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 Note that three of the contests require already published books and one is only interested in unpublished work.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…
Updated September 5th, 2018 The Totally Entwined Group is an eBook and print publisher that was successful in its own right, before being purchased by the Bonnier Publishing group. There have been some shifts in focus since Bonnier purchased it in 2015, but the group still has a good reputation and its focus is still…
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…