You Sold a Story! Now What?

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You sold a story to an Escape Artists market! Awesome job, go you! But now what?

Here are a few tips about what’s possible after the sale.

Tell the World

Once the contract is signed, feel free to announce the sale to the world. Post it on your blog, on social media, tell your friends and family. And don’t forget to tell everyone again when your story comes out. Just keep in mind if you sold an original story, your contract will follow any edits, so you might have to wait a bit longer.

Get Paid

You’ll need a way to get paid for your story. PayPal is common with genre magazines and quick to set up if it’s an option where you live. Using PayPal lets EA send you your payment fee-free.

Sell it Again

Escape Artists buys exclusive rights to original stories for four months. That means that you can submit your story again to reprint markets so long as they don’t publish it until our exclusive time has passed. And we are a market for your reprints from other publications!

You can find markets that accept reprints by using a submission tracker like The Submission Grinder.

Find a Community

Escape Artists pays the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (“SFWA”) qualifying rate for all original fiction, which means that a selling us an original story qualifies you to join SFWA. (Note: SFWA’s membership rules updated in late 2022 to make it easier to qualify for full membership.) SFWA is open to writers anywhere in the world.

Any sale to Escape Artists also qualifies you to join the free online Codex Writers’ Group.

Awards and Best-of Anthologies

Escape Artists actively submits to many awards juries and sends review copies of all the original fiction we publish to the following “Year’s Best” anthologists:

  • John Joseph Adams
  • Neil Clarke
  • Ellen Datlow
  • Paula Guran
  • Rich Horton
  • Jonathan Strahan

Popular awards like the Hugos and Nebulas do not take submissions from authors, however there are some demographic or genre-based awards and anthologies that might be a fit for your story. Be sure to check their guidelines to see if and how you can submit your work; we’re happy to help!

Here is an inexhaustive list of awards we know of:

By Geography

              By Demographics or Genre