Writers needed as beta readers for a new publishing guide

[Josh]

Hey writers, see if this has happened to you:
You finish the (hopefully) last revision on your latest bit of short writing, and get it properly formatted. Now all the fun stops, because you now have to go through the frustrating process of finding a journal, magazine, or contest to submit your writing to. You grab your Writer’s Market, or The Complete and Utter Ignoramus’ Guide to Publishing, or fire up the Newpages website and begin looking for a home for your writing. You browse for a period of time that is always longer than you had intended to browse, and if you’re lucky, perhaps afterward you have found a good candidate to research further.

So you check out their website to read some of their samples, to see if it might be a good match for the work you’re doing. Say you are exceptionally lucky, and find a promising journal on your first try; you get excited, and begin to imagine seeing your name in their print.

Then you check their submission guidelines, and see that they are not accepting submissions at this time.

Maybe they’ll be open in a month or two; maybe you’ll have to check back periodically to determine when they’ll be open for submissions. Either way you are either beginning the market research process all over again, and/or marking your calendar for later when you might choose to submit. Regardless, the process of publishing will always be a detraction from the time you have available to write.

This happened to me at the beginning of this summer, when I polished off some short stories I haven’t found a home for yet, and kept finding that many of the journals I was interested in were off for the summer. I looked online to see if there was a calendar, or schedule of submission periods already available, and found the web lacking. If I wanted an organized, chronological guide to literary journals and their submission schedules, I would have to make one myself.

I had some summer vacation hours to invest, so I got started on my guide. Several hours in two thoughts occurred to me: the first was, “If this guide will be useful to me, it will probably be useful to other writers;” the second was, “Dear Lord there are a lot of literary journals!” Putting these two thoughts together, I conceded that the guide would take more time than I had wanted to invest for it to be comprehensive, but perhaps I could put such a guide up for sale after I had finished, which would make my time worthwhile.

So I present The Writing Submission Schedule Guide Preview, recently self-published as an ebook on Smashwords. The beauty of ebooks on internet connected devices, is that each entry in the guide for a literary journal can contain a hyperlink. For example: In the Table of Contents you can click the current month, and be taken directly to the “chapter” showing what journals are accepting submissions in that month. Clicking on any of the journals’ titles will take you directly to their submission guidelines on their website.

As a preview, the guide ONLY includes Journals that begin with the letters A and B, from July to December 2012. The 2013 Guide, if there is enough interest to warrant it, would include the rest of the alphabet and calendar year.

Essentially I am test-marketing a limited version of my guide to fellow writers, to determine the following:
- Is this guide useful?
- Is it organized well?
- How easy or difficult is the guide to use?
- Would you use it? If so, what do you think would be a fair price to pay for a copy?
- What other information would you like to see included?
- Did you see any journals/magazines/e-zines/contests/etc. that I missed, that I should include?
- Do you see any mistakes I have made (I’m a one-man show here, so I suspect there are a few; another beautiful feature of ebooks is the ease of updating them with corrections/additions).

As a “Thank you” for contributing your constructive comments/suggestions/additions/etc., I will put your name on the Acknowledgements page of the guide, send you a coupon code for a free copy of the comprehensive 2013 Guide (granted there is enough interest to warrant its existence), and give you one of those handshakes that is pulled in for a quick, awkward hug, if I ever get the chance to meet you.
Unconstructive comments/suggestions/additions/etc. will receive rolled eyes and a disappointed shake of my head.

Click here to download a free copy of the Writing Submission Schedule Guide Preview: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

Thank you for your time and consideration!

Regards,
Josh Karaczewski

[Rob]

Are you planning to sell this guide to enterprising authors trying make "good investments" in their new self publishing careers?

[Josh]

It involves the traditional model of publishing short works through magazines and journals, big and small. I'm hoping to sell it to any writer of short prose and/or poetry that would like the information on these journals' reading schedules organized in a useful way.
So it is not a guide to self-publishing your work, unless, like me, you like to have your short work traditionally published before you self-publish a collection of your writings.

[Rob]

I'm going to pass then. Good luck with your endeavors.

[Catrina]

Sounds intriguing.