One of the places I use to chase down market leads is Duotrope's Twitter feed. I've found a lot of good places to market short stories there but I've also discovered that you can't always trust your leads.
Take today for instance. Laksa Press was posted as a new market open for submissions. Okay. I clicked on the link to their website and discovered that nothing new has been posted there since March of 2014. Nothing has been posted to their Twitter feed since last March either. There are no books listed, no authors listed, and no blog posts on their various blogs. Now this isn't to say that they won't be a perfectly good market, but if they haven't moved forward in the past year, will they be moving forward in the future?
I'm not posting this to criticize either Duotrope or Laksa Press. I'm posting this so that you writers out there realize that not every lead is good, even here on my blog. Always, always double check the market. Make sure that they're doing the work they promise. Check the dates they last posted on their website, Twitter feed, and Facebook page (if they have one).
And even if all this checks out you might be fooled. I posted a market here last year, even submitted to them and now they've pretty much disappeared from the Internet claiming they lost their server (Last January!?!).
Markets are fleeting things. Sometimes unreliable. But they're all we have as writers. We submit and hope for the best. Sometimes we're lucky and other times we're forced to find new markets for our stories and start the process all over again.
2 comments:
Amen, Sandra. I've found this to be true as well. So often publishers come and go quickly. I've received acceptances from a number of publications that simply disappear.
It makes it very frustrating to be a writer when this happens, Jacqueline. And for the most part there's no way of knowing for sure which pres is going to succeed.
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