The Best Way to Submit Your Short Story to Publications
This submission service for short story writers will guide you through it
Submitting your short story to publications is still the best way to (start) building your writing career. There are hundreds of journals in the US alone.
Authors like Bukowski and Stephen King started their careers getting their short stories published in magazines like Esquire or Playboy. Their work was noticed and they got the traction they needed to land publishing deals for their future work.
The question is: what is the best way to submit your short story to journals? Finding the right journal for your work is time-consuming, especially if you have no clue about the publication landscape.
You can browse Writer’s Market to find the ones that fit your writing. Through websites like Submittable, you can upload your story to these publications. I’ve done this with about seven of my short stories. I had no idea what to do or who to approach. I picked a handful of journals I loved, but in hindsight, they didn’t seem to be the best fit for my work.
What if there’s a service that uses the perfect algorithm to pinpoint which journals are a good fit for your story, run by people who understand the literary world? Enter Submitit, a full-service submission company. They handle the submission process for you, offer professional editorial packages, and select the best journals for your story.
I tried their service and Erik from Submitit helped me to not only select 20 journals that would be a match for my story, but he also proofread and critiqued it wonderfully too. Submitit saved me time and guesswork. Now all I can do is wait if the journals Erik approached on my behalf are interested.
Erik is a writer himself, and through the years he’s submitted many stories and was successfully published in coveted journals. It wasn’t an easy road though. Early on he made many mistakes which you can avoid submitting your short stories:
- He only submitted to top journals like The New Yorker or McSweeney’s. Naturally, all his efforts were fruitless
- He tried submitting to every journal in the world. A time-consuming strategy with…
