: How can I find and research places to publish fiction? Where are good places to publish everything from flash-fiction to novels or how can I find them? And also, if someone knows about a place

Vote Up Vote Down

The fiction you buy yourself is probably the most reliable way to discover who's publishing fiction. All that fine print on the first couple pages of most books? It's actually pretty useful information! And by going on to actually read the story, you'll get a good idea of at least one type of story they've bought in the past.

For digital versions, you may need to hunt a little harder as your e-reader may automatically open on the first page of the story rather than the first page of the whole document, but you can use the T of C or page back to find the information.

You can take a similar approach to short stories, etc. - look at who's publishing the ones you read.

For a larger overview of the market, I agree with Dale that Writer's Market and Duotrope are good sources. I'm not personally familiar with Ralan.com - it's apparently limited to speculative and humorous fiction?

You can also look at the bestsellers lists for your particular genre. Amazon breaks things down into pretty small sub-niches, so you can zero in pretty specifically on books that are like yours.

Regardless of where you find the publisher, you should check them out before submitting to them - you can go to Preditors and Editors, Bewares, Recommendations and Background Checks at Absolute Write, or just google the publisher's name plus "author complaints" and see what you get. (One or two disgruntled authors is pretty standard, but if there are loads and loads of complaints, beware).

You should also be aware that for novel-length fiction, the biggest publishers aren't set up to accept submissions directly from authors - you need to get an agent, first. Finding an agent is probably worth its own question and answers, so I won't get into it here.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

Here are some resources for finding publishers, magazines, and other fiction markets:

Writer's Market book or web site
Duotrope.com
Ralan.com (see the "markets" links near the top of the page)

(0)