A Quick And Dirty Way To Get Your First Short Story Published

In late 2018, as a lot of people do, I wrote down a series of goals for 2019. One of those goals was to get a short story published. I’d previously self-published a novel (It’s A Long Way Down) and a poetry collection (Before Oblivion), but I feared rejection and as a result, was too afraid to submit the short stories that I thought were of some merit. But after writing seriously for the last five years, I thought it was about time I got over that fear if I ever wanted to be a working author. 

Out of twenty or so stories, I knew I had at least four that had a decent shot of getting accepted if I were willing to bear the brunt of rejection. 

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Now that’s important, because as much as I wanted to get published, I didn’t want to deal with rejection. I decided that the best way to get published was going to be brute force. I would submit to ten publications every Friday until one of them accepted me. 

This way, each submission would merely be transactional—a habit I had to fulfill on a weekly basis. I wouldn’t feel any sort of emotional attachment to the rejection. Those letters would come in and I would move on. In a way, I looked at rejections as a necessary step towards an acceptance.

You just had to get them out of the way. 

In December of 2018, I began submitting. About four days into 2019, I got my first short story accepted to a publication. Another month after that, I got my second short story accepted. 

Brute force worked. All I had to do is follow a weekly, unemotional system until a publication picked it up. Every Friday, for about an hour, while watching TV shows that I wanted to catch up on, I submitted short stories.

At first I simply googled “publications to submit short stories to” and filled out the first few lists I found. However, those quickly ran out, and I started forgetting if I had previously submitted to this publication or that publication. 

So I write them down on a google doc, with the date and the submission title. When I got rejected, I crossed them off the list. 

Shortly after that, I also discovered submission email lists like Literistic and Erika Dreifus’s The Practicing Writer, both of which send you a list of submission deadlines, grants, residencies, and more on the first of every month. 

However, I still found that I was running out one or two weeks into the month. That’s when I discovered The Submission Grinder. This website allows you to search for specific publications through genre, required word counts, electronic or postal, market qualifications, story length, minimum pay, and average response time. 

I was a big fan of this site, and started going through the lists in a clinical fashion. Admittedly, I didn’t have a problem with my system of going through The Grinder, submitting, and recording it into a Google Doc, but I kept hearing about the more professional Duotrope, so I signed up. 

I’ve only been on Duotrope for just over a month, but I’m a big fan. I love that you can record and track your submissions all in a single location. And while The Submission Grinder is great a large list of criteria-specific publications, Duotrope gives you newly opened submissions or submissions about to close.

I still use The Submission Grinder for specific use-cases, but I’ve incorporated all four (Literistic, The Practicing Writer, The Submission Grinder and Duotrope) into my weekly and monthly submission quest.