Relvan Rescued
Filed under Market Report on April 26, 2011
Tagged: Duotrope's Digest, Janner Kohl, Pulp Empire, Relvan's Rescue, Tor.com
Oh, man, I’ve been waiting a long time to use that title. So, let me catch you up on Janner Kohl’s adventures in publishing. The story sat at Tor.com for nearly a year (304 days, according to Duotrope’s Digest’s submission tracker) before I received a rejection at the end of January. At this point, I had run through my list of professional markets, and was considering resubmitting to a couple that I had sent an earlier version of “Relvan’s Rescue” over three years ago.
Then I saw a listing on Duotrope for a pirate-themed anthology to be published by Pulp Empire, a small publisher of pulp fiction that had been around in a couple different forms since 2003 (per the About section on their website). Payment would be in the form of royalties, but that wasn’t really a concern for me. What drew me to the market was the fact that “Relvan’s Rescue” had originally been written for a small press anthology of nautical sword-and-sorcery. If the story were to be accepted for this new anthology, Janner’s journey would come full circle.
And so it has. I received an email this past Thursday welcoming Janner Kohl’s tale to Pulp Empire Pirates & Swashbucklers Anthology (not sure if this is the actual title or a working one), due out May/June 2011, just after the release of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. I am awaiting the contract to sign, and will post a table of contents, cover image, and link to buy as they come available. The publisher’s previous anthologies have been sold through lulu.com, so I’m expecting the same for this one.
April 26th, 2011 at 5:46 pm
Awesome, Kam! Good for you in perservering with the story. I should’ve thought of looking for a venue for my own pirate short I wrote for that same antho. Jack Sparrow knows how to drum up interest in pirates.
April 26th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Thanks, Stuart. I was reading back over some of the posts I made about trying to get the story published and I came across a comment you had made about how you had been hearing about this story for years and couldn’t wait to read it, and I thought to myself, “has it really been circulating for ‘years’?” I looked at the date of the post and it was 2007. Four years (five, if you want to count the original version I submitted to Sails and Sorcery back in 2006). Who submits the same story for four years? I guess I was just sure this was a story that was worth getting published.
I do feel bad that I didn’t post about the antho before the submission deadline, but it’s been too easy to neglect this blog while I’ve been in school full-time.
April 27th, 2011 at 7:09 am
Congrats Kam!!! Thats very exciting!! Good luck!