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Since the mid-Eighties when I broke in, the slush piles have grown bigger and the number of publishers who will even look at unagented submissions has grown smaller. Baen is one of the few publishers who still read slush (unsolicited novel manuscripts), but even they can only "start" perhaps one or two new writers a year. It's worth it to try every channel, but if you can land an agent who likes your work, so much the better. While no agent can sell a book that wouldn't sell on its own, once you have an offer, you'll want an agent anyway to do things like retain subrights, be sure your contract is reasonable, and market foreign sales.

Most agents do not handle short work even for their established clients, so of course new writers who can work at both lengths should send off their short tales to the magazines themselves. There isn't much to negotiate or change in most magazine contracts (though you should be sure you have a proper reversion clause), and a short story sale looks good in one's cover letter when offering a novel. No, it is not necessary to write or sell short stories before tackling novels; different writers have different natural lengths, and it's not a bad idea to play to one's strengths in the beginning.

Much depends on whether one writes better at short or long lengths. Many (not all) writers have a length that comes most readily to them. Both my friend Pat Wrede and I tend to be natural novelists. Our good ideas come in novel-sizes. Her first five sales were novels, before she ever figured out how to construct a salable short story. A lot of famous writers seem to be natural short-form writers. One is most likely to sell whatever one writes best. (Duh.) The odds are about the same, i.e., ghastly. (The mantras "They have to buy something," "Odds are for other people," and "There's always room at the top" are useful when contemplating this. Also "If s/he can do it, so can I." At least when "it" is properly understood as "the bloody hard work.") The short story market is shrinking at present, and many more people complete, and therefore submit, short work than long, so it's very competitive. On the other hand, the turn-around time for new novel submissions has become unconscionably long, literally years sometimes, and one can't simultaneously submit works of fiction. Any professional sale is a good thing, and will look good in the cover letter—selling either a novel or short work to an editor's respected colleague establishes your professional status, and the editor is likely to give your next submission, of whatever length, a closer glance.

There is a lot of on-line help out there these days that did not exist when I was breaking in. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has a valuable Website—the page at www.sfwa.org/writing is a gold mine. I suggest starting with Patricia Wrede's "Worldbuilding Questions" and Tappan King's "The Saga of Myrtle the Manuscript," and going on till you come to the end. Newsgroups such as rec.arts.sf.composition are on-line hangouts for both new writers and some helpful old pros, and hundreds of on-line critique groups of varying value have sprung up. E-mail has freed writing groups from geography. The SF publishing news magazine Locus is probably the best resource for publishing, bookselling, and convention news, as well as having extensive review columns and excellent interviews with writers. Not to mention photos of both famous and important behind-the-scenes faces—I was able to recognize my new publisher in an elevator crush at the '86 Atlanta Worldcon because I'd seen his photo in Locus.

Which brings us to reviews. Good reviews are always heartening, bad ones depressing. Curiously, a few bad ones manage to be far more excoriating than the ten or twenty good ones are uplifting. There's a psychological study in there somewhere, I'm sure. Ignore the bad, enjoy the good, and don't take either sort too seriously.

The most popular novels have both a good story and a good set of characters, accessible