6February2013

Finding new markets: tools of the trade

February 6, 2013Leave a comment

Last year, I wanted to get four pieces of writing published. I only managed three. When I analysed possible reasons, the most obvious one was this: I didn’t send anything out for six months.

Not everything you send is accepted, far from it, but if you don’t send stuff, it can’t be accepted. I wish there were pixies that flitted about looking in drawers and scanning hard drives to find pieces whose authors were too shy to submit and moved them from obscurity into the sunny gaze of a willing publisher. But it doesn’t work like that. You have to be your own pixie.

Continue Reading “Finding new markets: tools of the trade”

13October2011

Eagerly awaiting a response

October 13, 20115 Comments

I’m still waiting to hear whether some of my stories have made it or not. I know that it can take a very long time before you find out. Duotrope has lists of markets that are slow and swift. Response times range from a from a super-swift average of 0.4 days for a response, to a deathly slow 392.2 days.

392.2 days. That’s a year and a month.

The places I’ve submitted to won’t make me wait that long, I know it. Still, I look for a response every day. Even for the one that has over a month before the deadline ends.

I think it might take a while before I get used to waiting to hear.

20September2011

Have story, will submit. But where?

September 20, 20112 Comments

To get published you have to commit pieces to publishers. To start with, I want to get a short story published by someone who pays. The money isn’t really important, but the fact that I get paid is. Anthologies and well established magazines rate higher in the publishing stakes than my grandmother’s literary website.

I consider myself a pretty good Googler, but finding places to send submissions to turns out to be rather more complicated than I thought. Good thing that there are tools and websites that makes it easy for you.

Tools

www.ralan.com
Ralan lists a large number of websites and magazines that take submissions. You can filter by genre but you’re left scanning alphabetic lists of potential submissions. Luckily the summaries are comprehensive.
www.doutrope.com
Duotrope is a little more structured than Ralan and offers a fancy interface for searching. Learning what you can search for might take a while – I find either nothing or everything. If you find it useful, consider donating some money too them. It’s a great service and it’s free to use. (I’ve done my bit. And a little more.)
You can use Duotrope to track your submissions and responses. The aggregated response time data provide a guide to other writers.

Learning a new language

There’s a lot of new jargon to learn with submissions. A whole new language to learn. The joy! Luckily, it’s one you learn quickly. Many of the terms are self-explanatory although a re-submission* wasn’t what I thought it was. Until I started looking for places to submit I didn’t even know I wrote speculative fiction. I wasn’t aware of this catch-almost-all super-category that fits both the mild horror and urban fantasy stories I write.

* It means submitting something’s that’s been published somewhere else rather than submitting the same story to the same place more than once. Which would be a crazy thing to do.

18September2011

The path to publication: the first submission

September 18, 20111 Comment

Today, I submitted a story to a magazine. The deadline is November 30th, so chances are I won’t hear from them until early December. Still, it’s quite exciting: this is my first submission. Anything could happen. (Chance are nothing will, but it could.)

I’m using Duotrope to track the submission and share the results and waiting times with other writers.