Nathan Bransford - The Forums

I've got a small collection of short stories that I think are decent, but I've never tried to get them published. For the past year I've devoted all my writing research toward getting a novel published, so I don't really know where to start when it comes to short fiction. Me personally, I could use help with sci-fi/fantasy and southern literary venues, but I welcome any advice. Other writers I'm sure would also be interested.

First off, should you bother getting an agent for short fiction?

Agents have little interest in marketing short fiction. There's not much money in it and digest markets deal directly with writers anyway. A reason why agents do sometimes have interest in short fiction is publishing short fiction keeps a name-brand author in the limelight between novels, which is a good reason for novel writers too.

Duotrope.com tracks short story markets and indexes them according to genre, length, pay, and markets. Each entry has useful information about the market and links to markets' pages. Once at a digest page, navigating to their submission guidelines is by a link titled submission guidelines or in many cases a contacts page, or in some cases buried somewhere in the maze of the site.

http://www.duotrope.com/index.aspx

I'll echo polymath's endorsement of duotrope. It can be a little tedious sorting through things without a high-speed internet connection, so I would recommend a very tight search to start with and then expand from that if you don't find something promising.

Ah, cool. I'd never heard of Duotrope, but it's already giving me a wealth of options to pursue. It's dang handy.

Many thanks.

I know a couple of literary writers who signed with an agent based on their short stories. The agents signed with them because their short stories were so good, then advised them to work on a novel to submit to publishers along with their book of short stories.