I've been reading here for a while but have never posted before. I recently finished a collection of short stories that I'm having trouble placing in paying and print markets. The stories (1200-7000 words) are all in first person and use autobiographical situations as starting points, but they are narrative-driven with beginnings, middles, and ends. They are not really about me, only told by me and involving a first person persona to varying degrees, and I always treat the demands of the story with much more respect than the details of the situation that inspired it. For the most part, I feel they read simply as first-person fiction, only with a verbal storyteller's efficiency rather than a writer's flair for literariness, although they are quite serious and are more like literary fiction than any other "genre" I can find, certainly more so than autobiography or memoir.
I've submitted them all over the place through email, webforms, and snail mail, and I always stick to submission guidelines. I've had a ton of rejections, but many still to hear from. I've landed three of them in small, non-paying online journals, but I want to be able to take the next step up the ladder to print and/or paying journals, and this is where I seem to be hitting a barrier.
After reading here, I now appreciate how important it is to find the right market for your work rather than to send it off to every place willing to read it. The problem is, I can't seem to find any worthy markets to target that look for these kinds of stories. I've had some personalized, positive feedback from editors stating that they feel the work is quality, but not right for their publication. Duotrope is a great search tool, but the variables can't be tailored well enough to describe my work accurately. I realize I very well may be barking up the wrong tree with these stories and will need to start writing more of what publishers want to publish, rather than what I want to write. But before I do that, the people around here seem experienced and knowledgable and I'm hoping that someone will be able to point me down a fruitful path. Anybody know of specific markets, or a better place to hunt for them?
I've submitted them all over the place through email, webforms, and snail mail, and I always stick to submission guidelines. I've had a ton of rejections, but many still to hear from. I've landed three of them in small, non-paying online journals, but I want to be able to take the next step up the ladder to print and/or paying journals, and this is where I seem to be hitting a barrier.
After reading here, I now appreciate how important it is to find the right market for your work rather than to send it off to every place willing to read it. The problem is, I can't seem to find any worthy markets to target that look for these kinds of stories. I've had some personalized, positive feedback from editors stating that they feel the work is quality, but not right for their publication. Duotrope is a great search tool, but the variables can't be tailored well enough to describe my work accurately. I realize I very well may be barking up the wrong tree with these stories and will need to start writing more of what publishers want to publish, rather than what I want to write. But before I do that, the people around here seem experienced and knowledgable and I'm hoping that someone will be able to point me down a fruitful path. Anybody know of specific markets, or a better place to hunt for them?
