Finding the right home for your work

If you're looking to place your fiction, poetry, or essay, start by making a list of literary magazines and journals with tastes similar to yours. If you write 19th-Century-style love poetry, you definitely DON´T want to send your work to a journal that favors horror and fantasy. Doing your homework, finding out who is looking for what, can save you tons of time and money. This will take some digging, and some reading. Take advantage of the web—search engines can take you right to lists of literary journals with functioning websites. These websites will often have detailed descriptions of what the journal publishes, when they accept manuscripts, and where to send them. You MUST adhere to the guidelines the editors give you. Otherwise, your work will be returned or just ignored.