Okay, here's my situation.

I'm under the impression that the only talent I have is with writing, and I hope to make it a future career option, particularly as an author.

Does anyone have any tips on how to get your work out there, to get people to notice your work? Any published writers out there to offer me tips on how to make this dream of mine a reality?

I have been published in small venues before, and all I can tell you is this:

Try, try, try again

Read a bunch of magazines, get a feel for the kind of fiction that they are looking for and send in manuscripts. Ask your local newspapers how to submit guest editorials. Enter writing contests that offer scholarships (because those are the ones that are more likely to be legitimate than the ones offering other prizes--those tend to end up being sales pitches for vanity presses)

Don't send your work just to major publishers--they have enormous slushpiles. Also send your work to magazines, literary journals, etc. If there is a genre you enjoy reading more than others, seek out pubications in that genre more heavily than you do others because you are more likely to be able to write well in that genre.

Don't give up!

And, what makes you say that your only talent is writing?

Originally posted by BrandyBlue
And, what makes you say that your only talent is writing?

I dunno...lately, it just seems like the only thing that I feel like I could actually get somewhere in life these days.

Unless they start paying me to play Tetris, of course. :D

I think you are being too rough on yourself. :( We all have talents we haven't even found yet. If that is actually you in the avatar, I suspect that you are young and that has a lot to do with confidence--when you get to be an old fart like me, you won't worry so much about how you will make it in this world--something will have dawned on you by then

You hang in there and keep writing!

You may need to get an agent. I know Scholastic Books don't look at anything unless it comes from an agent.

Michael , 80s Trivia, will know the best.


I do think you need a literary agent, how you get one of those can also be difficult