Men's Magazine Stories

In looking through my records the other day before I posted about my first sale, I noticed that in the late Seventies I sold one story each to DAPPER and FLING (got paid on acceptance for both, a hundred bucks each), but I never saw the stories when they came out. I'm not sure I ever saw an issue of DAPPER or FLING, period. I just sent stuff out according to the listings in Writer's Market. So I don't know when those stories appeared or what pseudonym wound up on them. Likewise in the mid-Eighties, when I'd hit a dry spell selling novels, I sold half a dozen or so stories to the digest-sized, letters-oriented men's magazines, fifty or sixty dollars each, on acceptance. I don't think I ever saw any of them except maybe one.

The best men's magazine market for me was Dugent. The editor there, John Fox, liked my work and bought nearly everything I sent him. He even reprinted one of the stories in a DUDE ANNUAL or something like that and sent me a check for thirty-five dollars, which arrived out of the blue and came in very handy. Their payments were on publication, but they were prompt and even sent me author's copies of the magazines. My best sale there was a story in CAVALIER, their top magazine, for which I got $250.00. CAVALIER had been publishing Stephen King stories only a few years earlier. Most of the stories in his collection NIGHT SHIFT came from CAVALIER, I think. If there are any magazines like that left today, I'm not aware of them. But then, I don't check out that market very often, either.