I've been meaning to write up a report on this for a little while, but I've just now gotten to it. As I said
earlier, two weeks ago I went to a Christian writing conference. Aside from attending a number of talks by writers, editors, and publishers, I talked to several publishers and convinced two to take a look at my book proposal. I haven't heard anything back yet, but I'd be surprised if I had. I won't go into all the advice I heard about writing and publishing--some of it was good, some of it was okay, and much of it was contradictory. Writers are always telling you how to write, yet no two seem to write the same way. I met Dave Long of
Faith*in*Fiction there (and convinced him to look at my proposal), and talked to an old high school friend.
It was fun, but what I think may be useful to you is to talk about some of the publishers who are looking for submissions. If you have a story or book you want to get published, then these aren't bad places to start:
- Creative Byline - This isn't a publisher so much as an intermediary between publishers and writers. For a modest fee ($19), you can submit manuscripts, get feedback from first readers, and submit it to editors who are interested in your type of work. Now, I don't know how well this works, and they are fairly new, but what caught my eye was that among the publishers who signed on are Tor and Forge, who publish science fiction and fantasy. As they aren't very expensive (about what it would cost to send a manuscript via snail mail), they may be worth taking a chance on.
- theotherjournal.com - a Christian online quarterly for the discussion of faith and culture.
- Coach's Midnight Journal - A yearly journal of Christina genre fiction, including horror, crime, mystery, and paranormal.
- Relief - A quarterly journal of Christian literary fiction. Coach's Midnight Journal grew out of it. Cause great genre fiction needs to go somewhere.
There are some others, but those are the ones for the fiction I write. I may put up something for some of the others later.
Update (5/4/2008) Messed up the link for Relief (actually put a copy of the previous entry where the link should have been). Fixed now.
