Best markets for beginners?

Check Duotrope. The markets that have a higher acceptance rate tend to be accepting of new writers. Duotrope is also a good place to enter your story length and see what markets would be suitable. From there you can check submission guidelines and get an idea of what the market is like. GUD, and several Flash length markets are quite newbie friendly.

That said, you should aim high and submit to your wishlist of markets first. You might just have written something they like. As long as you follow the rules, they won't hold bad writing or something they don't like against you when you submit in the future, so there's no reason not to submit to the big markets.

Stijn Hommes said:

That said, you should aim high and submit to your wishlist of markets first. You might just have written something they like. As long as you follow the rules, they won't hold bad writing or something they don't like against you when you submit in the future, so there's no reason not to submit to the big markets.

Click to expand...

I can vouch for this. I sent a 14,000-word story to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction partly because I hadn't a clue where else to send a story of that length. Kristine Kathryn Rusch (the then editor) rejected it, but with a handwritten comment asking me to send more. So I did, and she accepted the next one I sent her. Only my fourth ever short story sale, and my first to a genre SF/F publication - and of course the major markets aren't interested in unknowns, and major US markets aren't interested in unknown British writers etc etc.

Yes, the competition in the top markets is fierce, but if you write a story that hits the spot for them then they'll take it. Editors love to discover new writers. All you have to do is send the story to them. (Usual stuff about proper MS format, having an acceptable means of replying to you and avoiding obnoxious behaviour applies too, of course.)

I agree with the concept of aiming high first--as long as your story fits the market you're aiming for. Don't send a sword and sorcery tale to Asimov's magazine, for example. The pro-paying markets make up a small list, so it should be easy for you to decide if your story is a good fit for any of them or if you need to aim a bit lower. Otherwise, you'll just be adding slush to the slush piles. Get to know your markets by reading the stories, and you'll save yourself a lot of time and trouble--and you'll get less rejection notices.

For Australian writers, The Lifted Brow is very open to unpublished writers and if you're under 25 as well, Voiceworks is good too and pays really well.

I write literary fiction (sometimes with a dash of SF), and the range of submission options is daunting. Most of the mags I actually read have 0% or 1% acceptances listed on Duotrope. (I'm not just talking McSweeney's, but every university-based lit magazine of much repute.)

So this is an ongoing problem for me. I'll continue to submit to the tough ones, because occasionally (and I mean infrequently), I get a rejection with encouragement. But my only acceptance came from a small print magazine with an 11% acceptance rate on Duotrope. So there is something to those ratings... if you can get past the fact that you might still get rejected and feel worse than you would if the journal were more selective.

Which you shouldn't, because an 11% acceptance rate isn't exactly high. At least, it wasn't when I was applying to college and that was the rate for Harvard...

But I'd appreciate any recs on a sort of mid-level magazine, one that isn't a household name (like McSweeney's) and isn't primarily seeking work by already well-published novelists and academic writing teachers looking to get tenure (like, say, The New England Review).