We received some terrific tips in the comments yesterday. I have compiled them here for one anyone who'd like to print them out. And as always, and especially for the non-short story scribes in the crowd, there's coffee, tea, and lounge chairs in the Comments. . .
From paul lamb: I've found a lot of engines that will cough up markets. Duotrope's Digest is a good one. Neatly and sensibly organized. Updated regularly.
From farfetched: Asimov's takes new author submissions as well for sci-fi. He also says: there's always the online route — it's a way to get your stuff out in front of an audience, and it has worked for several people (example: Scott Sigler).
From conda: Ralan.com is an excellent listing of short story markets. And for mysteries, the yahoo group Short Mystery Fiction Society is good. She adds: a newsletter called The Gila Queen's Guide to markets. You have to pay for this one, but it's dirt cheap for everything you get, pages and pages of market and publishing info, including occasionally an anthology that is open to newbies.
From usiku: writers could get together and use their individual and collective networks to publish and market their own book of The Best Neglected Short Stories or magazine of the same.
Guy Hogan has a blog with flash fiction tips.
Updated: I removed one of the original recommendations. I'll investigate a bit more. If it checks out, I'll put it back up.
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24 comments:
Somebody really ought to be here to beat me up -- then we'd have something that could be worked into a short story instead of this useless comment.
I get up early some days, andi, but you always beat me up! But if I wrote about it, it'd be 300 pages, and I think we'd need a lot more beating to make that work.
No comments are useless - you started the day off for us!
Thanks for the compilation, Nancy!
Good morning, everyone who andi beat up.
I Andi & Beth -- Good Morning.
Nancy, this list looks like a good tool I wonder if it could be included as a useful list someplace permanent?
Morning Beth.
Since BDSM is not my kink, I'll guess I'll pass on 300 pages of beating me up (though my mom could do that easily ... metaphorically of course).
How about a picture for inspiration instead. I think this one is rather suggestive.
Hey .. hi kb (I "saw" you when I did the preview).
Hi Andi (I LOVE the email notice) -- I'm working on another post at Eat4Today, but I'm lurking here...
:)
I love to start the day laughing. Still laughing. Children! Stop beating each other up.
Oh, and lovely photo, Andi, though I was disappointed that by "suggestive" you didn't mean what I thought you meant.
Hmm, kb. You have a good idea there. Maybe I should take all my writing posts and put them in one place to start with. Then eventually subdivide, maybe. Hmm. You know what? With some polishing, they could also go over to my website, couldn't they?
Great idea, Nancy! I was thinking I should be printing them out, then decided I could go back later and find them when I needed them - ignoring that in my world, it's out of sight, out of mind. If they were on your website, or in one particular place, it'd be easy to reference them.
I got all excited about the suggestive part, too! :-) Guess you can tell the single women...
Not that I didn't love the shot! I was just looking for a cabana boy under the mist.
lol, Beth, so sadly true.
And now you've gone and reinforced kb's idea. Encouraging me to do more work, ladies. :) Family Man will not approve.
Maybe it'll be okay if you do it from a recliner...
Well you can see why I'm not a writer -- I don't pick my word phrases carefully enough. So revise the "rather suggestive" to "physically and symbolically evoking a certain sense of mood and foreboding". kthanx.
In the morning's first light, when the night's gloom releases to a foggy start, all the trees pointed left, to the north, where I knew not to look, but did anyway.
There stood the writer, waiting with pen like a dagger to stab at his story in violent fits, sprinkling the pages with verbs and nouns like the blood and flesh of a demon tamed.
I turned my back on him and fled to the sanctuary and turned to a romantic novel and safely pushed my face into the bosom of the heroine in total denial that I should be writing my own story.
And oh yeah, nice compilation of yesterday's responses.
Can I eat one more piece of chocolate cake?
Hey, who brought the chocolate cake?
Add me to the list of those who were disappointed about the "suggestive" really being "evocative." :-P However, I find encouragement in not being the only perv in the village though! ;-)
Nancy, perhaps you could simply tag posts like these as "resources" and put a link on the front page of your blog (and/or web site)? I do that with my fiction posts on TFM.
Morning, guys:
I don't know if any of you were fans of the Nero Wolfe series (produced by A&E and based on the stories of Rex Stout), but I LOVE them. Anyway, I've been working my way back through the series on DVD and I just watched an episode where Penelope Ann Miller plays an eccentric millionaire obsessed with fog and its potential danger. When I looked at Andi's lovely picture this morning, (after I sighed at its beauty) I cracked up.
If you like Timothy Hutton, he's at his comic best in this series and I highly recommend it. :)
Chocolate cake? Suggestive photos? Oh my.
I do like the idea of somehow keeping a list--it's tough to find markets for any writing, as we all know...
Gorgeous photo, Andi--but not what I was expecting either!
Okay, okay. People want suggestive, I'll give you suggestive.
LOL, andi!!!!
Now THAT'S what I call suggestive!
oh my goodness - sniff as centerfold.
Hey Nancy - where's the nice weather you were sending? Right now it's gray, rainy - but warm. Big thunderstorms last night.
Hi Beth, kb and everyone else!
I'm jealous, maryb - here I am in the land of the rainy season, and everything is brown and dying because we haven't had any rain.
Enjoy them for me!
Funny,Rick. You've earned your cake today.
Great suggestion, Far, thanks.
Andi? That's not merely "suggestive," that's an overt statement! :)
Maryb, be sure to look out the windows tomorrow, because the nice weather will come and go fast. We just had snow flakes. (How can you get any work done? I have to talk to a book club tonight and it KILLS me to have to turn away from the news.)
Hi, Conda and Kimberly! Kimber, "Timothy Hutton." I wonder what he's doing now.
Sniff's lettin' it all hang out, huh? I'm not gonna "sniff" it though!
It's been soupy-looking all day here, but the rain is supposed to come in tonight. If it goes away by morning, I might take the bike to work again.
I left the worst part of the insert for last — the front. Not because it's worse than the rest, but it has all this ironwork filigree to work around. The cone brush, I hope, will do what's needed. But if all goes well, I might start painting it by tomorrow.
Hi all!
Those are interesting suggestions from the comments.
I too was enjoying our spring weather after this long winter. ;-)
Hi all. Found this post from my Mandatory Vanity Search. I can't understate the value of podcasting your work, and submitting your work to a number of short-story podcasts. Variantfrequencies.com (multiple genres), escapepod.com (scifi), pseudopod.com (horror) and many others have wide-open submission policies. If you can learn how to record and post your own work, that's the best solution -- you're the editor, you publish any story you think is strong enough. It also creates a bond with the listener, because there is something special about hearing an author read his or her work. If you're not suited for recording, you can still submit stories to the above-mentioned markets. If they pick up the story, someone else reads it, and you have a multi-media calling card you can use as you build your name. A link to an audio recording of your story can be sent via email, posted in blogs or anywhere online -- it's instantly listenable and caters to the time demands of new readers. And if those readers like it, they are apt to simply copy the link and email it to their friends.
Look into it!
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