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There are a lot of published goons floating around, so I thought it might be useful to make a thread where everyone can share their knowledge / experience and hopefully contribute to more people getting their work out into the world. I'm mostly going to be focusing on short fiction because that's all I really feel comfortable talking about, but if anybody out there is publishing poetry or novels and wants to chip in, please do! How Do I Find Places to Submit To? There are two major options: Duotrope and The Submission Grinder. Duotrope costs $5 a month (or you can buy a year of it for $50), while The Submission Grinder is totally free. If you are just starting out or not submitting too often, the Grinder is more than good enough. Both of them let you search for markets with all sorts of handy filters, like word count, pay rate, genre, response time, etc. Duotrope's advantages are: More accurate data on acceptance rates, turnaround times, etc. A more intuitive UI (in my opinion) and a few other similar quality-of-life upgrades Support for poetry and non-fiction markets Something else to consider is that The Grinder skews slightly more towards sci-fi and fantasy markets, and tends to have pretty thin data (and fewer market listings) for "literary" journals. It's not a huge deal, but if you are planning to submit on a frequent basis and don't mind the cost, Duotrope is a pretty handy tool. Another site worth keeping an eye on is Funds For Writers, which posts a lot of submission calls for contests, grants, and writer in residence programs. If you are writing genre stuff, ravenkult recommends checking out The Horror Tree for submission, contest, and anthology calls before they hit Duotrope and The Grinder. How Difficult is it To Submit a Story? 99% of the time, it's incredibly fast and easy to send stories out. The vast majority of journals use Submittable now, which lets you type your name + a short cover letter / bio, attach your story, and send it. Submittable even has its own little tracking system - they'll let you know when the journal has received your submission, when it's in the reading queue, and whether it's been accepted or rejected. This is nice, because it means you don't have to worry about whether your story got lost in the void or something. There are still some places that just want you to send your story as an attachment in an email, or even pasted into the body of the email. Most of those places are still very good about letting you know that your submission has actually been received, though. And of course, there are the old dinosaur mags that still, in the year of our lord 2016, somehow only accept snail mail. Mostly these are the stuffy old university-run lit mags that have been around for a hundred years and don't really have any incentive to get with the times / are so prestigious that people are willing to jump through the hoops. You can decide whether it's worth your time or not. These places almost invariably also have ridiculous response times (some as high as an entire year) so I've never bothered. Will I Get Feedback? Almost never. Most journals are a bunch of overworked volunteer slush readers sifting through hundreds of stories a day, and a lot of them are barely in English. There are some journals that give a line or two of feedback, and they are treasures. Some places have "tip jar" systems where you can pay a couple bucks to help support the journal, and in exchange they'll give you personalized feedback. Up to you whether that's worth it or not. If you are looking for feedback, you are better off going somewhere like Zoetrope, Critters, or here on our very own subforum! I will try to keep a list of places that offer feedback at the bottom of this OP, so if anyone knows of any, please say so. Keep in mind that some journals are very picky about what constitutes a story being "previously published." Most places don't care if you posted a rough draft in an online workshop, and some don't care at all as long as it wasn't published in another journal. Theoretically, posting it anywhere, whether it's for critique or not, means it has been published, but in practice, you will probably be fine as long as you take a minute to edit the story out before shopping it around. If you can't find it by copy + pasting text into Google, you should be alright. Some people aren't comfortable with that and don't put anything up online ever, and that's fine too! Formatting This is one of the places you'll see big differences between journals. Always look around the website of any place you are submitting to for a list of guidelines. Their rules may be annoying, but not following them is a very good way to have your story shitcanned without anyone reading it. For the most part, you can't go wrong with Shunn Manuscript Format, which is basically the gold standard for formatting and will be totally fine for most places you submit to. The most common request you'll see is to leave personal information off of the manuscript, so that the editors can do blind reads and not publish a crappy story just because someone famous wrote it. Sometimes you'll see journals that are a lot pickier, and want specific fonts / margins / spacing / pagination, etc. It's a minor hassle, but just do it. There are also some places don't really care at all what you do. For those, I'd still strong recommend sending it in Shunn format, because then you can send it to other places without having to tinker with it again. Most editors seem to prefer Courier over Times New Roman, but I can almost guarantee that will never be a reason your story gets rejected, unless it's specifically mentioned in their guidelines. Cover Letters Most journals will ask you to include a cover letter and / or a short biography with your submission. Don't stress out over this! Keep it short and simple. This is a template that I shamelessly stole from one of the editors at Clarkesworld: quote:Dear (Editor), Nice and succinct. Some people are probably wondering if you should include the editor's name or not - I'd say go for it if you can find their name on the website, and if it's clear who is going to be reading it. Smaller journals usually have only one editor, but bigger places might have a large staff + volunteer slush readers, in which case it's totally fine to just say "Dear Editors." Obviously don't be a weirdo and track down an editor's name if it's not on the website. You aren't going to get rejected because you didn't write their name down. For the bio, short and sweet is the way to go again. Keep it in third person, include your name and maybe what you do / where you live if you feel like it, and include any publication credits you might already have. If you've never been published, you decide whether you want to mention that or not. Include relevant info - if you're writing a story about the Iraq War and you were actually in the war, probably mention that. Don't talk about how you like cats or how you are actually a dragon spirit in a human body, etc. Here's a Lit Reactor article on the subject that is pretty good, though tread lightly with those first two bits. There is nothing more cringey than an author bio trying to be edgy / quirky / ironic. Keep it simple unless you are very confident that you can pull off something else without looking like a goober. Paying vs. Non-Paying Markets First things first: You are not going to make a living writing short stories, full stop. Even famous, best-selling novelists aren't making big bucks with short fiction, and even the absolute best-paying markets are paying you less than minimum wage for the hours invested in writing. That being said, publishing can be a decent source of beer money, if you look in the right places. Both Duotrope and The Submission Grinder will let you sort markets by No Payment, Token Payment, Semi-Pro Payment, and Pro Payment. Token payment is usually in the $5-10 range. Semi-pro payment is anything between 1 and 4.9 cents per word, while Pro Payment is 5 cents or above per word (or 6 cents per word, by Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America standards). Some places also pay flat rates, either for the entire piece or per printed page. There are a decent number of journals that pay in the $20-40 range per printed page, which is a nice chunk of change. There are a few places that have great payouts - Electric Literature pays $300, and The Sun pays all the way up to $1,200 - but those places have crazy low acceptance rates. Also, if you are published in a mag that is actually printed on paper, you are almost always going to get a contributor copy or two. Something to keep in mind is that paying =/= better than. There are tons of very widely-read and well-respected journals that don't pay anything, or pay very little. Generally speaking, if you are writing Sci-Fi and Fantasy, you have a lot more paying markets to choose from. Literary fiction is basically a blasted hellscape when it comes to getting paid, since most of the journals are small independent or university presses that people are running on a combination of their own money, donations, and prayers. Most of them don't have a paid staff, or any staff. It's also important to consider how much exposure and readership is worth to you. At the end of the day, the difference between getting $0 and $10 for a story you spent hours slaving away it is pretty much nil. If I had to pick between a journal that paid a few bucks but had only a handful of readers, or a journal that paid nothing but had thousands, I'd pick the latter every singe time. Getting your words out there where people can see them is very important if you want to get serious about publishing. Also, please don't pay to submit to magazines. Some places do this and it feels really scummy to me, especially since a lot of them don't even pay their authors. The exception to this is contest fees that actually have some kind of prize behind them. Some authors turn their noses up at contests, but if you want to do a few and the cost feels reasonable, go for it! Structuring Your Submissions If you plan to submit on a regular basis, it's important to have some kind of system in place so that you aren't sitting on your thumb waiting for a journal with a 200-day response time to reject you before you can send the story somewhere else. The most important step is to divide markets into those that accept simultaneous submissions and those that don't. As you can probably guess, simultaneous submission means you are sending the story to multiple places at once, in the hopes that at least one of them will accept it. (And if one does accept it, please do not forget to withdraw the story from the other markets. Not doing that is awkward, a major pain in the rear end for other journals, and a good way to get yourself blacklisted from that journal.) The next step is to break down markets by response time. Some places have very quick turnaround (a week or less), some take a couple weeks to a month, and then there's the places that take approximately forever. Generally, you want to send a story out in "waves." I try not to have a single story out at more than 5-ish markets at a time, but some people prefer the carpet-bomb strategy. Send the story out to your fastest markets first, then the second fastest, then the slowest. Note that this assumes you are putting roughly equal stock in the journals you are submitting to - if there's a really good journal that you think you have a shot at , send it there first and endure the wait. You really, really don't want to get an acceptance back from Tin House the day after Jim Bob's Basement Zine picks up your story. If you exhaust your other options, just start sending the story out one at a time to places that don't accept simultaneous submissions, or else decide the story sucks and try to publish something else instead. Reprints Every journal handles the author's rights a little differently, so always pay attention to that. Most places put it in the guidelines. Most of the time, the rights revert back to you at some point ranging from "right after publication" to "after a year or two." At this point, you can try to get the story reprinted in another magazine. Not every journal accepts reprints, but a decent number do, so if you've got some older stuff you published once upon a time, it might be worth checking out. Another thing to note is that most journals only want North American rights, which means you are open to having the story translated + printed in international journals. I don't really know about this process, but our very own Ironic Twist had a reprint picked up in an Italian journal, so he might have something more to say on the topic. Networking One aspect of publishing that doesn't get brought up a lot is networking. Just like anything else, there are definitely elements of "Who You Know" to the whole thing. Most places read submissions blind, or at least claim not to show preference, but from my own experience and the experience of others, you are definitely more likely to get more attention / a second look if you've been published in a few places, are an editor / reader at another journal, or know people in the industry. There's not a whole lot you can do about this, but it's worth taking opportunities to network if they arise. Part of that is having some sort of social network presence - you don't need to go all-out and spend all day tweeting and stuff, but being able to connect with other authors and publishers, and let people know when your stories have been published, is worth the hassle of setting up a couple accounts. I'm also going to recommend that once you get a few stories published, you spend an hour or two putting together a simple wordpress site. You don't need to keep up a blog or anything (unless you want to), but having a simple landing page with your contact info, twitter feed, and links to your published stories is a nice thing to have. You never know when you might get picked up somewhere and suddenly people are trying to find other things you've written. What if I Can't Handle Rejection? If you even remotely aspire to have your words read by human beings that aren't your mom, you are gonna have to get used to rejection. It happens to literally everyone. The average writer on Duotrope has an acceptance rate of right around 2%, which is roughly the acceptance rate of most good journals. A lot of places are much, much lower than that (Hello Tin House, with your .16%). Just keep sending them out. Trust me when I say that the feeling of getting your first acceptance *far* outweighs the shittiness of all the rejections that came before. It's an awesome feeling to get something you wrote published and read by other people, so I really encourage people to give it a shot, and I hope this thread is at least a little bit useful. I intend to keep it updated and add more information as I think of it / remember it, so if there's anything anybody wants to hear about or wants more info on, please ask! There are a lot of published goons that will hopefully toss their own insights and experiences into this thread. And of course, feel free to come in here and brag / post links whenever you publish something. List of Journals That Provide Feedback: Lackington's Bartleby Snopes Lockjaw Magazine Ember Youth Imagination (Not Guaranteed) Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 01:15 on May 21, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 00:46
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Canadian Surf Club posted:a good thread to have. I've been ramping up my submissions and rolling in the rejections. As a shout out, I received a sort of feedback/nice comment from Lackington's when they rejected. It wasn't much but it was like a drop of water in a boilerplate desert. Awesome, I will add them to the list! And yeah, keeping track of subs can be a nightmare, especially with journals that only want you to submit once per reading period but don't actually mention that on their site. The Submission Grinder is a really nice free way to keep track of where you've sent stuff, even if you don't use it to look for markets.
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May 17, 2016 05:42
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Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:It's worth mentioning that most pro publications, at least in the Sci Fi/Fantasy realm (only one I have experience with), do not allow simultaneous submissions, so bear that in mind before you go launching your masterpieces at Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, et al I don't submit a lot of genre stuff, but now that you mention it, that is sort of odd. And yeah, absolutely make sure the places you send to are cool with simul-subs. I'd say if you have something that even remotely jives with Clarkesworld's style, always send it to them first. They usually respond within 2 days, sometimes faster, and even though they have the lowest acceptance rate of any genre mag (unless that changed recently), getting in opens a lot of doors. And thanks ravenkult, I'll add that to the OP!
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May 21, 2016 01:11
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Jitzu_the_Monk posted:For GP and others who have been published a few times or more, I'm curious to know: Have your readers ever contacted you? I mean through social media, wordpress, email etc. If so, what have these interactions been like? I always post my publications on Facebook / Twitter just for the hell of it. I can't really say I've had direct fan mail yet, but I had an old friend I hadn't talked to in a few years get in touch to say he liked one of my stories, which was a good feeling. Otherwise I've had a few random people compliment a story on Twitter, and that's as close as I've gotten so far, I guess. The online format doesn't really encourage direct contact very much - you might get a comment or two if the website has that feature, but mostly you get people that just follow you and don't ever say anything, which is still pretty flattering. I wouldn't mind it if someone ever got in contact, but I'd never expect it. And Muffin is right, public readings are just awesome in general.
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May 23, 2016 04:45
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Pham Nuwen posted:I made it to the final selection stage for Flash Fiction Online, but didn't get in. When I got the rejection, they said I could request feedback, which I did. So I guess FFO will do feedback, at least if you make it far enough. ravenkult is right - it's pretty unlikely anyone will remember seeing your work before, especially since a lot of places read blind. There are exceptions of course, but generally the only way you are going to be remembered in a negative way is you just have no regard at all for their rules, like sending multiple subs at once or during the same reading period when they explicitly ask you not to, or simul-sub to a place that doesn't accept them, etc. If your work is so memorably offensive that they never want you to send them anything again, or if they don't want you to keep trying, they'll probably tell you. Off the top of my head, I think Grasslimb has a polite suggestion on their website that if they reject you more than 10 times, you are probably better served submitting elsewhere.
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May 27, 2016 22:10
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ravenkult posted:Bruh I just made Ellen Datlow's long list for Best Horror of the Year. That's awesome, congrats! Is the story up anywhere? I've been completely out of the writing / subbing loop for like a month and a half because of traveling and moving into a new apartment, so I gotta get back in the saddle now. While I was gone I did get a really nice personal rejection from a journal I like, and an invitation to send more stuff from one of the places that I had to pull a submission from because it got picked up elsewhere  .
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Aug 3, 2016 04:01
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Canadian Surf Club posted:So I'm trying to shop around a humor/speculative piece, just under 2k words, but I'm noticing a lot of the mid-ranged mags are closed to submissions around now. Is there some sort of seasonal shift going on at this time? Yeah, there are sorta "seasons" for publishing - a lot of reading periods tend to coincide with school semesters since a lot of journals are partially funded / run through universities or staffed by students. Other places go based on how many issues they put out - quarterly publication is probably the most common, so you'll see something like 3 months on, 1 month off so that slush readers can keep up with all the submissions. There are tons of other variables involved, but if there are journals that you really want to sub to, it's probably worth waiting until they reopen while you work on something new or keep polishing the piece. Most of them should tell you when they reopen if you poke around on their site. Off the top of my head, Clarkesworld and McSweeney's are high-profile places that you might want to wait on if they aren't open. For humorous sci-fi, the only paying markets I can think of that are open right now are Fantasy & Science Fiction, Blue Monday Review, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod (they do audio readings, I believe, if you are into that) and Space Squid. Your last question is going to depend almost entirely on the people running the contest. They are usually pretty specific - generally, when most places say "no published authors," they mean people who have trad-published actual novels / collections, so that some bestselling author / award winner isn't slumming it to pick up easy money in contests. There are lots of shades of gray when it comes to what is "published" - some places consider putting it up anywhere, even on a private, password-protected personal blog, to be published. Most places aren't that anal about it. The most common qualifier is probably "did any transfer of publication rights take place" - if not, I think you would be totally fine calling yourself unpublished. If so, just pay close attention to the contest rules, because you are still probably free and clear to enter most of them.
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Aug 5, 2016 00:59
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Congrats on the acceptances guys! I definitely encourage people to do some braggin' in here, and of course throw us some links when stuff gets published. I'm just now getting back into the groove of sending stories out, since I was traveling around for 3 months and just moved into a new place and everything has been hectic as hell, but a little while ago one of my stories got nominated for Sundress Lit's Best of the Web 2016, which was a pretty cool feeling. I'm actually not sure when they start paring down to finalists, and last year they had people from Guernica and AGNI and stuff so I'm not holding my breath, but at the very least it will something cool to stick in my cover letter. I've also got two stories coming out either next month or in January in an actual print magazine, which will be my first time in print that isn't an anthologized bundle. It's also my second time getting accepted by a British journal, so don't be afraid to toss some stories to international markets. I've seen a lot of journals that primarily look for authors from their own country (especially if they are funded by a grant or something, because then it's usually a requirement), but they'll still consider stories from elsewhere. They also tend to be friendlier towards reprints since the reader base isn't going to be overlapping much if at all. ravenkult posted:Sold a story to the Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing newsletter/Dark Moon Digest, along with a reprint of an old story. That's pretty cool man, getting a story translated is one of my "someday" goals, though I haven't tried very hard yet and I'm honestly not even sure how to go about looking for markets like that other than stumbling across them. I'd love for this thread to be more active too, so if anybody has any suggestions / questions / etc., let me know! I'm sure there is some useful info I've neglected, and there's more resources out there than I can keep track of, so anyone that finds something neat is more than welcome to stick it here.
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Nov 20, 2016 02:21
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Congrats spectres!sebmojo posted:Nice work! I can slap some links in the OP if nobody wants to make a dedicated thread for it (and if someone does want to, that would be awesome too). There's a pretty hefty ream of goon stories floating around at this point.
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Dec 5, 2016 23:28
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newtestleper posted:I got a story accepted for Takahe Magazine. https://www.takahe.org.nz Hell yeah!
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Jan 17, 2017 06:05
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I've come across a couple places that want a photo with the initial submission, but yeah it's pretty rare. It seems more common with smaller / younger journals, probably because the staff is only one or two people and it's one less thing to potentially forget about / run into deadline issues with if contributors are slow to respond or something. I've seen it once in a print journal too, which I assume is so that they could set up the final proof as quickly as possible. Kinda weird, but I guess it's not a bad idea to have a bio headshot laying around just in case.
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Jan 18, 2017 01:48
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Just had two stories come out in Neon, which is my first time being in overseas print. Both of them are old, slightly reworked TD entries - there's a free story here http://neonmagazine.co.uk/signals-of-fear-and-uncertainty/ and another one that requires actually downloading the issue. Sitting Here posted:So every day fiction is kinda cool in that you get a ton of feedback if you get accepted. I got crits from 4 editors, plus it appears that people actually use the comment/rating features. Congrats! And that's awesome, it's rare to see a journal with an active community of readers leaving comments like that.
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Feb 16, 2017 03:50
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If y'all can pressgang someone into setting it up, I will definitely add it to the OP.
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Feb 17, 2017 00:37
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Cicada would be another one to check out. The only other one I can think of that fit the bill would be Second Hand Stories, which isn't specifically YA, but accepts it. Might be worth looking at if your story is toeing the line, anyway.It's also in podcast format, if that matters to you. edit: Should probably link them, huh? Cicada: http://www.cicadamag.com/about Second Hand Stories: http://www.secondhandpodcast.com/ Also congrats ravenkult!
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Mar 21, 2017 09:55
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ravenkult posted:New calls for submission (mostly genre, but some lit): http://www.cotronis.com/blog/submissioncalls Congrats, and thanks for the link! I want to send out some more stuff to podcasts, there are a few good ones floating around that put a lot of effort into it.
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Apr 26, 2017 08:27
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