by Suzanne Lieurance
One of the most common reasons writers don’t submit isn’t that they don’t want to. It’s that they don’t know where to send their work — and the research feels overwhelming before it even begins.
The literary market is large and varied, and no writer is expected to know all of it. What you are expected to do is read in the spaces where you want to publish. That’s where market research starts, and it’s also the most enjoyable version of the work.
Start Here
Begin with the publications you already know. Think about the journals, magazines, or websites you actually read — the ones whose sensibility feels like kin to yours. Those are your first targets, because you already understand what they publish and why. A submission to a publication you genuinely read is almost always better calibrated than one sent to a name on a list.
From there, you can expand. When you find a piece you love in a publication, look at where else that writer has been published. Writers who produce work similar to yours often have similar publication histories, and those histories are a map of where your work might belong.
Tools like Duotrope, The Submission Grinder, and Poets & Writers are useful for finding markets by genre, word count, and response time. But use them as a starting point, not a substitute for actually reading the publications. Submission guidelines tell you the mechanics. Reading an issue tells you the soul.
Pay close attention to what each publication says about itself — and what it doesn’t say. A journal that describes itself as “experimenting with form” wants something different from one that calls itself “a home for accessible literary fiction.” Both are useful signals about fit.
The goal isn’t to find the most prestigious publication. It’s to find the right one for this particular piece. A piece in exactly the right publication — even a smaller one — reaches the readers it was meant for. That’s the whole point.
Start with one. Read one issue. Send one submission. Then do it again next month.
Try it!
BTW – Visibility as a Writer is the theme all month at Write by the Sea. Read the June Writing Challenge here to find your starting point and your practice for the month.
Suzanne Lieurance is the author of over 40 published books and a transformational Law of Attraction coach for writers who are ready to stop waiting to feel like the real thing. At Write by the Sea, she guides writers through the identity shift that changes everything — not just the writing, but the whole life built around it. She is the publisher of Manifesting Monthly magazine and the host of Monday Morning Manifestors.
