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Friday, January 09, 2004I'd forgotten how absolutely work intensive submitting your work is. I went to www.ralan.com (a huge favorite of mine) and began studying markets out, checking out guidleines, reading websites, trying to get a feel for each place. I have a three section spiral bound notebook. On the front cover I have the names of my short stories written down, with the word counts next to them. This way I have a handy little reference guide so that I can find out easy if my only romantic fantasy story is below the three thousand word requirement in the guidelines. (It wasn't.) The first section is the messiest...I've been trying to hock my short stories, on and off, for years. The first entry is March of 1999. The last? June 2001. Some of my stories are no longer formatted, and I have to go back and format them right. Another tip? Save all your stories as ASCII files...alot of email submissions, or online submission forms play havoc with those purty curly quotes and apostrophes. Also save them as RTF files. All my ready to be sent out short stories are in three flavors....wps, necause I use works, .rtf, so I can attach my stories to emails for those who accept it, and .txt. I also do a silly thing when I format each story...when they're all ready, I've been saving them, then decking them out really pretty with nice title fonts, drop caps, etc...which I then print for myself. I don't keep these results on the computer, since I would never send them this way to a publisher. That would scream newbie all over, and I'd rather like to trick them into thinking I'm not. :) So, my advice: Keep really good records. Really study out the guidlines, webpages, even copies of the magazines if you can get a hold of them to see if your story will fit. Have a hardcopy for yourself. I see hunting for a market the same way a archer hunts for prey...I watch, I wait, I study, I aim with care, and I conserve my arrows. Permalink Cindy scribed this at 9:45 PM 0 comments |