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Fiction Submitting with Odd John

Now more than ever, there are ample opportunities for the new writer or poet to be published or even get paid (a very small amount) for his or her work. The question is, where to start?

You have probably heard that it is best to start at the top. If you are a realist, however, you know that at some point you will be sending your fiction or poetry to smaller publications that are more open to new writers. For the top down approach, you might like this website. It lists various markets in tiers. A good approach would be to try a few of the top tier markets, then move to second tier, etc . . .

After trying several print publications, you might want to try submitting to e-zines. The good news is that many of these magazines are wide open. Some of them, especially genre 'zines, even pay. The bad news is that what you publish in them will most likely sink like a stone and be forgotten. The thing to do is keep submitting, always trying for a little better market as you improve your writing and start to build a name for yourself.

Fantasy writer George R.R. Martin once said it takes five years of really hard work, publishing a lot of short stories in various markets, for a dedicated writer to build enough of a reputation that they have a chance to publish a novel. I like that. It gives me a nice concrete goal to shoot for. Right now I'm just publishing a few things in obscure e-zines, but if I keep working at it every day, then maybe, five years from now . . .

If you want to write science fiction, fantasy, horror, or literary fiction, you might find my del.icio.us list useful. Del.icio.us, if you aren't already familiar with it, is a service that allows you to bookmark websites on the net. You can also see what other people have bookmarked. Note that on the right side there is a list of various tags that I have grouped my bookmarks under, including flash, horror, and speculative fiction. There is also a tag for paying markets. Some of these paying markets, like Alien Skin, are very open to new writers. My list is less useful for poets, but most of the literary markets I have listed do accept poetry.

I created this list for my own use, so you may find some of the remarks to be rather cryptic, but there are a lot of decent magazines here, and nearly all of them accept electronic submissions, so you don't even have to pay postage to give them a try. Happy submitting!

posted by Doug Martin @ 2:56 PM