The goals are achanging

In my last post about my writing goals this year I mentioned one goal I wanted to achieve, possibly, but if not do the alternative. The goal was to maybe submit more ideas to a certain magazine that published short stories that was suited to what I write. That goal has now completely changed, because the magazine has changed their rights policy. When I had my story published with them last year, I was given the rights back after publication. That magazine now has a contract (which I didn't get) asking for All Rights. You can read more about it at womagwriter.blogspot.com. You can also read more about it in the current issue of Writer's Forum magazine.

So what to do instead? Well, I am planning on getting all my magical and ghost stories together to put as a collection. I am also going to enter more competitions and write more fillers, starting this week. I will be entering a flash fiction competition this week, and have in mind to write a couple of bits for Writer's Forum magazine. Watch this space...

More changes in Womagland

That is the land of women's magazines, esp fiction. Authors who write fiction for womags, esp Woman's Weekly, are up in arms at the moment because of recent changes that have been found out. They weren't happy before because their payment date was changed to when their story was published and not on acceptance like it used to be. Now they are even more unhappy as there are two more changes now that the company who owns the magazine has been taken over. The following changes are:

1. Stories accepted, whether by new or established authors, will have acceptances on an 'all rights' basis. This is not good at all. All rights means that they take all your rights away from you so you are no longer the copyright holder of the story, and you can't do anything else with that story yourself, inc submitting it to the ALCS. It also means the magazine can do what they like with it and maybe not pay you for it. Wrong on all accounts.

2. New authors who get their story accepted also have a pay cut. It used to be £150 but it's now £100, and possibly no chance to have a raise with more stories published.

So, if you do want to have a story accepted by Woman's Weekly, please think again. If you're not sure about the contract that comes with it, you could try to get it changed but it might not work. The only option is to refuse to sign and find another market for that story. or self-publish it.

The best blog to read about all this and more on writing for womags is https://womagwriter.blogspot.com/. Even the author who runs this blog says she would refuse to sign the contract on the all rights basis now.