Friday Writer Roundup: The Submission Grinder

This is one I'm particularly in love with. Does anyone remember Duotrope? I mean, Duotrope's still around, but they finally had to become a subscription site in order to cover their costs. For a long time, I missed them greatly. There just wasn't a replacement.

And then, along comes the new kid. Diabolical Plots'Submission Grinder.

It's great. It's almost like having Duotrope back in my life, which pleases me to no end. For anyone who never got to use Duotrope, it was the king of submission aggregators (and still is, actually, but I prefer free, and I prefer to offer you free tools, when possible). It had all the submissions categorized by genre, sub-genre, theme, word count, payscale, type of project, and a handful of other things. It was glorious.

Well, The Submission Grinder does pretty much the same thing. It lacks the subgenre category, which is a slight annoyance on occasion, but it also let's you search for markets with certain qualifications, such as SFWA and RWA Qualified. Which is awesome, from time to time. And, as with Duotrope, you can register in order to help you keep track of your submissions, as well as improve the data The Submission Grinder has to draw from.

Now, as always, there are alternatives. If you just want a listing of open markets, specifically speculative fiction, head over to Ralan.com. It doesn't have a search function, but it has categories based on pay, as well as a category for anthologies, one for contests, and one for miscellaneous things, like flash, poetry, and audio.

Another one, specifically for any erotica authors out and about here on my blog, is ERWA's Author Resources. Now, don't go here if you don't want to risk some explicit language, but, if you writer erotica/erotic romance, it's a good place to find not only anthologies and magazines, but also full-length markets.

And of course, there's Duotrope. It's not exorbitant in any sense of the word. $5 for a month or, if you go for a year subscription $50. I know a lot of authors who will spend that much just on their own website hosting, if not more. If you plan to write, or find yourself writing, a lot of short stories, I would say it's a good investment to at least consider making.

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Voss