Write Out of the Margins! Getting Published

Submit! Submit!
That's the essence of it.

Marketing stories:

The best first step in getting anything published is to invest in a copy of the current Writer's Market. The book contains useful articles on manuscript format and other things you need to know, as well as a fairly exhaustive listing of what publishers are looking for what material.

Some of the best online resources are:

There are increasing options for publishing books these days, including e-books. The above sites have information on all of the options.

How much you are going to be paid for a 1-5 page short story is going to vary extremely according to where you sell it. A literary magazine might pay you $10, or pay you in free copies; the New Yorker might pay you $250. Some publishers pay a flat fee for stories and some still pay by the word. The online sites may be the easiest to search for exactly the right publisher who is looking for your type of story and will pay for it.

If you want to be published professionally, do take the time to study professional writer's guidelines. Your manuscript will be competing with many others, and the more professional it looks the better chance it has of being read, and bought.

Marketing Poetry:

One of the best things to do if you are serious about becoming published is to get a copy of the current Poets Market. Poets&Writers magazine is an excellent resource also. Poets&Writers also has an online resource.

Please stay away from Poetry.com or any place that offers to print your poetry in an anthology they will sell you for $49.95 or more. These people do not value poetry, only money. Therefore they print anything, and the fact that they printed your poem becomes meaningless. There are some incredibly lousy poems published as "prize winners" at Poetry.com. There have also been excellent poems published at Poetry.com, which is heartbreaking, because those poems could have been published anywhere else in better company. Being printed at Poetry.com is not something you want to list in your publication credits. No reputable publisher respects it, and it will count against you.

There are a growing number of high-quality ezines publishing poetry on the web. Some of these are:
Some other excellent places online for posting and discussing poetry are:

You can find another list of online and print poetry journals at Kalliope workshop.

I hope that's enough to get you started. One psychological tip that's worked in our local workshop: set yourself a goal of 10 rejection slips. Getting rejection slips means that you are doing the work of writing and submitting your poetry. Going after rejection slips will encourage you to be persistent, and persistence is what will finally get you published.

Chapbooks:

The first step for most poets, after getting individual poems printed but before trying to market a book to a publisher, is to self-publish a "chapbook" -- a small folded-and-stapled booklet. This can also be done with prose, although it works best with a collection of very short pieces.

You can usually find a local printshop or copier service that will print, fold and staple such booklets for less than $1 a copy. If you are willing to do the folding and binding yourself, you can create a more appealing book for less cost. There are a lot of books out there, so anything that you can do to stand out helps!

Some references:

I have had 52-page 8-1/2 by 5-1/2 books printed locally for under $1 a copy in 500-copy lots. Hand-bound books are not only lower in cost, but they stand out more, if they are done on unusual paper in unusual ways. I've sold those 52-page books for $5 at a book fair, next to a small press selling tiny little handmade books with handmade paper covers or yarn or ribbon-sewn bindings, for $5 apiece. They outsold me 5 to 1.

NO Poetry.com!

Updated January 8, 2003