Annual Investor Report 2021-2022

[acrozatarim]

Right, so, yeah, Black Library and submissions. For clarity and full disclosure up-front:

• I am a self-employed, freelance tabletop games writer and fiction writer. Writing is my livelihood and how I pay the bills, and I don't do it for free.
• I applied to Black Library's open call last year. I recently finished working on my first short story for publication by Black Library.
• I have no special insight into the procedures or thinking processes of Black Library's editors, and can only provide my own perspective here.

First up, I think it's worth clarifying that Black Library does open calls, not competitions. Now, you may - quite reasonably - call that semantics, but my work is basically all about semantics so it's an important distinction in my mind. Open calls are normal in publishing, and they're more like applying for a job or pitching for a project contract than participating in a fun competition. Hell, they're exactly like pitching for a project contract because that's what you're aiming to get out of it - a contract from a publisher to write something for them.

From a writer's point of view, open calls do have some advantages. During an open call, the publisher has explicitly invited you to pitch them your work, which means you are definitely catching them when they're interested - conversely, trying to pitch to publishers who just have a general open policy for submissions can be absolutely miserable because you have no idea whether your writing sample is going to get looked at any time soon, or even be read at all. An open call with a theme or topic also gives you an idea of what a publisher is looking for, rather than just having to put something together and pray it'll catch their interest. Obviously, the downside is that you're competing (yes, like in a competition - I did say it was semantics!) with a bunch of other hopefuls who are also taking advantage of this opportunity but, on balance, I think open calls are better than just tossing your work into the void and hoping for a response.

Anyway, inasmuch as this matters for the Black Library open call, it's basically a chance to get your foot in the door with a big publisher for work. You're not providing GW with anything free. To tackle some specific points:

• Prior to actually signing a contract with GW, if there are no further terms and conditions on your submission, then when it comes to the question of the writing sample you provide, I think it's fairly likely it's just subject to normal legal regulations around ownership of written material. There's nothing untoward or dubious here - we have existing laws covering this sort of stuff. On top of that...
• ...an open call like this isn't really anything to do with Black Library gathering ideas. I have no doubt that every Black Library author and every editor has half-a-dozen ideas bubbling out of the top of their head for new stories at any given time. Ideas are not something writers have a shortage of. More valuable than ideas are the writers who are technically capable of making ideas into an actual story - and the open call is your opportunity to show that you can actually do that.
• In an open call, it's normal to write and submit some stuff that you don't actually know is going to get you paid. In some cases, that's one or more short writing samples (although depending on who the open call is with, you may be able to use excerpts of your existing material to show your capability); in other cases, you might write a full short story with the intention of trying it in a few different open calls then shopping it round as best you can until someone picks it up. Even when your writing sample gets you a gig with a publisher, there's no guarantee that your submission itself is what will get published. However, unless a publisher has explicitly made an open call with a statement that they're not paying for publication (which you might see with small online magazine publishers or the like), the expectation is that if the publisher decides to select you from the open call to create work for publication, that you will then be signing a contract and getting paid for the work they want you to do. The open call is what gets you through the door, like your cover letter and CV do when you're applying for a job; they're not the actual work itself. The 500 words of fiction and 100 words outlining a story idea that Black Library asked for are quite reasonable in that context, and it's not like they're getting anything for free out of you if they decide not to go further through the process with you.
• As noted above, generally this sort of work is done as a contractor rather than via a permanent in-house writing position. In my experience, the latter are extremely rare and, depending on the individual's viewpoint, either enviously coveted or dreaded as a source of burn-out.
• I'm pretty sure Black Library have been doing open calls since at least 2016, so this is a pretty normal process for them rather than some sort of anomaly.

Anyway, I guess the tl;dr to counter my verbosity above is that I didn't feel the open call was unusually demanding in terms of writing samples, and at the end of the day I am getting paid to write for them rather than producing material for free.

[Sothalor]

Thank you for sharing your experience and insights.

Frankly, it's kinda bizarre seeing somebody fixate on the BL open calls procedure as the epitome of its shortcomings and mismanagement.

[Mechanicus Tech-Support]

Thank you for your insight!

I was going to mention something similar sanguinity and then Acro swoops in and everything I was gonna type pales in comparison hehe