Navigating the Online Publishing and Promotion World
Over the last years, it has become respectable and even desirable to publish online and in ebook format. Traditional publishers, now often called legacy publishers, are scrambling to figure out how to survive in the digital age. With the mushrooming of digital opportunities, websites, publicists and book industry people are dedicated to helping authors find quality venues. Here is a list with links that I believe you’ll find helpful for understanding and using the vast opportunities that exist for publishing poems, essays and fiction as well as books online and promoting your work online, as well.
I. First of all, you might want help determining quality online journals:
Writer’s Relief — The short article suggests 14 criteria for you to consider the quality of an online literary magazine.
Litline — their guide to online literary journals
NewPages.com — their guide to online and print literary journals
EveryWritersResource.com — their guide to print magazines that offer online submissions
Esquire — their guide to “great” online literary magazines
World-Newspapers.com — their international guide to literary magazines
PlacesForWriters.com — their guide to Canadian literary journals
PoetrySuperhighway.com — their compendium of over 400 online publications that feature poetry
Rutgers University — Professor Emeritus Ernie Crew’s “continuously compiled” list of poetry publishers who take electronic submissions
Poets & Writers has a list that is enormous and includes print journals as well.
II. Browse online journals and consider submitting your work:
Flash Fiction:
Wig Leaf — features stories up to 1000 words. You can submit three stories online in one Word document.
Flash Fiction Online — You can subscribe for free and they are open for submissions of stories up to a 1,000 words in length.
Everyday Fiction — This site invites participation in rating stories of short lengths in a variety of flash fiction subgenres.
Traditional short fiction:
Narrative Magazine — This digital magazine is dedicated to publishing fiction by established writers and newcomers in digital form. Subscriptions are free. You can learn about their submission process here. That page describes the different categories of the fiction submissions.
Strange Horizons — is a digital magazine dedicated to publishing speculative fiction (from their website: a vibrant and radical tradition of stories that can make us think, can critique society, can offer alternatives to reality. Speculative fiction stories help us to understand our past and imagine our future.
Personal Essay:
Hippocampusmagazine — the heart child of an MFA graduate Donna Talarico who wanted to create a magazine that would keep memories alive, publishes personal essay, memoir excerpts and flash nonfiction as well as experimental forms of nonfiction.
Tiny Lights Flash in the Pan — seeks “pieces of writing that may have first appeared on a napkin, in a journal, or as a dream. 500 words or less, they are impossible to explain or categorize, and equally impossible to forget.”
Brevity Magazine — publishes well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form.
Poetry:
Blood Orange Review — requests submissions on themed issues and publishes personal essay and fiction as well.
Blood Lotus Journal — publishes poetry and fiction and a category they call “grey area” as it is becoming hard to distinguish between poetry and fiction at times.
Blue Pepper — is Australian poet Justin Lowe’s endeavor dedicated to publishing poetry with a bite.
III. To learn about digital publishing, follow Jane Friedman:
Here’s one article in particular you may enjoy by her:
Ten Questions to Ask Before Committing to Any E-Publishing Services
And here’s another by Ms. Friendman: The Future of Publishing.
You can also follow her on Facebook and derive benefit from her experience.
IV. To keep in the loop with online promotion ideas for when you have a book:
Follow active and informative publicist Penny Sansevieri on Facebook.
You an also benefit from the information she shares on her website Author Marketing Experts.
V. To self-publish digitally investigate:
Smashwords — This is a well known sight for self publishing your digital book and listing it at a reasonable price.
Amazon Kindle — The Kindle singles program offers you a way to publish a short manuscript or an excerpt from a longer one that you may still be working on. You can begin to build an audience.
Here’s a Wrtiting It Real article by Christi Killien, an author who used the Kindle Singles program and Smashwords.
VI. Here are two digital presses looking for book-length work:
Open Road Media — Kit Bakke, who is also a Writing It Real contributor and one of the authors of a title Open Roads published, Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices, says of her experience that the book Open Roads produced is reasonably well done and made several thousand dollars so far for her group The Seattle 7, through which seven Seattle authors have come together to support literary philanthropies.
Booktrope is a press that offers an alterative to traditional (not called legacy) publishing.
VII. Once you’ve published a book, promote your work online by visiting and joining sites such as:
VIII. To build an audience even before you have published a book but certainly once you have, blog to build a platform for your work and garner attention. There are many sites to choose from:
OpenSalon.com — a publishing platform with a built-in audience, it was developed for writers, photographers and artists “in need of a smart home for their work (and not one of those giant, anonymous blog networks), and who are hoping to be rewarded for it.”
Blogger.com — tauted as a “streamlined streamlined blogging experience that makes it easier for you to find what you need and focus on writing great blog posts.”
WordPress — a popular choice for building a website for a blog.
An action you can also take to build an audience and some notarity is to guest blog on others’ sites. Search for them by the topic you are prepared to write about and email to ask if they’d like a guest blog on a topic from your book. Here’s a community of guest bloggers that helps you do this.
To let people know about you: Facebook pages, Linked in networks, Twitter (which can be linked to the others), and online radio programs are helpful and can garner fans and colleagues interested in the topics you write about.
Remember to put your area of interest (eventually your book title) under your email signature; better yet, create an email address with a name that touts your area of interest.
Comment on others’ blogs and on online news articles to gain credibility in your area of expertise or interest.
Join online discussion groups in your field and contribute information from your interest area and writing. Become an expert for a site; write on your topic for eHow.
Once you are an author of a book, make an Amazon Author Page at Amazon’s Author Central.
Once your book is out there, create a book blog tour. Here’s an article that explains what a blog book tour is.