Anyone who has been keeping up with the blog lately will know that 2024 is my year of short stories. I’ve been writing short fiction and submitting it to publications. As a result, I’ve been using Duotrope quite a bit.
Duotrope includes a database of publisher information and a submission tracker for authors. (It’s not the only one: Submission Grinder and Chill Subs are out there too. Duotrope is just the tracker I’ve been using.) So, I thought I’d write about a few tips and tricks that I’ve discovered that make the submission process a little easier.
1. Search by Title
The Duotrope publisher search has a lot of options, so you might be surprised (as I was), that there is no option for the actual title of a publication.
For some reason, Duotrope decided that this belonged in its own section. The “Find by Title/Name” option in the Search menu gives you the option of inputting a partial or exact name. If you don’t quite remember the name of a publication, you can also try searching by alphabetical index.
2. Find Publishers for a Piece
Once you’ve added a story to your Duotrope submission tracker, it will show up on your “List of Pieces” page under Account -> Pieces.
When the piece is ready to be sent out, you can always search for publishers by manually entering the length, genre, and other parameters. But you don’t have to.
Instead, just click the “Publishers” link next to your story on the “List of Pieces” page. This will automatically populate a search with the information you’ve entered in the piece’s description.
3. Publishing News
The Publishing News section of the site shows publishers that have been recently added. Since brand-new publications are inherently less well-known, they may represent a good opportunity to get a story in front of editors that are hungry for content, with relatively small slush piles.
Publishing News also has a section for publishers that have recently opened to submissions, which can be another good way to find fresh options, especially when those publications are only briefly open to submissions.
4. Track Themes and Deadlines
Some publications are only open for submissions during specific windows. This is especially true for themed issues or anthologies. Duotrope can track these submission windows and deadlines.
On a publisher’s detail page, general submission windows will be listed under the Dates heading, and specific themes will be listed under Theme(s). In each of these sections, there will be a Track link and a colored bubble listing the number of Duotrope users who are already tracking.
In the Account menu, you can visit “Themes and Dates” to see a convenient list of everything you’ve chosen to track.
5. Deadline Calendar
Whether or not you’re tracking any Themes or Deadlines, you can access the Theme and Deadline Calendar under the News section of the menu, or from the link at the top of the Theme tracking page.
By default, the calendar shows a list of all the themed submissions and deadlines in Duotrope, but you can filter by genre, payment, or your personal favorite publishers.
6. Overdue Responses at a Glance
Duotrope’s Submissions view shows information for all your tracked stories that are out on submission. It includes a trove of information, including some that makes it easier to decide if you need to follow up.
This view shows how many days each submission has been out, as well as the average response time reported by Duotrope users and the estimated response time provided by the publisher. But the status icon also has four different color options for pending responses.
Normally, the status is gray, but it will turn yellow if the submission has been out longer than the normal response time, and red if it exceeds the publisher’s stated response time. In some cases the publisher may state that they don’t always respond to submissions or don’t respond to status queries. In these cases, the icon will turn purple.
Of course, as with all things, you should confirm the publisher’s information on their website before blindly trusting Duotrope. It’s usually right, but occasionally there are discrepancies.
7. The Reports
Reports may sound dry and boring, but there are a few useful lists available there.
Authors who are sick of waiting for long response times can check the 100 fastest publishers to respond. Looking for feedback? Check the list of publishers most likely to send a personal response. Just trying to get a story accepted somewhere? Consider the list of publications with the highest reported acceptance rates.
What Else?
Do you use Duotrope? Are there any interesting features I missed? If you use a different tracker, I’d love to hear what they offer that Duotrope does not. Let me know in the comments.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 2
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Rejections This Year – 4 (1 personal)
Let’s Get Personal
Two stories returned to me this week, both rejections. No problem; I’m developing that thick skin that’s needed for short story submissions. I get a story back, I send it out again, and I keep working on the next thing.
I was pleased to note that one of these rejections was “personal.” If you’re not familiar, there is a bit of a spectrum of rejections for short fiction. The typical rejection response says something to the effect of “Thank you for submitting, we read it and we decided to pass. Good luck elsewhere.” Short, polite, clearly uninterested. There’s really no useful information you can glean from a rejection like this. They might have hated it, or thought it was just okay. Because there are so many people submitting fiction, the vast majority of responses fall into this category, usually upwards of 90%.
However, many publications also have slightly more encouraging variations on rejection. These are usually along the lines of “We liked your story, but we have to reject it anyway.” That may mean that some editors/readers liked it and others didn’t, or that they liked it, but not as much as other stories. Unfortunately, the nature of the business is that a magazine will often have more good stories than they can publish.
A personal rejection is still not a sale, but it’s nice to have a magazine with pretty good pay rates (and thus, lots of submissions) telling me that they’d like to see more of my work.
Delving Into the Trunk
As I mentioned last week, I decided to open up my metaphorical trunk of old stories. It was fun to go back and look at how many stories I’ve written over the years. Not surprisingly, there are a number of these old short stories that are just not very good. They’ll be staying in the trunk. However, I was also surprised to discover several old stories that held up pretty well. In fact, I found three stories that I think are worth dusting off.
Admittedly, these stories need some work. I like to think that my skills are still steadily improving, and I immediately identified some opportunities to make these stories better. Two of them are too long and need better endings. Those will take a fair amount of effort. But the shortest one just needs some polishing.
That first old story is called “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk,” and I’ve already done one editing pass. I’ll probably do one or two more in the upcoming week, put it in the Critters queue for critique, and start hacking one of the bigger stories down to a manageable size.
I’m happy that I dug up these old stories, because one of my current weaknesses is my ability to edit. This gives me an opportunity to work on that.
Developing a System
It’s still the first quarter of the year, and I feel like I’m just beginning to hit my stride in this project. So far, I am really enjoying it, far more than I thought I would. There is a joyous momentum to writing and submitting short stories that is just not present when writing a novel. A novel requires so much focus for so long that it’s sometimes hard to remember what life was like before you began the project, and hard to believe that it will someday end.
Writing short stories is a kind of willful amnesia. It’s a burst of intense focus to make a little thing as perfect as possible, and then it goes out into the world to meet its fate. Maybe it will succeed, maybe it will fail. In the meantime, I get to make something completely different.
Researching markets and submitting stories might sound like an unpleasant distraction to writers who want to focus completely on craft, but I’m finding the logistics of submissions interesting as well. Even with tools like Duotrope or Submission Grinder, it’s a surprising amount of work to find the “best” fit for a given story, especially when you’re optimizing for themes and pay rates. I haven’t even dealt with simultaneous submissions or publications that ask you to wait some amount of time before submitting something else. It’s a lot to track.
Right now, I’m still figuring out what’s important and what isn’t, and each submission feels like a new little adventure. Eventually, I expect to develop a rhythm, and I’ll find that I’m carrying out the same tasks for each submission. When I get to that comfort level, I’ll write a post describing that process, and hopefully it will save some new author a little bit of effort when they decide they want to start submitting their own short stories.
Goals for Next Week
Get a draft of “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk” ready for critique.
Start editing another old story, tentatively titled “Red Eyes.”
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Total Rejections – 2
(I doubt anyone is setting their watch to my blog posts, but I wanted to note that I’ll be shifting these updates to Mondays, which fits better with my writing schedule.)
Second Rejection
This week marked my second rejection of the year, a response for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug, which had been out for about three weeks. I’ve now had one rejection for each story I’m submitting, which feels like a small milestone.
I’m learning to batch the effort of finding publications for a story by jotting down several options, so that when the story comes back to me, I can send it off again with less downtime.
Revisions for Pleasant Hills
After a couple weeks where I felt I wasn’t getting much done on this story, I tried to buckle down and get these revisions done. I even took a day off my day job to sneak in some extra writing time.
Revision is hard to quantify, especially with short stories. There are no word count quotas or chapters to measure progress against. I definitely get more done when I can set specific, measurable goals.
To that end, I made a checklist of problems to resolve and went through them one by one. Most of these items involved adding words, so the final step will be to trim, trim, trim.
So, as I suspected last week, I didn’t manage to finish. However, I’m close, and I should be done before the next update.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Rejections – 1
The First Rejection of the Year
“Tom, Dick, and Derek” garnered my first rejection of the year. This was a turnaround of only a few days, but it’s not too surprising since it’s a drabble and the magazine was only accepting flash fiction. I’m still not entirely sure of the viability of 100-word stories, but I’ll continue submitting to flash fiction publications and see how it goes.
Revisions for Pleasant Hills
This week, I re-read all the feedback I had received for “The Incident at Pleasant Hills” and condensed it into a page of bullet points of things to address, and several more pages of small line edits and suggestions for wording improvements. Most of these are straightforward fixes. A few are things that the story needs, and I just need to figure out where to put them. But there are a couple problems that I don’t have a solution for yet.
One of the things I need to improve about my writing process is handling revisions. I was hoping to be done or close to done with this story last week, but now that I’m in the middle of it, I’ll be happy if I can get it all done in the next week. I’m quickly realizing that writing short stories is a juggling act between keeping finished stories out on submission, and writing and editing new stories.
Themed Submissions
I mentioned last time that I was thinking about trying some themed submissions.
This week, I trolled the Duotrope listings, looking for themed submissions in speculative fiction genres that pay pro and semi-pro rates. I started with the basic search, and was annoyed to find no good search options to filter down to these. So I searched the listings and read the submissions pages. It was only after I had gone through twenty or thirty publications that I discovered Duotrope’s entirely separate page, the Theme and Deadline Calendar, which is designed for exactly this.
Having gone on my own search before discovering these listings, I know it’s not showing everything that’s out there. For example, Apex Magazine’s monthly flash fiction contest doesn’t show up. This probably comes down to how the listings are categorized.
If you’ve got the time and the inclination to write for these themed submissions, it might be worth doing your own research to track them down. However, the Duotrope listing is pretty good, and won’t suck up a whole afternoon.
With a few options in hand, I spent time brainstorming for the Parsec short story contest’s “AI Mythology” theme. I filled a couple pages with Story Engine ideas, but nothing that particularly excited me. I find Story Engine useful because it creates interesting constraints, but in this case, where the theme is already a significant constraint, I think it might be too much.
I plan to come back to these themed submissions every week or two and try other methods of brainstorming. It’s a good exercise to stay productive when I don’t feel like working on the stories in progress.
Fun Find – Plotopolis
Plotopolis is a new site for interactive fiction. It’s launching this winter, but open for submissions and proposals now. If you’re not familiar with interactive fiction, I wrote a post about it. It can be as simple as Choose Your Own Adventure-style branching narrative, or as complex and gamified as Fallen London, with character attributes and an inventory of items.
Interactive fiction has gained some acceptance as gaming in general has entered the cultural mainstream, but it remains a fairly small niche, so it’s nice to see something like this popping up. Hopefully they find their feet and are able to stick around.
Goals for Next Week
Only one goal this week: revise Pleasant Hills! I want to get this one done and out for submission.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions this Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Submitting a Drabble
I reviewed quite a few options this week, and ended up submitting my drabble, “Tom, Dick, and Derek,” to a magazine taking flash fiction submissions. I’ve never sent out a drabble before, and I have no idea whether the incredibly short format will be a disadvantage or not.
As a general rule, it’s a little easier to sell short stories than long ones. In the old days, when everything was on paper, this was a simple matter of limited pages. Magazines cost money to print, and there’s a limit to the number of words that will fit. In a world where many publications are entirely online or have a web component, the limiting factor might be attention, rather than space.
However, I suspect the general rule breaks down when a story gets below about 500 words. While there are plenty of places to sell flash fiction, when the story gets short enough, the format becomes a distinguishing feature. There are a handful of publications that specialize in drabbles, but they’re few and far between.
Critique Revisions
My short story, “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” is a more traditional short story at roughly 2000 words. I ran it through Critters a while ago, and got a lot of useful feedback. This week, I reacquainted myself with the story and began to re-read all that feedback, distilling it into broader issues and line edits. Hopefully I can finish those revisions this week.
Themed Submissions
While I was scanning publications in Duotrope this week, a few calls for themed submissions caught my eye. These are usually for one-off themed issues of magazines, but they can also pop up for anthologies or writing contests.
This is one of those things that I was aware of, but never really took seriously. Maybe it’s the difficulty of coming up with an interesting story for a specific prompt. Maybe it’s the concern that a story crafted to fit a theme will be harder to sell somewhere else if it’s rejected. However, if I’m going to be spending a year on short stories, it seems like a great time to get my feet wet.
I may spend some time brainstorming ideas for themed submissions this week, but if I don’t get around to it now, I’ll definitely try to dedicate some time later.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in progress – 1
Submissions this week – 0 (1 currently out)
An Unproductive Week, A Cool New Tool
Short post this week, as I ended up being busy and didn’t get much done in the short story department.
I did discover an exciting new tool, Chill Subs. It already provides a publication database and submission tracking tool for writers, similar to the Submission Grinder and Duotrope. Even better, it’s looking to unseat Submittable as the de facto tool for editors to receive and track submissions.
In recent years, Submittable has become almost ubiquitous among literary fiction magazines, pushing the transition from snail mail to electronic submissions for short fiction. But its pricing scheme is predatory. It charges not only a monthly fee, but a fee per submission processed. Since so many literary magazines live on the budgetary knife’s edge, this has helped to drive the now-common submission fees for literary writers hoping to get their fiction published.
I feel lucky to work in genre fiction. The fantasy and science fiction space has more than its fair share of technical people. We’re lucky to have developed tools like Moksha and the Clarkesworld submission system.
Chill Subs aims to bring its own submission manager to market some time in Fall 2024. Their delightful website even allows you to choose how optimistic you are about their chances, updating the language and graphics accordingly. It’s a small team operating with a surprising amount of transparency, and their love of the craft (and the authors and editors) shines through. I don’t know if I’m “confident AF,” but I really hope they succeed.
Goals for Next Week
Same as last time!
Revise “Pleasant Hills”
Research more publications and submit at least one drabble
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in progress – 1
Submissions this week – 1 (1 currently out)
Reviewing the Backlog
This first week, I spent some time reviewing short stories that I already have finished and edited.
“Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder-Drug” is a 1400-word modern fantasy story about a man in a drug trial who experiences an unexpected transformation. It has already been through critique and polishing, and is ready to send out.
In general, there tend to be more venues for shorter stories than longer ones. This is a nice length because most publications will accept it. It’s right on the edge of flash fiction territory (depending on your exact definition).
I recently gave a Critters critique that got me thinking about story titles and the ways they can add to the story itself. I spent some time rethinking this title, and while I didn’t end up finding one I liked better, it was still time well-spent. One of the most valuable things I get out of critiquing others’ work is new insights that I can apply to my own work.
I also have four finished drabbles that I’m fairly satisfied with. One is new, but the other three are already posted here on Words Deferred, so they could only be submitted to publications that accept reprints.
I don’t really know how easy it is to sell drabbles, since they’re so short. I’ve only seen them in a couple of publications that specialize in them, so my guess is that they are harder to place than flash fiction in the 500-1000 word range.
Submitting Stories
Duotrope is a great tool for narrowing down possible places to submit stories. I start by narrowing my search to the appropriate genre(s) and length. I also limit my search to professional pay rates. Well-paying publications are going to be more competitive, but you might as well try. If the story gets rejected, you can always submit to the semi-pros markets next.
However, that filtered list of publications is just the start of the process. The bulk of the effort is in reviewing those publications to find a good fit. After all, it’s a waste of time to submit a story to a place that doesn’t publish what you’re writing.
Duotrope has interviews with the editors of some publications, and these (usually) provide some insight into what they’re looking for. Ultimately, though, the best way to get to know a publication is to read it.
So, I read a few of their stories, if possible, and try to get a feel for what the editors like. Conveniently, a lot of publications these days are online, and it’s common for at least some stories to be available for free.
This all has the added benefits of immersing my brain in good short fiction and giving me a better understanding of what the current market is like in my chosen genres. It feels like a lot of effort now, especially if I decide that a publication isn’t a good fit for the story I’m sending out, but I hope that over time I’ll develop a good feeling for many of these markets, and I won’t have to do quite so much research.
This week, I only submitted one story, “Dr. Clipboard,” and that’s at least partly because I spent a few days deciding where to submit.
Work In Progress
I have one story in progress, a 2000-word sci-fi story called “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” about the detonation of an architecture bomb with the power to reshape a city. It has been through critique and needs some revisions before it’ll be ready to go out the door.
The final story I’ll talk about this week is one that I’m just starting, tentatively titled “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime.” It’s a science fiction story about a performance artist who uses time travel to create his magnum opus. I’m going to try to write this in the form of an interview with the artist’s former assistant.
It’s interesting to note that the core ideas of both of these stories came from my brainstorming sessions with Story Engine cards.
Goals for Next Week
Revise “Pleasant Hills”
Research more publications and submit at least one drabble
Early in the life of this blog, way back in 2020, I made my novel Razor Mountain a main feature. I thought it would be interesting to document the process of writing a book from start to finish, and put it out episodically. This had the added benefit of aligning my blogging with the fiction I wanted to complete. It kept me writing, and kept the blog active. I believe the tech bros call this “leveraging synergies.”
However, all good things come to an end, or at least slow to a crawl. I’m still in the process of revising Razor Mountain, but I’ve found that there just isn’t as much worth writing about in the revision process as there was when I was working toward a first draft.
In November, I participated in NaNoWriMo, and it turned into a similar project almost by accident. I started writing about the process every day, and decided to stick with it for the entire month. The result was an extremely smooth NaNoWriMo experience, where I was able to reflect on what I was writing.
2024
Now, a new year has been released from a secret compartment in the ceiling, and threatens to roll over us like that boulder from Indiana Jones. I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions, but I do have a new goal for the year, which is both simple and difficult: write, edit, and submit as many short stories as possible.
Since it has worked well for me with other projects, I’m going to try blogging my way through this as well. This is self-serving: I want my writing here to encourage me to accomplish my fiction goals. The current plan is to do weekly updates, but I may adjust that depending on how much I have to say.
As usual with the traditional publishing process, rejection is the norm. So once a story is out for submission, it will likely rack up a number of rejections. Even for successful short story authors, this is pretty normal. It’s rough out there.
As with my previous projects, my goal is to provide transparency for the curious. I’ll be honest about my successes and failures, and I expect there to be plenty of failures. But it should be fun, and I have no doubt I’ll learn a lot in the process.
The Short Story Series
As long as we’re talking about short stories, I’ll take a moment to plug my series about writing short stories. I wrote these in mid-2022. I’ve been thinking about a project like this for a while.
One of the goals of Words Deferred has always been to open up my writing process for everyone to see. I don’t claim to have the perfect process, and I think the best way to write will ultimately be different for each writer. However, there’s surprisingly little talk among writers about the day-to-day details of what writing is like, and I want to do my small part to change that.
As the end of the year approaches, I thought it would be interesting to look at the writing I’m doing and the tools I’m using in 2022. Then I can look back on this next year and see how things have changed, or if they’ve stayed the same.
Ideation
Writers are known for carrying little notebooks and jotting down ideas whenever and wherever they appear. In the past, I’ve carried pocket-sized notebooks, but I went entirely digital several years ago.
My digital notebook of choice is Microsoft OneNote. I have separate tabs for general brainstorms and ideas, short stories, novels, blog posts, lists of books I might eventually read, and more. When I need to take notes on the go, I just jot them down on my phone. OneNote synchronizes automatically between phone and laptop, with only occasional weird formatting issues.
My OneNote. There are a lot of pages hidden under those headings…
Novel Writing
For novels, when I’m ready to go beyond the idea-gathering stage, I move all my notes from OneNote into Scrivener.
As far as I am concerned, Scrivener is the best novel-writing application out there. Where it really shines is in the way it lets me split a big project into nested parts. I split Razor Mountain into folders for each act, then split out each chapter into its own document under those folders. I have separate sections for major characters, locations and other research notes.
With a click of a button, I can look at the chapter summaries on a cork-board view, and I can drag-and-drop chapters in the document tree to rearrange them, something that has been really convenient as I’ve merged and moved chapters in Act II. Scrivener also has built-in support for “snapshots,” which I use to save each revision of each chapter. I typically save at least a rough draft, a second draft after some editing, and a third draft once I’ve gotten reader feedback.
To ensure that my work is fully backed up, I save my Scrivener files to Dropbox, which copies them across my computers and my phone for safe-keeping. I do have the mobile version of Scrivener, but I almost never use it. I love taking notes on my phone, but I do not enjoy long-form writing on that tiny keyboard.
Scrivener’s editing and cork board views.
Serial Publishing
I’m publishing Razor Mountain as a serial in three places: here on the blog, on Wattpad, and on Tapas. I chose to do this so that I could get a feel for the different platforms, and to try to increase the visibility. However, I haven’t done much to promote the Tapas or Wattpad versions, so pretty much all of my regular readership is on WordPress. I keep telling myself that I’ll eventually put some love into Tapas and Wattpad, and that may actually happen at some point. Either way, I’ll continue on all three until Razor Mountain is finished.
Because I’m posting to three platforms, my process for this is a little bit insane. It goes something like:
Write the first draft and first round of edits in Scrivener.
Copy it to Google Docs for easy beta reader feedback. Fix the formatting that doesn’t transfer nicely.
Make changes based on feedback in Scrivener, and decide how to split the chapter into multiple posts.
Copy it to a OneNote template with the brief description at the top and links to previous/home/next at the bottom.
Copy from OneNote to WordPress. Schedule the posts.
Copy from OneNote to Wattpad. Fix all the formatting that doesn’t transfer nicely. (Wattpad has no way to schedule posts.)
Copy from OneNote to Tapas. Fix the formatting that doesn’t transfer nicely. Schedule the posts.
On the scheduled day, chapter parts automatically post to WordPress and Tapas.
I have to manually post the saved draft to Wattpad. I also have to update the previous/next links in the WordPress post, and I need to add links to the Razor Mountain home page. Depending on how busy I am, I sometimes forget to do these things, and I typically don’t catch it until I start posting the next chapter.
Some of this complexity comes from posting in three places, each with their own idiosyncrasies. It’s obnoxious how often copy/pasting between tools and websites causes the formatting to be lost. It’s doubly obnoxious that Wattpad doesn’t let me schedule posts.
I suspect there is probably a way to add WordPress links (previous/next and home page) that point to a scheduled post and only work once the post is “live.” I haven’t spent the time to figure it out though.
Short Stories
The majority of my writing time this year went toward Razor Mountain and the blog, but I have managed to sneak in a few short stories.
For microfiction, drabbles, and flash fiction, I often just work in OneNote. Unlike novel writing, I sometimes do work on short short stories on my phone, and I typically do not need organizing features or formatting more complex than italics and bold.
For longer stories, I usually use Microsoft Word on the laptop. Oddly, I copy to Google Docs for easy beta reader feedback, but I never really write in it. I’ve been using Word for years and I’m comfortable with it.
For all of my stories, I save everything to Dropbox to make sure it’s backed up. When it comes time to find places to submit stories, I use Duotrope.
Blogging
My blogging schedule has fluctuated over time, but these days I try to post Razor Mountain chapters every other week.
Unless a chapter is around a thousand words or less, I will break it into 2-3 parts of about a thousand words each. I’ve read that 500-1000 words is the sweet spot for keeping readers’ attention for blogs, and a slim majority of my WordPress readers are on mobile, where a post of that size feels bigger on the page than it does on a full-size monitor or tablet. Tapas and Wattpad don’t have that kind of detailed dashboard for writers, but they do say that most of their readers are also on mobile.
Along with the chapters themselves, I write a development journal for each Razor Mountain chapter. Sometimes I post the chapter parts earlier in a week (e.g. Wednesday and Thursday), and the development journal on Friday. If I have three parts in a chapter or get a little behind, I will sometimes post the development journal the following Monday. I used to worry about maintaining an exact schedule, but nowadays I just aim for a schedule and adjust as needed.
I write blog posts unrelated to Razor Mountain on the “off” weeks, and sometimes for the Monday of Razor Mountain weeks as well. I’ve been blogging long enough now that I have a few ongoing series of posts, so I will often mix one of those posts with something stand-alone in a given week.
I’ve gotten in the habit of posting reblogs every other Wednesday. Writing three blog posts in a week is too much for me, and reblogs are low-effort (while hopefully still interesting content). They occasionally result in some cross-pollination with the other blog’s readership. Their main purpose is to serve as a good motivation for me to regularly read other writing blogs. I maintain a list of interesting articles and blog posts in my OneNote, and trawl through them for these reblogs.
For the header images on my posts, I use Pexels. I don’t usually do any picture editing apart from cropping. If I have a really difficult time finding an image that I’m happy with, I will occasionally check Unsplash. Both of these sites offer pictures that are free to use and do not require specific license language to be displayed.
(If you’re blogging, please do yourself a favor and always check the licensing and make sure you’re attributing correctly. There are trolls out there who will sue you for hundreds of dollars, even for such non-crimes as using the incorrect version of Creative Commons. And if the image isn’t licensed for your use, don’t use it!)
I make it easy on myself and always use the same cover image for Razor Mountain chapters, and pictures of mountains for development journals. For all other posts, I just search for terms vaguely related to the content.
I always write my blog posts in OneNote, do an editing pass, and then copy/paste them into WordPress. I almost never publish a post immediately. Instead, I schedule them for 7:00am CST on a subsequent day—usually Monday, Wednesday or Friday.
Tracking
My latest endeavor is to try to get a better understanding of how I’m using my writing time. Lately, I’ve been using ClickUp. I like it for charting “deadlines,” even if they’re entirely self-imposed, and laying out a schedule of things I intend to write.
And even though I’ve explicitly said in the past that I don’t want to end up tracking things in Microsoft Excel, I’ve been doing a little bit of tracking in Excel. I haven’t found a great way to roll up the time spent on different projects in ClickUp in a way I like. Excel makes it dead simple to make a few columns and track days, projects and half-hour increments. It’s all compact and easy to eyeball, and there’s always an easily searched website that will tell you how to translate a few columns into an interesting graph, even if Excel formulas make me feel a little dirty.
This tracking stuff is still in flux, and I expect it to change. In every other respect I am an old man, set in my ways. It’ll be interesting to check back in next year, and see if anything is different.
This post is already much longer than I planned, so I’ll end it here. Hopefully it was interesting to see how another writer works. If you’re an author who writes about your own process, I’d love to read about how you’re working. Leave a comment or a link to a post of your own.
It’s the ultimate crossover event! Today we have a continuation of my short story series, as well as my Reference Desk series detailing useful tools for writers. Get ready for a battle of publication catalogues and a submission tracker showdown!
Finding the right place to submit your short fiction isn’t trivial. Back in the olden days, you might have to subscribe to an actual dead-tree trade journal just to have a somewhat up-to-date list of publications. These days, the internet gives us some easier options.
The two most popular submission tools for short fiction writers are Duotrope and Submission Grinder. Both of them are designed to help you find markets for your stories and track your submissions. Today, I’ll be comparing some of the different features between these two tools to give you a better idea of which one you might want to use.
Price
Let’s get this out of the way up front. Duotrope is a paid service. After a 7-day free trial, it costs $5/month or $50/year. Submission Grinder is completely free to use, although they have numerous options to donate.
If you don’t want to pay or can’t afford it, Submission Grinder is the tool for you.
Listings
Duotrope maintains listings of publishers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and visual art. It also lists literary agents for fiction writers. Submission Grinder maintains fiction and poetry listings.
At the time of writing, Duotrope lists 5,027 fiction markets. They claim that they keep their listings accurate and up-to-date by checking each active listing for changes about once a month. They also run more thorough check twice a year, contacting the editors or agents if anything appears to be inaccurate or if there are signs that the market may be dead or on hiatus. (Websites not being updated is honestly a pretty big problem with small markets.)
At the time of writing, the Submission Grinder has 2,669 listings for fiction and poetry. It’s not entirely clear from the webpage how the listings are kept updated, although there are links for users to suggest a new market listing or suggest a correction, so it seems to be mostly crowdsourced.
Submission Tracking
Both tools let you
Add stories to your tracker
Add submissions for a story
Mark a submission as accepted, rejected, or no response
Track and search personal statistics
Track deadlines
Both tools also aggregate the statistics across their user base. This allows them to show information like what percentage of submissions are accepted or rejected by a specific market. They both have anonymized feeds of recent activity.
Duotrope has a plethora of statistics*, including the markets that are fastest and slowest to respond, and those that are most or least likely to accept (or even respond!)
*Note: you can see the list, but not the actual statistics, without a subscription
Additional Features
Both tools have an optional newsletter with new listings and other publishing news.
Duotrope has transcripts from hundreds of editor and literary agent interviews—possibly useful for getting a better idea of what your favorite market is looking for, or just general good practices.
Duotrope has some basic guides for writers, especially around submitting your work. It also has guides to using their various tools.
Takeaways
Honestly, both of these tools get the job done. They make it easy to search a lot of different markets, and to track your submissions as you send them out.
Overall, I do find Duotrope to be a little bit nicer. It has a few more features and a little more polish, but that’s to be expected when they have a subscription fee. If you don’t mind spending the money, I think Duotrope is good value for the cost.
Submission Grinder feels a little more like a community project, crowdsourcing market info and relying on donations. Maintaining a popular tool site takes work, and based on their Patreon, I think Submission Grinder is powered more by love than money.
If you have a story or two that you’re looking to send out, you should definitely try out one of these services. It will make it a lot easier to find ideal markets and keep track of what gets sent where.
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