Short Story and Poetry Submissions

When poetry and fiction writers look to make a few dollars from their writing, they usually have to freelance in order to make ends meet. In a perfect world, we'd be able to write what we want and still get paid, rather than writing about something we could care less about.

I recently found an excellent website that you'll want to bookmark if you're a poet or a fiction writer.

Duotrope Digest is a searchable database of literary magazines that publish poetry and fiction.

With a free registration, you can search for magazines that publish specifically what you write. You can search by genre, style, theme, length, payscale, and many more. While some magazines don't pay at all, there are quite a few that pay from token amounts to professional rates.

They offer a free online submission tracker to help you keep up with which markets you've submitted to. There's a separate page for new markets, in case you want to increase your chances of publication with a magazine that's just starting out. To top it all off, you'll find a deadline calendar, listing markets with upcoming calls for submission.

Another good spot to visit is New Pages, a website that lists all the literary magazines in America. They publish news and submission guidelines  for magazines, alternative newsweeklies, an other places to consider publishing.

For you novelists out there, the thought of trying to write something shorter than 25K sends you in search of serious chocolate. So, in the interest of your sanity, I offer some links to articles on short story writing. My current novel started out as a short story that would have been submitted to one of these magazines, so you never know if one of these markets will spark your next great idea.

Short Story Articles: #1 #2 #3 #4

Forums where you can share your short stories and get feedback: Short Story Group and StoryWrite