will make sure your father knows we believe him and are doing our best for him in his final days.”
Now tears really did reach her eyes and she smiled.
“How much is your fee?”
“Let’s not worry about that,” I said. “Can I meet your father now?”
She nodded. And gave me directions to his house, which I already knew, of course.
“I will follow you,” I said. “I have a white Cadillac that I can do a little research in and get my assistants to help while we drive.”
I didn’t have any assistants, but I figured I would set that up in case I learned something from her father I needed to cover.
Again she smiled and stood. “You have no idea how much I appreciate this.”
“Let’s see what we can do,” I said.
I had little hope at all that we could do much more than help a dying man get some peace, but watching Jean walk from that bar ahead of me was worth far more than I wanted to admit. Natural beauty like hers just didn’t walk into my life that often.
TWO
Jean’s father’s house sat in one of those desert subdivisions that looked all the same. All were gated with winding streets and evenly spaced palm trees. Only slight differences in the desert landscaping of each brown-toned house and the large address numbers on the front by the two-car garages allowed anyone to tell them apart. I hated subdivisions like this one, no matter how well-kept they looked. They felt more like warehouses for humans than actual distinctive places to live. That’s why I lived in the Ogden Condos that were square in the middle of the downtown area. It was a beautiful high-rise condo that looked out over the constant party that was Fremont Street.
Jean waited for me to park on the street, her massive red hair glowing in the afternoon sun like a goddess. I had met my share of real goddesses over the two centuries, including Lady Luck herself, but none of them could hold a candle to Jean’s beauty.
We went through the open garage and into the kitchen area of the modern home. It was clean, as I would have expected, with no dishes in the sink or on the counter.
The morning paper, actual old-style print newspaper, took up part of the kitchen table, and the sounds of a football game came from another room. Everything was in brown tones, including the kitchen tile and eggshell paint on the walls.
The living room was more brown, with expensive furniture and only splashes of color from a pillow or a flower in a vase.
I knew Jean’s father lived here alone since her mother had died five years before. And I knew he was well-off when it came to money. Clearly someone did the cleaning for him as well.
As we entered the living room, Jean said, “Daddy, I have company. Someone to meet you.”
The man with the balding head in the chair glanced back, then clicked off the television and stood without issue. Clearly he was in good shape except for the cancer that was about to kill him.
“This is detective Sky Tate,” Jean said. “Detective Tate, this is my father Carl King.”
Carl laughed. “You hired a detective?”
Jean just smiled at him fondly. “I wanted to see what we could find out.”
I had left my trench coat and fedora in the car and still had my hair down, so I looked fairly normal.
�
�Nice to meet you, Detective,” Jean’s father said, reaching forward to shake my hand.
And the moment I touched his dry skin and firm grip, I knew for a fact he was telling Jean the truth about finding a giant robot in Lake Mead.
He really had.
I flat didn’t know what to think about that.
The robot had a pointed head, two rocket-looking packs on its back, two arms, two legs, and no mouth. Its eyes were black as night and Carl had communicated with it through thoughts.
The robot had clearly been hiding for some time, mostly underwater, when Carl came into contact with it in a cave in the rocks in an area of Lake Mead that was now, all these years later, above the water line, since the lake level had gone down so far.
I held onto his hand a moment too long, then finally let go. The shock that over fifty years ago there was a giant robot in Lake Mead took me a moment to adjust to, I had to admit.
“I am sure sorry to hear about your illness, sir,” I said.
He shrugged. “I survived Nam, figured something was going to take me out eventually.”
I smiled at him and then at Jean.
Jean got us all some water and we sat at the kitchen table, with Jean between me and her dad.
Then I leaned forward and looked him directly in the eye, making sure he understood I was listening as intently as anyone had ever listened to him. That was one of my main superpowers, besides reading thoughts and the ability to teleport.
Then I said simply, “Tell me about this robot you found.”
And he did, detail for detail, awkward at times because he clearly hadn’t told this story much at all. He started by detailing the times of the 1960s, about how he had gone up to Lake Mead to get away from the knowledge that he was going to be drafted. He had been trying to decide whether to go into the service or flee to Canada. He had already run through his student deferment.
L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 35 Page 24
