Publishing Advice for Writers

Video Transcript

"Now you've written something and you want to share it with the world. Well you can put it on your website and hope that somebody sees it or you can send it out to be published by someone who has regular readers. The biggest word of advice, the one that is most often ignored but it is also important is be professional. You are sending someone a business proposal. They may take it and they may not. It doesn't mean they don't like you, it doesn't mean you are a bad person, it doesn't even necessarily mean that your work isn't good enough, it isn't right for that market at that time. You are going to be rejected and you have to get used to it but who is going to be rejecting you or, in some cases, accepting your work. You have to find out what is the best place for you. See who is publishing work that is like what you've written, authors who are similar to you or if you are working in a genera what magazines or what publishers are interested in that genera science fictions, or fantasy, or westerns or romance or whatever. There are a lot of resources you can use and some of them are on the web. I like duotrop.com, writersmarket.com, you've got to pay to get in there but if you are going to try to make money at this it is very much worthwhile. If you are in science fiction and fantasy ralan.com is also very good and you can find other market lists, that's what these are called market lists on the web. So find out who is interested in what you are writing and they're the ones who are most likely obviously going to publish it. If you just send your stuff out at random you are just going to make enemies. Then the next stage of course is keep track of where you are sending stuff. You do need to know where your stuff is. Nowadays we don't only send a story or a poem or a book out to one publisher, we send a bunch of stuff out and if it is accepted at one place you have to tell all the other places that it is no longer available so you have to have records of that. Some people do it on index cards and just write down every submission on an index card and keep it in a little box. I use a program called Sonar which is similar to index cards except I don't have to worry about losing the index cards and it alphabetizes them automatically and it keeps track of how long stuff has been out which is very useful but you need some system, some people do it on a spreadsheet, whatever works for you is fine but you have to keep track of where everything is, send it to the right places and remember you are going to be rejected, everybody gets rejected."