Literary journals are one of the best ways to build a publication history. They give agents and publishing houses a reason to take your manuscript submission seriously. However, most literary journals publish short stories, poems, nonfiction, and flash fiction, not novel excerpts.
That is fine as many novelists also write other work. Some do not. This is why it is great to find literary journals that publish novel excerpts. This is also helpful if you are looking to promote your novel. If a reader stumbles across your novel excerpt in a literary journal, they may go ahead and buy your novel.
When choosing an excerpt to submit, do keep in mind that the editor and any future readers will not have any background information about that piece, so the excerpt you choose should be as self-contained as possible.
It is important to note that many of the journals have additional guidelines regarding the novel excerpt, that you can read in their submission guidelines. Also the majority of the journals on this list are currently open to submissions, but not all of them.
Cosmonaut Avenue is a Canadian publication interested in publishing a wider variety of writing, including novel excerpts.
This literary journal publishes short stories, novel excerpts, and a variety of nonfiction (including memoir).
This Canadian literary journal publishes a variety of work, including stand-alone novel excerpts.
Embark is an online literary journal that only publishes the opening of novels (up to 4,000) words.
This online literary journal publishes a wide variety of writing including novel excerpts, usually.
This respected online literary journal is open to novel excerpts up to 3,500 words in length.
This wonderful literary journal/anthology series is based out of Taiwan and they publish novel excerpts, as well as poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and flash fiction, from manuscripts that have been rejected by at least one press.
An online publication focused on providing quality reading for commuter’s, including novel excerpts.
Their tag line is writers write, actors read. They accept stand alone, unpublished novel excerpts.
They publish a wide variety of writing, including novel excerpts.
They publish poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from women and non-binary writers, including novel excerpts, as long as the excerpt can stand on its own.
Is an online literary journal with a large audience. They publish original short fiction and novel excerpts.
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, The 2019 Guide to Manuscript Publishers, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The Authors Publish Guide to Children’s and Young Adult Publishing.
She occasionally teaches a course on manuscript publishing, as well as a course on publishing in literary journals.
You can follow her on Facebook here.
