Submitting 101: Which Zine?
I’ve been editing The Harrow for over ten years, and this series will summarize the advice I’d give a beginning writer.
The first thing you need to do is decide where you should submit your short story (or poem, or article, but I’m going to assume genre fiction here). If you’re a beginning writer and haven’t been workshopping your fiction around university or prestigious literary writing critique circles, you’re probably going to want to start small and work your way up.
Now, if you have a lot of confidence that your work’s professional quality — maybe you’ve received positive feedback from those university or literary writing critique circles — then by all means, submit to a pro zine and see what happens. But for most amateur writers, starting small is a good way to make mistakes, learn the process, and gain confidence. So for them, I recommend aiming for the amateur paying market — zines that pay something, but not pro rates.
See, pro zines are swamped with submissions by writers that run the gamut from highly published professionals to complete beginners with more optimism than talent. Your chance of getting published in a pro zine is much smaller than your chance of getting published in a smaller paying zine, and if you’re trying to build up your writing credentials — I know how embarrassing it is in a cover letter to write, “I’ve never been published before, but…”! — then why not increase your odds of publication by aiming low and working your way up to the big time?
Two excellent places to go looking for potential markets for genre fiction are Ralan’s Webstravaganza and Duotrope’s Digest.
Once you find a potential market, visit the zine’s web page and check out the latest issue, if it’s available and free. (If it’s not, you may want to move along and try a different market at this early stage in your writing career.) Go on — skim a few of the stories. Maybe go back a few issues and check out those stories, too. Would your work be a good fit, or are you writing traditional horror while the zine publishes bizarro suspense? Or vice-versa? If your work’s very different from what’s being published in the zine, forget it. Go back and find a market that publishes the same kind of genre or style you’re writing.
If you think your work is going to be a good fit with the zine, read the submission guidelines carefully. This is the first point of weed-out for many zines. After all, if you don’t care enough to format your manuscript and email the way the editor wants them formatted, why should the editor care enough to read your manuscript? There are plenty of writers out there trying to get published; few zines go begging for submissions, especially if they’re offering any kind of monetary compensation at all. So read the manuscript formatting and submission guidelines and follow them carefully.
Okay. You’ve chosen a zine that’s a good fit with your work, you’ve prepared your submission exactly the way the editor wants it. Ready to go? Not yet. Let’s take a moment to look at that cover letter, in the next installment in this series.
drupagliassotti @ February 19, 2008