You Sold a Story! 🎉 Now What?

Home » You Sold a Story! 🎉 Now What?

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 likely need a PayPal account to get paid for your story, so set up an account if you haven’t already.

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 SFWA pro-rates for all original fiction, which means that a selling us story of 1000 words or more qualifies you to join Science Fiction Writers of America as an Associate Member. Any story sale to an EA market counts toward the requirements for Full Membership. Note that SFWA is open to writers anywhere in the world, regardless of what its name might imply.

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

There are also 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.

Here is an inexhaustive list of awards we know of:

By Geography

              Demographics or Genre