This commentary was aired on July 8, 2007 as part of our interview with Karen Anderson about writing for the Web.

In 1990 a radio station in St. Petersburg, Florida changed from general classic rock to an all Led Zeppelin format. That meant the station would play absolutely nothing but Led Zeppelin for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Everyone loves Zep, right! My God, why hasn't anyone tapped into this sort of programming before. We're trailblazers! We're trendsetters!

Sounds great, right?

The problem is, the entire collected recordings of Led Zeppelin equal about seven hours of music, total. Two weeks later, this station abandoned the all Zep format and returned to general classic rock programming.

Today's lesson? Don't narrow focus yourself out of the picture.

Both writers and editors can make the same mistake as our Florida all-Zep/all-day radio example. Let's say you love science fiction, but only science fiction set in the very near future and our current unoccupied (save for us) solar system. Great! Let's also say you've written the best possible story about near future colonization of the Moon or Mars. Also, awesome, good work!

Where are you going to sell it? If you've managed to keep the focus rather wide then the markets are pretty much wide open. Everyone from Analog to Zoetrope will probably give it a read. And there are some great places to look at short fiction markets. I prefer ralan.com because the site is writer-managed and the listings are up to date within 24 hours or so.

Ralan's is also nice because their listings are a lot more author-friendly than the baffling pictogram structure at duotrope or the editor-written-and-therefore-almost-completely-useless listings at writersmarket.com.

One of the good things about any site that hosts listings for writers is that you can tell, at a glance, who has a shot and who doesn't. Now, narrow focusing doesn't just apply to writing. And I'm as guilty of it as the next guy who spent 40 hours writing a detailed story of zombies that overrun a slave ship in 1830 for a single market that wanted George Romero zombie stories set in pre-1900 and outside the USA.

No, I'm talking about the editors.

Ralan breaks the listings down into sub categories, pro, paying, and for the love. And each group has a bunch of listings that are among the recent dead. Now, it's very much the case that just about every dead/dying market at any of these listings is suffering from money problems. That means either:

A: they don't have a business model

B: they underestimated how much work it takes to publish a magazine/webzine

C: they are about to die for lack of funds/interest

And symptomatic of these three probabilities are submission guidelines that infer hyper-specialization:

A: We want a very, very, very specific kind of story that only we could possibly write, but we figured having a magazine would be fun.

So lets say you want to publish a magazine of vampire fiction, great! And you know that lots of horror short fiction mags take vampire stories. So, the good side is that there are a whole lot of authors out there you can get submissions from. The bad side is that there are a whole lot of authors out there you can get submissions from. Well, how do you attract good talent to your magazine, without potentially starting your e-Mail server on fire, or giving your mail carrier a permanent back injury? You have to differentiate yourself from the crowd. There are three basic ways to do this:

1: Have a business model that allows you to pay authors more than $5, and

2: Try to find the best vampire stories in the known universe to make your magazine a paragon of vampire themed publishing, you

3: Narrow the focus.

And I don't mean stating in the guidelines that you take horror, fantasy, detective fiction, whatever, as long as there is a vampire in it. Every magazine pretty much differentiates their content in submission guidelines and that narrows the focus a little, say, being a science fiction magazine, or a fantasy magazine, or a horror magazine. You can even narrow a little further into one of the subgenre of each genre, say, space opera, or fantasy westerns, or magical realism.

But some places go overboard, and it kills them. Let's go back to our vampire example.

Sure, vampires are a pretty broad subject. So we'll only take stories that are set in, say, modern times. That will screen out more than half of our possible submissions. But there are plenty of contemporary vampire tales already in the marketplace, so we'll narrow it further. The story has to be told from the point of view of the vampire, in first person, as if written by Dashiel Hammet, Anne Rice, and Dr. Seuss. Yeah, putting up storytelling hurdles will no doubt cut down on the number of story submissions that we don't like or have time to read. Additionally, every story should have a love triangle in it between a female lesbian vampire, a good-hearted detective, and a piece of sponge cake. Finally, we'll insist in our guidelines that our standards for contemporary, first person, lesbian/detective/spongecake vampire love triangles are so high, you'll probably be rejected by us anyway. Please buy a copy of our magazine before you submit (that'll be 8 bucks plus shipping).

Hey, you do have a business model!

Sure, I'm exaggerating, but only a little. Plow through the graveyard at ralan's if you don't believe me. I'll be sitting back listening to "Stairway to Heaven" while you're gone.

(c) 2007 Jeffrey R. DeRego