How to Know When to Give up Submitting a Short Story

You've spent weeks perfecting your story. You've fixed every typo, bridged every plot hole, the dialogue sings, and there's not an unnecessary word in sight. So you send it out to some magazines and it's not long before your first rejection letter arrives. And then the next one. And the next one. And the next …

3 Tips for Beating Writer’s Block

You’ve got your whole afternoon blocked off for writing. You’ve just gotten off work, turned off your phone and found a quiet place to spend some quality time with your keyboard. You take a deep breath, open MS Word, and... Two hours later, you don’t know where the time went but it certainly didn’t go …

How Not to Sell Your Book (Lessons From Fanboy)

Fanboy Expo is a local Con, and if you head to the back rows, you'll see dozens of self-published science fiction authors--and learn how not to sell your books. If you're going to self-publish, you have to know how to sell and market your books. No one else is going to do it for you. …

How to Know When to Submit Your Story

It's a balancing act. You can't just keep editing your story forever without sending it in. But if you're overanxious and send it too soon, you might have mistakes that you would've caught with time. Whichever side of the spectrum you fall on (submitting too early or not submitting at all), it's important to know …

How I Learned to Write Good (and Bad) Flash Fiction

Flash fiction can be a great place for new writers to start. It's a lot easier to perfect a one page story than a 1,000 page epic, after all. Given that, it should come as no surprise that we get a lot of flash fiction at Belmont Story Review. What is surprising, however, is just how …

When to Break the Rules When Submitting Short Stories

In their guidelines, the magazine Bards and Sages Quarterly highly discourages submitting first person or present tense stories. My first published story with them was both. The magazine Fabula Argentea lists Anthropomorphism as a hard sell. The first story of mine they published was a suicide note from a training bra. One of the most common pieces of …

Your First Sentence is Your Most Important

A close friend of mine has a test she gives to each book she picks up in the store. Instead of reading the blurb on the back to determine if she's interested, she'll read the first sentence. And unless that first sentence sings, she'll put it down. That's how long you have to capture your reader: …

Getting Published in Magazines (Tips by Someone Who is Also Struggling)

You look into a bookstore and see row after row of glossy covers lining the shelves. You think about all the authors whose work you see, all those who have "made it." Then you think about your half-finished and entirely unedited manuscript that only your parents have read. How do you get from here to there? For …

So You Want to be a Publisher…

It's the first day of Kindergarten, and as a little getting-to-know-you game, your teacher has the students, one after another, say their name and what they want to be when they grow up. It's a common exercise, and no doubt that teacher is going to have a lot of future firemen and police officers. But …

How to Write a Cover Letter

If you're submitting a short story to a magazine, they're probably going to want a cover letter. But what exactly are you supposed to put? This is going to be the editor's first impression of you, and, like any first impression, you want it to be positive. When I first started submitting, I was clueless …