Want to Get Published? Start Here.

When I was trying to cross the bridge from unpublished to published writer, I was overwhelmed. The sheer number of venues, the anthologies, the themed issues, not to mention deadlines and requirements all blended together in my mind. In order to figure out how to get published, I first had to figure out a system for narrowing the field. There were so many places accepting work, and yet, each one felt impossible for its own reasons.

I’ve learned to start by making my personal “dream publication” list. I keep 30–40 venues on it. I work on sending work to the publications on that list regularly. Then I revisit the list once or twice a year, take off venues that no longer interest me, add places that do. This is a lot of research up front, but ultimately, it saves time. When I’m ready to publish something, I know just where to start sending it out to. So here are my best resources for that pivotal first step: researching literary magazines (so you can eventually get published in them).

• Submittable (free). You can’t send work in electronically to most literary magazines without a Submittable account. They are free for authors (though publications do pay a subscription fee for the service). If you don’t already have a submittable account, this is the place to start. Sign up here.
• Duotrope ($5/monthly fee after 30 day free trial). Duotrope has the very best search function I’ve found for literary magazines. You wanna know which venues pay for book reviews? Who publishes gothic romance? Duotrope has even recently added an agent search function. In addition, Duotrope keeps important stats on publications, including what percentage of submitted works get accepted, how long it takes on average to hear back, and all sorts of other great lists and statistics about fees and acceptances. Click here to sign up for your free 30 day trial. I think you’ll agree it’s well worth the $5/monthly fee.
• Garstang’s list. Each year, fiction writer and former lawyer, Clifford Garstang, puts out an annual list of literary magazines ranked in order of their Pushcart Prize winner numbers. He started doing this for his own “tiered submission” process. (This means simultaneously submitting work to magazines in the same tier, but not across tiers.) He has lists for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (the only three categories that receive Pushcarts). While the Pushcart is not the only prestigious writing prize open to emerging and new writers, it is a very well known one. Read the Garstang List for 2018.
• Book Fox rankings. This list uses the Best American Essays series to rank magazines, literary journals, newspapers and other literary nonfiction markets by how often their essays are cited in the anthology. They also do one for Best American Essays. Check out the Book Fox list here.
• Entropy’s Where to Submit. This list comes out seasonally, about every 3 months. It’s a total labor of love by the rad folks at Entropy Magazine. A great place to look for contests, calls from journals and anthologies, small presses, and chapbook publishers. Definitely worth following Entropy on Social Media, or checking back quarterly to get the information. Entropy’s Where to Submit list March-May 2018 here.
• The Review Review. You know how everyone is always telling you to do your research and read the magazines you want to be published in before you send them work? It’s good advice, but you have to be judicious. Otherwise, you could spend all of your time reading, and none of it writing or sending out your writing. Using The Review Review, writers can get a deeper sense of the journals by reading reviews of them. The reviews are not intended as a substitute for the journals, but “a way to guide writers toward the journals that most interest them.” If something sounds good to you on The Review Review, it’s probably worth reading an issue or subscribing. I’m partial to this site, as it was my very first tool for figuring out where to send my own work. The Review Review lives here.
• Erika Krouse’s Rankings. I gotta say, I love a good algorithm, especially one that I don’t have to explain. Erika is a data nerd after my own heart, whose rankings take into account a deliciously long list of factors, including but not limited to: prizes won, circulation, payment rates, byline gender and race parity, and “coolness.” She only ranks fiction publishers, though, so essayists and poets, take her list with a grain of salt. Check her scoring and explanation out here.

So that’s the list of my very best resources for researching publications.

Do you have other resources for deciding where to send your writing? Drop a link in the comments.