Building a Career Backwards

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog. Update your links today.)

Just when I thought I was being smart and finally getting somewhere, I meet some fellow writers and have my confidence shaken.

I nearly made it to a Vision Writers' Group meeting in Brisbane last week. I travelled 250 km especially for the event and then got the time of the meeting wrong! (Which led to 20 minutes of running around the State Library of Queensland trying to find a meeting room full of people I've never met before, who might just look like writers, because the State Library keeps no record of who has booked it rooms for what periods!)

Fortunately I owed one of the writers some money, so he hunted me down and directed me to a pub just a few blocks away where the remains of the meeting was winding down in the beer garden. I must say that it was 35 degrees C in Brisbane and the hygrometer stood at 'soup'. So it took a couple of cold beers before I managed to cool down enough to enjoy the experience. But enjoy it I did - until the point where I mentioned that I've largely been submitting my stories to non-paying magazines.

My rationale for this is that I'm slowly building up to the high-paying mags, first by building a portfolio of published work in the non-paying markets, then moving up to the low-paying mags, then the mid-range ones, then the high-paying ones. It seemed like a good strategy to me and it's been working out. I've been clocking up some publications, I've been getting the experience of working with editors, and my confidence in my publishability has been growing.

But no-one else does it that way, it seems. Everyone else starts by submitting to the highest-paying mag they can find, then, when they're rejected, move down a tier, then down again, and so on until someone publishes their story. Given this, they had all supposed that I'd been rejected by every paying mag in the world or I wouldn't have been published in non-paying mags! (Someone also said that they thought I was doing myself an injustice and that my work was easily good enough for at least the mid-range mags - bless 'em.)

So, do I change my strategy, or what? If I stick with what I'm doing, I'm pretty sure my bottom-up approach will get me there in the end. If I switch over to the top-down strategy, I might get there quicker - and I won't have to endure people assuming I can't hack it in the high-paying markets. It seems like a no-brainer, yet I can't help feeling my 'work your way up' strategy has merit. Maybe it's just my working-class background making me feel like I should serve an 'apprenticeship' before I can claim to be a trdesman.

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