Where To Get Your Short Stories Published For Free — (1)

Are people still reading short stories? Hell Yes!

I imagine a world where short stories are dispatched daily from all over the world and channelled into a story-builder, and all the beautiful ones are compiled into Pocket-size For-sale volumes, categorised by themes. And people actually buy and read those books.

While literary magazines are great places for budding fiction writers, they seldom pay well. More often than not you have to pay to get the privilege of submitting your work. What low-class citizens writers are. If you’re a writer your labour is not only unwanted, it is often in negative demand, as in you have to put in money from your pocket to create a supply for it. I used to think it was funny and that I’d never pander to such snobbery. But I am earnestly thinking of putting my work out there, sigh. I need eyeballs over my words, I cannot wait much longer.

There are just too many good writers out there, too many bad ones with big names, too many exceptional ones with brilliant track-records. Where do you fit in! If you haven’t even started attempting fiction and you want to be a novelist, how will you get there if you keep writing bulleted articles and bland self-help crap. You need to start feeling again, emoting and flapping about, as you smear the rich butter of fiction onto the pages of your imagination.

I start seeing colour, the seconds begin to dilate and stupid things like reality seem to matter less and less, the more I write.

So I did some research and came up with a few places that will publish your work for free - yes you no longer have to sell your kidneys to be an insider!

Of course, you need to read the guidelines properly, research the genres, see the kind of things they put up in their issues and then send in your awesome-sauce submissions. Even if you don’t get a dime out of it, you’ll still get to know if your writing is good enough. And that’s worth your time. Maybe you could even coax a vagrant publisher to actually invest in your work by building this — “your fiction portfolio”. You are Sisyphus- you shall keeping rolling that boulder up the hill till someone finally pats you on the back or better still you start feeling like you deserve the pats. You’re not a phony who makes up words to impress other people, though essentially that’s what you sometimes do.

For personal reasons, I have shortlisted only those publications that are open to accepting international submissions and charge nothing from the writers. Some of these will even pay you for your words- gasp!

I am certain there are bigger, better magazines that could be relevant to someone in a particular location but since people from India, USA, UK, Russia are among my loyal readers, I’d like this piece to be useful for all of them.

If you have previously written for these magazines please share your experiences. It would help your fellow writers. Thanks in advance.

There are so many others that I want to add but I want to take my time researching, so I am splitting this article up. Hence, this by no means is an exhaustive list. I’ll be posting part 2 soon.

NOTE: I have not included those journals that are currently not accepting submissions. If you get too frazzled, look for the Submission Guidelines/Submit/Contact Us/General Submissions Links on these pages. There would also be some sites where paid submissions might show up at the top but it will have a free submission option somewhere below- just look properly.

I have purposely included all the ones that are giving writers the option of sending in works of fiction for no charge and via the internet.

I have excluded the places that will consider only hard-copies since that won’t be feasible for international writers. Keep watching this space for more.