Adam Yeich, Consultant
So there is a rather large and close literary community here is Louisville, especially within the university, and this is something I was very happy to find here when I moved from rural Northeast Ohio. There are a whole bunch of things I could post
in this blog concerning writing, but I wanted to focus on something that would be especially useful to the future endeavors of the writing community here and at large. It’s a topic I didn’t have access to or knowledge about accessing until well into my own academic and creative writing career: submission and publication.
Publishing is the aspect of creative writing that is perhaps most daunting, especially for newer writers and/or writers trying to get their work out into the world for the first time. The Internet is HUGE, so how do you go about finding places looking for submissions? How do you go about finding an agent for your novel? I’m going to provide the links to a few resources to help you find the right home for your short story/poem/personal essay or whatever writing form you call your own.
First, we have Newpages.com, which is a news, information, and guide to calls for submission from contests to literary magazines, and all kinds of publishing options in between. You can set the filter parameters to whatever genre the piece of writing you’re looking to publish fits (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, art, photography, cross-genre, comics, reviews, interviews, and more), and then you can set the kind of publication you would like to publish in (book, chap book, magazine, anthology, literary website). This resource is a free guide to and compilation of calls for submission, including deadlines and costs for submission.
Link: https://www.newpages.com/classifieds/calls-for-submissions
A second resource is Duotrope. This is another guide to publication for writers and artists. This resource, according to their website, offers “submission trackers, custom searches, deadline calendars, statistical reports, and extensive interviews.” Duotrope is a more detailed and more user specific resource, so if that is of interest to any writers or artists out there, it is more than worth checking out. However, because of their status and reality as a more detailed and interactive resource, this one is not free. There is a free trial for users, but after that, anyone who finds it useful and wishes to continue using it will have two options for subscription. There is the $5/month subscription option or there is the $50/year option for those who know they plan to utilize the resource long-term.
Link: https://duotrope.com/
A third option I want to let you all know about is less directly about publishing and more directly about writing, though there are publishing opportunities that can extend out of this resource. The resource I am talking about is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. This annual event is best summed up by there website which describes the event as such: “National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing. On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30. Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought about writing a novel.” I have a friend who participated in this event a couple of years ago, and she told me it was the single most productive month she ever had in the three years (at that point) she’d been working on her novel. It is definitely worth checking out, and the writing you’ll get done…well nothing else compares. The event sets you up to crank out words and pages like you never thought you could.
Link: https://nanowrimo.org/
Some last minute advice on seeking publication: Always read VERY carefully the guidelines the publisher has set for their submissions. Check their word count, page count, line count (for poetry), check whether they want blind submissions, check how they want the manuscript formatted if they specify, and make sure to include a proper cover letter if they request it. These publishers likely receive thousands of submissions when their call goes out. They have a limited budget for paying staff to read pieces and will take any reason to have a few less to read. Not following their specified guidelines could get you thrown into that “not getting read” pile.
I hope you find this helpful toward getting your work out into the world, because you have a voice and the world should hear what you have to say with it.
University of Louisville Writing Center 