Writers let themselves get tricked into believing two wrong things:
—First Rights are so valuable that you should hide your stuff away until it can be debuted Just Right
—your early works are trash you should be embarrassed by
This adds up to writers hiding most of their work in a drawer and only bringing out the most recent shiny piece and being willing to sign their souls away (sign bad contracts) to get prestigious deals.
We should be posting our work where people can see it, where WE own it.
Yes, if you post a story on your own website, you use up the First Rights. So what? It’s still yours. If it’s valuable, people will still want it. Maybe not right away, but eventually, if you build up enough of a little fiction empire, people will want to read it.
Anyway, this is why I’ve been keeping most of my stories for myself lately and publishing them on Deep Sky Anchor.
I’ve written a lot of great stuff. I keep writing great stuff. Readers will find it. And eventually, people will come calling.
And if they don’t? I’m having a whole hell of a lot more fun publishing my own magazine of my own fiction than I was having playing the rejection game.
And even when you do sell to top magazines? Mostly it doesn’t change your life. So make sure you like the life you’re choosing.
Is your work going to get better over time? I certainly hope so. But that doesn’t make your early works trash that you should be embarrassed by.
Is Jane Austen’s collection of juvenilia as good as Emma and Persuasion? Of course not! But it’s treasured, not scorned.
Value yourself and the weird, quirky, lovable gems that come from inexperience and youth. Writers don’t need to be perfect and flawless to make things of profound beauty. Sometimes the quirky flaws are part of it.
And maybe, if we shared our works more openly, readers would get a chance to love them.
Just because the gatekeepers put out hoops doesn’t mean we have to jump through them.
As long as you still own the rights to your works, you still hold all that value.