I think I'm ready to submit my first short story. Can anyone give me the name of a Mag (I already know of ByLine) Thats partial to never before published writers?
Submitting !st
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Hi, tony1. I think you might be shooting yourself in the foot if you start at the bottom, with magazines that favor never-published writers. Not that there's anything wrong with such magazines, but my thinking is to go the opposite direction.
Get yourself a Writer's Market or any other listing of markets and figure out all the ones that your story might fit. Check them out--find recent issues in stores or libraries, contact them for sample copies, borrow back issues from friends, etc. Read the stories in all of them and figure out if your story would be a decent fit there and whether it's as good as the ones they're running now.
Make sure your story is the best it can be, then send it to the highest-quality and/or best-paying magazine that it seems right for, following its guidelines exactly. (If they say no simultaneous submissions, for instance, they mean it.) If they reject it, send it to the second-best market, and if needed, the third-best, and so on, until you make a sale or you've run out of any markets at all for this particular story.
That way, your story will find its placement in the best market it's good enough for. If you submit it to the worst markets first, you guarantee it a poorer placement. If it's good, one of them will snap it up, maybe paying only in copies. (Eek!)
Maryn, hoping this helps
Get yourself a Writer's Market or any other listing of markets and figure out all the ones that your story might fit. Check them out--find recent issues in stores or libraries, contact them for sample copies, borrow back issues from friends, etc. Read the stories in all of them and figure out if your story would be a decent fit there and whether it's as good as the ones they're running now.
Make sure your story is the best it can be, then send it to the highest-quality and/or best-paying magazine that it seems right for, following its guidelines exactly. (If they say no simultaneous submissions, for instance, they mean it.) If they reject it, send it to the second-best market, and if needed, the third-best, and so on, until you make a sale or you've run out of any markets at all for this particular story.
That way, your story will find its placement in the best market it's good enough for. If you submit it to the worst markets first, you guarantee it a poorer placement. If it's good, one of them will snap it up, maybe paying only in copies. (Eek!)
Maryn, hoping this helps
mag
Darned near every magazine out there is partial to never before published writers. If you have a short story that's good enough, an editor won't care whether you've ever been published. If your short story isn't good enough, the editor won't buy it no matter how many times you've been published.
Just get a market list and pick teh magazine that's the best fit for your story. If it gets rejected, it won't be because you've never been published.
tony1 said:
Darned near every magazine out there is partial to never before published writers. If you have a short story that's good enough, an editor won't care whether you've ever been published. If your short story isn't good enough, the editor won't buy it no matter how many times you've been published.
Just get a market list and pick teh magazine that's the best fit for your story. If it gets rejected, it won't be because you've never been published.
Before you submet, you need to be reading. Get your hands on as many lit mags as you can, either at the public library, your local bookstore, online or whatever. If you go on Poets and Writer's website, they have a pretty extensive list of links to a wide variety of lit mags. You can purchase back copies for a small amount of money. Study each one, learn their submission guidelines, and be prepared to wait. I just sold a story last month (my first time getting paid for fiction. Hooray!) a full year after I submitted. Turns out it got put in the wrong folder. The editor called and asked if they could publish it in two weeks! Anyway, brace yourself for the long haul, and in the meantime, write another story. Better yet, write ten.
Kelly B.
Kelly B.
Maryn's right, though, don't necessarily aim for the bottom. Don't think "well, they publish new authors and they pay in contributor's copies, so I think they'll be willing to look at mine."
First submission I ever made was to SciFi.com's SciFICTION section run by Ellen Datlow. They pay twenty cents a word.
They didn't take it (and are now, lamentably, defunct) but I still have a pretty rejection letter sitting on my desk.
I first aim for the markets I want to be published in. Then, barring that, I aim for the markets where I may have a better edge. But I'd rather send a story off to Ellery Queen and have a chance there, then send it off to Bob's Mystery Market and have a stronger chance.
First submission I ever made was to SciFi.com's SciFICTION section run by Ellen Datlow. They pay twenty cents a word.
They didn't take it (and are now, lamentably, defunct) but I still have a pretty rejection letter sitting on my desk.
I first aim for the markets I want to be published in. Then, barring that, I aim for the markets where I may have a better edge. But I'd rather send a story off to Ellery Queen and have a chance there, then send it off to Bob's Mystery Market and have a stronger chance.
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