Hi, hello, and howdy!

This is a mini-post on what to keep in mind when submitting to magazines!

Specifically, I’ll be talking about maintaining and updating my magazine posts, and why you should carefully follow the guidelines.

This was a disclaimer I originally had in my horror magazine list, but I felt it bogged down the readability of the post a bit. Plus, I felt it would be redundant to copy and paste this disclaimer into every magazine list I made.

So I decided to move it here as its own post! That way it won’t be in the way of the lists themselves, but it’s still easily accessible through a link in those posts.

Hopefully, that’ll make the lists more digestible and neat.

If you’re wondering where you can find these mythical magazine lists, here are a few I’ve written:

Keep In Mind

Not all submission periods will always be open.

BUT you can write something now, and hold on to it until the submission period is open.

That’d give you a good chunk of time to write your story, and then leave it alone for a while. That way you’ll have fresh eyes to edit when you submit.

Also, note that I do my best to vet magazines on my lists, but it’s important for you to do your own research as well.

If you wanna have a place to start, here are three websites I use to look up more information on magazines.

The Grinder

Absolute Write forum (They have a post with a list of publishers)

There’s also Duotrope, but it’s better to look up magazines through a search engine than going to their website.

Outdated Information

Some of the information on my lists of magazines is gonna end up outdated. As of August 2022, I’ve updated them to the best of my knowledge, but that could change at any point.

Submission periods can sometimes be hard to list because not everyone has a set reading period, a magazine could change its reading period, or it may not list any dates if they’re currently closed.

The types of writing they accept could change (e.g. no longer accepting poetry), or their word count could be adjusted.

A magazine’s pay rate could go from $0.04 per word to $0.05 per word.

A lot of things can change throughout the year, and I can’t always keep up with updating posts. That’s why it’s really important to check out the magazines’ websites and see their guidelines.

These lists are to help share magazines you may have been unaware of, and share some general guidelines to pique your interest (or find your deal breakers).

Magazine Guidelines

All magazines have different guidelines, formats, and genres they’re looking for in writing.

They use these guidelines to help them streamline the submissions process, and have everything run as smoothly as possible.

When they aren’t followed, it brings the process to a screeching halt.

It’s important to remember that magazines get SO MANY submissions, and they don’t all have big teams of editors that can take their time on hundreds or thousands of submissions.

Sometimes they’re running on a handful of volunteers.

So please, please, PLEASE look at their guidelines, check out their archives, and follow their rules as best you can.

It’ll make the editors’ lives SO much easier. Plus, it shows that you’re really interested and invested in the publisher, and they’ll (hopefully) want to do the same for you.

Following the guidelines can be the difference between acceptance or rejection.

And I’m pretty sure you want the former over the latter.

Thanks for reading, and happy writing!