3. MAKE A DETAILED LIST OF PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH YOU WILL SUBMIT

There are two main ways to find publications for your story:

  • If publishing your short story were your religion, then the annually updated Novel & Short Story Writer's Market could very well be your bible. It lists thousands of magazines, with short descriptions of each that should be enough for you to know whether you're interested in submitting there. Because you figured out in step two exactly what kind of magazine you want to publish in, you should be able to use the Writer's Market with no problems. Just flip open to the section on Small Circulation Magazines and start finding the ones that sound right for you.

  • You can find print and online magazines on the web; Google's magazine listing is a fairly comprehensive and well-maintained list of magazines with websites. Again, they are broken up into categories, and knowing what kind of magazine you're looking for will help you wade through the endless possibilities.

Writer's guidelines

Most of these magazines will make available a set of writer's guidelines that will let you know both what they're looking for and what format requirements they demand. They use these guidelines so that they have to do as little work as possible. Some of the guidelines are industry-wide:

  • Don't send your only copy of the story
  • Double-space your manuscript
  • Print on one side of the page in a clear and simple font (e.g., Times New Roman)
  • Include a brief cover letter (more about that in step 4)

Some magazines can be incredibly picky about some of the specifications (e.g., demanding paperclips rather than staples, or that your name not appear anywhere on the manuscript), so it's important that you get your hands on guidelines for every publication to which you submit your story.

Here are some other things to look out for:

  • One of the most common requests made in these guideline pages is for "No simultaneous submissions." That means that if you submit your story to that magazine, you're not allowed to send it to any other magazine until you get a response. Unlike the other guidelines, you can almost certainly ignore this. The odds of you getting published in even a single magazine are fairly low; two at once would be uncanny. If you do simultaneously submit to magazines that ask you not to, you risk blowing your relationship with the magazine (that is, the very special bond between an editorial assistant and the 438th story he's read this week). In the rare case that your story is accepted at two publications, just call or write all the other magazines considering your story and tell them not to bother. You probably won't encounter too much resentment. We recommend that you send to 10 to 20 magazines.

  • It's very important to look at the publication at least once before you send it in. Editors like to say that the number one thing they look for is familiarity with their magazine. Don't bother trying to read through 15 previous issues, though: as long as you have a decent idea of the kind of fiction that they print, you'll be fine.

  • Finally, we recommend that you remain realistic, but still only submit to publications that you respect. It's better to not publish a story at all than to see it in a crappy publication.

Here are some publications that you might want to consider:

The New Yorker
Pif Magazine
Zoetrope: All-Story (Francis Ford Coppola's publication)
Painted Bride Quarterly
GlimmerTrain (an online publisher)
Skive Magazine
Storyteller Magazine (Canadian)
Zyzzyva (a West Coast publication)
Conjunctions
Theatlantic.com (a lesbian publication)
The Believer Magazine
Libbon
Firstwriter.com (over 300 mags)