Image source: Screenshot of the Submission Grinder homepage.
This year is the year that I began my fiction writing project in earnest. After getting laid off from my corporate job, so many of my colleagues and friends said that I should use my severance time (eight months) to try my hand at writing the novel I had always wanted to write. Eight months is a long time, surely enough time to at least get started on that novel, right?
Wrong.
I’m a Goody Two shoes. After getting laid off, I wasted no time and jumped directly into my freelance phase of my working life. The idea that I wouldn’t be bringing in any income outside of my severance made me feel nauseous, like I was teetering on a tightrope, about to fall into the abyss at any moment. So, I had no downtime as I polished up my resume, reached out to old colleagues, updated my resume, and then started reaching out with queries for freelancing work.
When I first started out, work was sporadic, so I did have some downtime to get started on a few short stories. But, now that I’m working with a great set of clients, I’ve got work projects coming in all of the time, and I’m exhausted at the end of most days. Not really a state of mind conducive to writing novels. However, I could still work on my short stories. Those were manageable with my new, unpredictable, work schedule.
As I started churning out a batch of stories meant to chill your blood and raise the hairs on the back of your neck, I was getting completely overwhelmed with the submission process. First I needed to even find the publishing markets to submit my stories to, and I was totally lost at sea. When I was a precocious teenager wanting to sell my knockoff version of The Hobbit, I remember buying the thick Writer’s Market volumes and working my way through the pages to find markets that would work. Sadly, the online version of that book died years ago after being purchased by Penguin Random House. And, I’m not about to purchase a paper book that is going to be outdated the second it’s published.
I then turned to good old Google and began with simple searches like “where to sell horror short stories” and “scary short story submissions.” I found a few markets and set up a Google spreadsheet. I even managed to get one of my stories published, “How to Find Killer Stock Photos.” But rejections soon vastly outweighed acceptances. After the rejections started flying in fast and furious, I quickly exhausted the short list that I had found on my own.
Thankfully, I found mention in one of those Google searches of a free online database called “The Submission Grinder.” This has been such a godsend, and I’m happy to share it all with you. This nonprofit organization exists off of donations and provides an easy-to-use interface that allows you to browse the couple thousand open markets it has listed. You can search by a variety of parameters including genre, turnaround time, length, whether it accepts simultaneous submissions, etc. If you create an account on the site, you can even keep track of the submissions you’ve completed and which ones have rejected or accepted your stories.
It’s a fabulous resource that has allowed me to submit even more stories, which has motivated me to keep working on my writing no matter how tired I get at the end of each day.
If you have other online market databases you’d like to share, feel free to share them in the comments below!
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