How to Publish Your Science Fiction Story: A Step by Step Guide

At this time you should have a pretty damn good story on your hands. There are two directions you could go from here. If you have rewritten the story so much that it barely even resembles the original story. It’s a good idea to repeat Step 3. If the story is pretty much the same, with all the major trouble spots reworked, then you can probably move on to Step 5. Trust your own judgment. Does this story feel close to perfect or are you unsatisfied with it?

Step 5: Find a Market

To find an appropriate market for your story, you will want to do some research. Browse through a copy of Writer’s Market or peruse the Market Listing page to find a market you think would be suitable. Look at the accepted word counts and the types of stories they are looking for.

Obtain a copy of the publication’s writer’s guidelines. Most magazines publish this on their website. If not you might have to send a business sized SASE. Reading the guidelines will help you determine if this is an appropriate market or not, but it is not all you should do.

You should also try to read through some of the stories that they publish. You will be able to get a pretty good feel for the sorts of things the editor buys. If your story fits in, great! Send it in. If not, look around for a more suitable market.

If you blindly submit stories without doing any research into the market, you are wasting your time. Taking a little time to research will pay off in the long run.

To Be Continued . . .

Come back next week for Part 3 of this article.

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