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Alternate History General Discussion

Whatever the issues with it and its series (I may have wrote about it before), the cover of Marching Through Georgia is still great. It might even be my favorite alternate history book cover ever.

OONwYxt.jpg
 
Just out of curiosity: Apart from (obviously) the good folks of SLP, which publishing outfits are generally (whether according to their record or other factors) more receptive than others to AH fiction? Tying into this, what are some of the better short story publication options out there for AH (magazines, online, etc.)?
 
Just out of curiosity: Apart from (obviously) the good folks of SLP, which publishing outfits are generally (whether according to their record or other factors) more receptive than others to AH fiction? Tying into this, what are some of the better short story publication options out there for AH (magazines, online, etc.)?
As was noted in this SLP interview, Inklings Press does some AH short fiction. I've seen AH stories appear in several pro-rate sf magazines such as Clarkesworld, Asimov's and Analog, although the competition for pro-rate short fiction is obviously pretty stiff.

Although I'd add a cautionary tale that despite listing themselves as open to AH, there's still plenty of markets which don't really get it. Without naming any names, I recently had a polite rejection for an AH short story for an anthology which described itself as open to AH. They included their slush reader feedback - which complained that my story didn't reflect the history of the country it was set in, without realising that it was alternate history. The lesson I took from that was to make the divergences much, much more explicit and obvious when writing for an audience outside of the AH online subculture.
 
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Just out of curiosity: Apart from (obviously) the good folks of SLP, which publishing outfits are generally (whether according to their record or other factors) more receptive than others to AH fiction? Tying into this, what are some of the better short story publication options out there for AH (magazines, online, etc.)?

Technically there's Grey Wolf and his Publishing Company, but I've been deeply unimpressed by his products in general, so would avoid

Otherwise as @Jared has highlighted, AH is very difficult to properly market and I've yet to see any publisher really explicitly advertise for it
 
As was noted in this SLP interview, Inklings Press does some AH short fiction. I've seen AH stories appear in several pro-rate sf magazines such as Clarkesworld, Asimov's and Analog, although the competition for pro-rate short fiction is obviously pretty stiff.

Although I'd add a cautionary tale that despite listing themselves as open to AH, there's still plenty of markets which don't really get it. Without naming any names, I recently had a polite rejection for an AH short story for an anthology which described itself as open to AH. They included their slush reader feedback - which complained that my story didn't reflect the history of the country it was set in, without realising that it was alternate history. The lesson I took from that was to make the divergences much, much more explicit and obvious when writing for an audience outside of the AH online subculture.
I actually had a comment from one person (who claimed to have read all nine volumes of the 'House of Stuart Sequence ' ) who, very earnestly, told me that the Jacobites had been defeated in 1746 at a battle "somewhere in Scotland" .
 
Otherwise as @Jared has highlighted, AH is very difficult to properly market and I've yet to see any publisher really explicitly advertise for it

I did have some luck with Malefaction (who sadly seem to have had plans for more zines knocked out) when they asked for general speculative crime fiction and I took the opportunity to go "AH IS SPECULATIVE HERE'S ONE" that fit their issue theme. In that case, I had a very broad diversion (the welfare state develops in a very toxic way) for a semi-general reader. Giving that tactic another try with a horror AH short somewhere else, so fingers crossed this is a tactic that can be replicated!
 
I did have some luck with Malefaction (who sadly seem to have had plans for more zines knocked out) when they asked for general speculative crime fiction and I took the opportunity to go "AH IS SPECULATIVE HERE'S ONE" that fit their issue theme. In that case, I had a very broad diversion (the welfare state develops in a very toxic way) for a semi-general reader. Giving that tactic another try with a horror AH short somewhere else, so fingers crossed this is a tactic that can be replicated!

Oh sweet what issue are you in?
 
As was noted in this SLP interview, Inklings Press does some AH short fiction. I've seen AH stories appear in several pro-rate sf magazines such as Clarkesworld, Asimov's and Analog, although the competition for pro-rate short fiction is obviously pretty stiff.

Although I'd add a cautionary tale that despite listing themselves as open to AH, there's still plenty of markets which don't really get it. Without naming any names, I recently had a polite rejection for an AH short story for an anthology which described itself as open to AH. They included their slush reader feedback - which complained that my story didn't reflect the history of the country it was set in, without realising that it was alternate history. The lesson I took from that was to make the divergences much, much more explicit and obvious when writing for an audience outside of the AH online subculture.

Yeah, I submitted to Asimov's once, and no luck. Of course, it was an earlier, REALLY crappy version of Red Delta, so this was for the best, in the end.

Of these three, which have been the most open to short AH in your experience? And are there other such outfits that might accept it under the broader SF label?
 
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Yeah, I submitted to Asimov's once, and no luck. Of course, it was an earlier, REALLY crappy version of Red Delta, so this was for the best, in the end.

Of these three, which have been the most open to short AH in your experience? And are there other such outfits that might accept it under the broader SF label?
The acceptance rates for pro-rate magazines like those three are generally under 1%. So while they're open to AH, any story is going to have to be spectacular to make the cut.

In terms of their openness to accepting AH, Clarkesworld have shown some - one of their stories won the 2014 Sidewise Award for short fiction, and they've had at least one other nomination. But AH is not their dominant subgenre or anything, it's just that they accept them occasionally.

Analog do similar things, and they've noted that their next issue (July/August 2021, which of course is coming in June) includes a Space Age alternate history - I expect that Apple TV's current series has some inspiration for that.

Edit: But given the hit rate for the pro magazines, I'm seriously just considering putting a short story collection together myself and self-publishing it. That would include a couple of stories which started life as vignettes here, but more which aren't. (A few AH ones in there, but more which aren't, so it'd be a stretch to pitch it to SLP.)
 
@Jared your post is an increasingly-common view amongst authors I'm seeing online. Self-publishing just doesn't have that stigma any more, and can at least be controlled fully by the author.

And while advertising can be difficult and payment low, the same can be said for pro magazine sales it seems
 
The payment rates for pro magazines aren’t low. Pro rates means at least 8 cents (US) per word (SWFA minimum) and the best ones these days are around 10 cents. So a pro rate sale of, say, a 4000 word short would earn a tidy $400 US, plus all the exposure and reputational boosts that come with that (that helps most if one has a backlist off other titles, since some readers who like the short story will usually move on to other works by that author)

Without wanting to turn this into an off-topic tangent about the relative merits of self-publishing versus trad publishing, there are plenty of successful indie authors who make a very good full-time living from self-publishing. But they run it as a business, which means getting professional cover design (unless one has real graphical talents), professional editing and proofing, and most importantly, marketing.

The reality is that except for a handful of big names and the initial publicity burst (which shouldn’t be underestimated), most traditionally published authors have to do most of their own marketing anyway. Self-publishing properly means that the author pays for the initial publication costs as per above, but keeps a much, much larger share of the profits (ie all of them, except where royalty sharing with audiobook narrators and the like).

Self-publishing can of course be done badly and cheaply (ie an unedited tome which lacks structure and is full of grammatical errors and typos), but done properly is another matter.
 
This is the really bastardly part of self-publishing (and small-press publishing), far as I can tell.
Marketing takes work, but is doable for someone who wants to take the time to learn. I'm a member of a couple of Facebook writers groups who are very good at explaining how to learn. Some of it costs $$$$, but some of it is cheaper (a lot of authors are building a social media presence on TikTok, for example, which has considerably increased their sales).

But a key consideration is the size of the market that an author is aiming for. AH exists as a market - witness the number of authors who have self-published in that field - but sales are concentrated in certain types of AH and dealing with particular time periods. AHs with a military slant dealing with alternate WW2s or near-WW2s are quite popular, judging by the most highly-ranked self-published AHs on Amazon, and how Festung Europa and the Drakes Drum series are among the best-selling of all SLP titles. But even in those fields, the AH market is dwarfed by some other kinds of spec fic - space opera and urban fantasy, for example - and those in turn are dwarfed by the overall size of the romance market (though that also has a lot of subgenres, some of which sell better than others).
 
Marketing takes work, but is doable for someone who wants to take the time to learn. I'm a member of a couple of Facebook writers groups who are very good at explaining how to learn. Some of it costs $$$$, but some of it is cheaper (a lot of authors are building a social media presence on TikTok, for example, which has considerably increased their sales).

But a key consideration is the size of the market that an author is aiming for. AH exists as a market - witness the number of authors who have self-published in that field - but sales are concentrated in certain types of AH and dealing with particular time periods. AHs with a military slant dealing with alternate WW2s or near-WW2s are quite popular, judging by the most highly-ranked self-published AHs on Amazon, and how Festung Europa and the Drakes Drum series are among the best-selling of all SLP titles. But even in those fields, the AH market is dwarfed by some other kinds of spec fic - space opera and urban fantasy, for example - and those in turn are dwarfed by the overall size of the romance market (though that also has a lot of subgenres, some of which sell better than others).

A lot really depends on just what you're doing. Books that are really nothing more than timelines - like Look To The West - have a very limited market, while novels tend to do better as they draw in readers of other fiction (war, detective, etc). Invasion of 1950 drew in a lot of readers of mil-fic even as they scoffed at the AH itself.

Chris
 
Though Drake's Drum and Festung Europa are timelines, which isn't stopping them selling because WW2-but-different timelines are more commercial than a number of narrative tales that aren't WW2.
 
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