August 24, 2016
An advance is a signing bonus that is paid to the author before the book is published. It is paid against future royalty earnings. So for every dollar you receive in an advance, you have to earn a dollar from book sales before you receive any additional royalty payments. Most independent publishers do not offer…
Escape Pod publishes all of its stories in audio and text formats. They are a science fiction market but as they say in their submission guidelines “our mandate is fun.” They allow some flexibility to exist within the genre and they have published the occasional steampunk or superhero tale. But they are not interested in…
Writing romance is not easy. The world’s largest publisher of romance fiction receives about twenty thousand unsolicited romance submissions per year. Editors often say that they judge the potential of a manuscript based on the opening lines. It isn’t surprising then that only a handful of manuscripts get requests for a full submission. Even then,…
August 22, 2016
By Loretta Bolger Wish I had barely arrived at my first writers’ conference when I learned my most valuable lesson: it had taken me too long to attend one. If your inner skeptic has kept you away, you aren’t alone. You are, however, missing out on some of the best knowledge, motivation, and fun a…
August 18, 2016
These three different calls for submission are all very different. The first one is my personal favorite and it is a paying market. The First Line: “In the six years I spent tracking David Addley, it never occurred to me that he didn’t exist.” The First Line is a literary journal that publishes short stories…
Written By S. Kalekar Here are four prestigious free-to-enter writing competitions. They cover literary fiction, arts writing, cultural diversity, and science fiction/fantasy. Note that three of the contests require already published books and one is only interested in unpublished work. PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: This is one of America’s foremost awards for literary fiction, and…
There is one mistake that most authors make when submitting their work to literary journals and magazines for the first time. It is a mistake I made the first time I submitted. It is a mistake that most of the serious authors I know made. What is that mistake? Is it a terrible cover letter?…
August 11, 2016
Written by S. Kalekar The following three print anthologies are all paying markets and they are all seeking submissions on very different topics. Meerkat Press is accepting submissions for Behind the Mask, a superhero anthology with a twist; they are looking for ordinary, day-to-day issues faced by superheroes – growing up, relationships, growing old, career…
Updated March 2020 Soft Skull Press is a small publisher of literary fiction and nonfiction currently based in New York. They publish a wide variety of quirky and well written work. They have published a number of well-known authors, including Maggie Nelson. They are a niche press. Their distributor is Publishers Group West. They are now…
Various readers have emailed me over the years asking about how often they should expect to be rejected. They phrase it different ways. Sometimes they ask if a ratio of four rejections to every one acceptance is good. Sometimes they ask if one acceptance a year is good. The one single factor that affects your…
The Slag Review is a new print and online journal of poetry, fiction, essays, and art, bravely exploring the perils and triumphs of the creative process. The creators of The Slag Review are metallurgists, artists engaged in the science of metal crafting, which they see as a metaphor for the transformative process of artistic creation….
August 8, 2016
The literary journals and magazines on this list reject the vast majority of what is submitted to them. But they are respected and trusted. Most have a large readership. Many of these are the journals and magazines that the editors of publications like The Best American Short Stories read through to select work from. Acceptances…
August 4, 2016
The three anthologies we are featuring this week are very different. One is part of the bestselling Chicken Soup for the Soul series. It is open to submissions until September 30th. The other is an anthology of poems about Nelson Mandela, with an open ended deadline. The final one is an anthology of LGBTQIA stories about Knights….
UPDATED March 17th 2021: Lakewater Press is closing in 2021. Lakewater Press is a newer eBook and print on demand (POD) publisher. They were founded in early 2015. They publish a wide variety of fiction. They appear to be open to all genres of fiction including young adult, new adult (18-30), and romance. It is…
August 3, 2016
“You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I…