Get Published With Confidence: Essential Writing Advice
If you are a writer studying at the Studio, you know I’ve been promising a resource list to help ease your way toward submitting your work. It’s here, at last, and I must thank Joseph from Studio III, because he pulled it all together for me.
Many balk at submitting, due to the fear. IE: You might believe your work is not good enough yet, or you have a terror of rejection. But submitting, ironically, is a terrific way to get over your fears. Once you start the process, you’ll soon demystify it and discover submitting is just like any other aspect of writing—tedious, confusing, non-sensical, and then (when you suddenly get published), thrilling!!!
Below are three resources, along with Joseph’s words of advice based on experience:
1. Duotrope has a free trial but is a pay service ($50 per year) and you have the ability to filter what you receive. It’s nice because it separates into paying and non-paying markets, it lists contests, with entry or submission fees, genre, topic submission calls, and on and on. I guess the worst part is that it’s a pay service.
2. Submittable is a website for submission management, and it’s what most publications require you submit through. It’s free, and it’s really nice because it keeps track of your submissions for you — where you submitted, when, and the status (accepted, rejected, pending). They also have a newsletter with calls, but it’s not as helpful as the others (in my opinion):
3. Lastly, a place I get a lot of general literary news, articles, interesting published pieces, writing on writing, etc., is a place called Literary Hub. Again, it’s a daily email in which are usually 10 to 20 links to anything “literary” that’s out there. This is where I came across the article about the woman reading David Foster Wallace for the first time.
Thank you again, Joseph! Helpful.
To everyone who is reading this blog: SUBMIT!
