Information post: What's Duotrope Digest?

Duotroping to Get It Done

by 

Nora Weston

Five Sci-Fi poems, two horror stories, and one fantasy, flash fiction piece need a home. Options? Scour the Internet for hours only to bookmark four possible markets, or I can head over to Duotrope’s Digest, and do what I like to call duotroping. If you’re new to the writing and submission madness so many of us thrive on, then obtaining potential markets for your work is essential for success as a writer.

Duotrope’s Digest takes the frustration out of market hunts because it’s a free writers’ resource listing over 3300 current poetry and fiction publications. It’s an award winning site that also offers a free online submissions tracker for registered users, and the current listings are checked approximately once a week for accuracy. Specific markets can be found by isolating what you’re looking for by choosing your genre, subgenre, style, length, theme, pay scale, royalties, medium, and sub type.

That’s all good and wonderful, but there’s more to Duotrope’s Digest, especially for writers who’ve just embarked on a submission adventure. Click on “Stats,” located on the blue menu bar, and you’ll behold the magic of market statistics that highlights:

• The Swift- markets with the fastest mean average response times reported

• The Slothful - markets with the slowest mean average response times reported

• The Challenging- markets with the lowest acceptance percentages reported

• The Approachable- markets with the highest acceptance percentages reported

How does this help a new writer? The statistics make it easy to determine who you want to submit to. For example, if you’re looking for a quick response and a high acceptance rate, then look at market listings found in both The Swift and The Approachable. Static Movement is one such market with a quick response time of 4.3 days and a high acceptance rate of 92.86%.

Keep in mind, there’s more to submitting than finding a market with a quick turnaround and a high acceptance rate, because an outstanding market like Abyss & Apex is worth submitting to even though it has a current low acceptance rate of 0.32%. It just depends what you’re looking for while considering potential writing markets. At Duotrope’s Digest, you can check the pay scale, and if that doesn’t matter to you, then think about subbing to various markets to increase your chances of acceptances.

That being said...be ever so careful to check if your chosen market allows multiple and/or simultaneous submissions. Multiple means that market accepts more than one submission at a time, and if that market accepts simultaneous submissions, then authors are free to sub out that work of fiction, or poetry, to more than one market at a time.

If you visit Duotrope’s Digest, markets under six months old are called fledglings, and clicking on “Info for...” on the blue menu bar will lead you to editor interviews, market news, and general advice for writers, plus much more.

Ready to submit? Get it done with duotroping. It’s one of the best online market databases I’ve used. Do you use Duotrope’s Digest? What are some other market databases you’ve found helpful?

Thanks for visiting!

Nora Weston’s fiction and poetry slips in-between and all around science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her publishing credits include the anthologies Mind Mutations, Cyber Pulp’s Halloween 3.0, and Dark Pleasures. Other venues in print and online include; The Hacker’s Source, The Dream People, Hoboeye, Abandoned Towers, Lost in the Dark, Sputnik 57, Soul Engravings, and Decompositions. Recently, Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine, Worlds Within–Worlds Beyond, Trapeze Magazine, and Four and Twenty published her work. Melange Books has accepted The Twelfth Paladin for a May 2011 release. Nora has had the pleasure of reaching people through the airwaves on radio stations throughout the US, and episodes can be downloaded from Blog Talk Radio’s show Not Picture Perfect.