When my spouse and I give presentations to conferences and writing groups, I’m usually the grumpy one who wants to focus on craft more than business, because I believe no gimmick or pitch is going to make you a selling writer if your craft is not professional grade.

That said, I’ve seen enough red flags in magazine practices, in contest submission guidelines, and in assumptions expressed by new writers to make be feel that we definitely should talk about the business side of things, when you’re a short story writer. You might have a sense, from reading Fiction University and from other sources, of how you approach novel publication. Some of those lessons overlap into short fiction, but in many ways the short fiction landscape is unique, so it’s worth talking a little bit about how to seek publication.

In this post, I was going to write about the market in general—where to sell your work and what to expect—and also about red flags, but once I started writing, I saw that this was really too much for a single post. So I will split the topic. For today’s post, I will focus on finding publishers, deciding whom to approach, and reaching out to them.