How to Get Published

When new writer’s fail to be published it is often because they break the golden rule of being published. You have to submit to get published. It looks so easy on paper but to put it into practice is one of the hardest things a writer has to do. There are a lot of things you can do to help you get over the sting of rejection and actually increase the chances you will be accepted for publishing. For this article I’m going to discuss getting short stories, articles, or poetry for magazines that from here on out will all be referred to as articles.

1. First and foremost you need to do is to make sure that the article you’ve written is “publishable”. Make sure you have gotten all presentation errors dealt with (typos, punctuation, grammar, capitalization,…etc).
Post your piece for critique on a writer’s forum, present it to your writer’s group for critique, or give it to beta readers to critique (not members of your own family but friends, teachers, or someone who can give you an unbiased response).

2. Do your research. Writer’s Market, searchable databanks, writer’s forums, writer’s websites…etc, to find magazines that are looking for the type of article you’ve written. I can’t even begin to tell you how much time and heartache you’ll save yourself if you do your research and rule out all the editors that you know up front will reject you. Resist the urge to spam editors. It just wastes your time and postage and it can really get you off on the wrong foot with some editors for a long time.