All those using Writer's Market!!

Don't get me wrong, I adore my Writer's Market. I love it's thick solidity and it's deep lavender cover and the assurance it promises, the years of expertise, the way they immediately flag those who aren't worth bothering.

But it is, after all, an expensive book. And for someone trying to sort through short story markets to determine which are best for my work, it's tedious. I have my huge tome propped up on my knees while I steadfastly enter listing after listing into an Excel file, always certain that I've missed something. I know I have. Writer's Market is limited by the weight the human arm can bear, and there are always publications missing.

I just discovered Duotrope. It's an online listing of short story, poetry, and long fiction markets, organized by a search engine, so that I can list my genre (literary), desired payment (semi-professional and up), and type of media (print) and it lists all the publications it can find, with little codes next to them to indicate what genres they accept, the length of submissions, payscale, and media type. If you select the publication you're interested in (say, Paris Review - hey, my ambitions are absurd) it will clarify further how to submit to that particular publication (by mail, with no simultaneous submissions and no reprints) along with statistics from the users of the site as to the percentage of rejections and acceptances. The best button, to my mind, is the one that allows you to eliminate publications that are not currently accepting submissions from your search. If a publication doesn't accept submissions between May and September, and you do a search in June, that publication will not appear in your search, and you won't waste time trying to determine if they are a fit market for the story you just finished.

It's a wonderful site, and it's absolutely free, and it organizes this information in just the way I would want it organized, if I had any idea how to write up a website, which I do not. I am glad Duotrope does this for me. This means I can put off learning HTML for another decade. Well done, Duotrope. Well done indeed.