Writers and Anthologies

 

Many of you know that I have multiple stories in the Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies. I still check their website for the books that need stories. Right now, they have calls for eleven books. Eleven! Check the Possible Book Topics page to see what they are.

Chicken Soup is one of the best known anthologies, but there are many more, but it's up to you, the writer, to find them. That takes a bit of work, but it's well worth the effort if you find a few that fit your kind of writing. 

Facebook has a group that is a boon for writers. They have calls for anthologies but also other publications. The page is Call for Submissions. Find it by searching on your home page for the group. Other writing group pages on Facebook sometimes have calls for submissions to both anthologies and other types of publications, too. 

If writing for anthologies is your aim, do a search on your favorite search engine. Then try a different search engine, where you may find some duplicates, but also some different places where you can submit. There are many to choose from. Some of the top ones are:

Google

Bing

Duck, Duck Go

Yahoo

Baidu

Yandex

Ask.com

When you search, you may be surprised by the number of anthologies and also how specialized some of them are. Some want only horror or dark stories, while others might seek holiday stories, and still others are looking for mystery stories. There are poetry anthologies and anthologies that feature stories about cooking. Guideposts puts out lovely anthology books. Theirs is one of the nicest quality, I think. I once had a story in an anthology that used reading as the theme.

Some of the former anthologies have come and gone. A Cup of Comfort was quite popular for a while, and then it vanished. Another was Not Your Mothers... But it had a short duration. Why? Maybe the quality of the stories was not up to par. Maybe the editor didn't put enough time and effort into advertising. Or perhaps the editor moved on to other things. 

Be sure when you are searching for anthologies to check the date the calls were put out. I noted one recently that sounded interesting, but it was from 2008. A waste of your time. When you put your keywords in a search engine, it might not hurt to add 2022.

Why bother to write for anthologies? They pay, some better than others. Chicken Soup for the Soul is the highest that I am aware of. You'll get a check for $200 and 10 free copies of the book in which your story appears. Others pay $50 or $25 or maybe with a copy of the book. A second reason is that it is a good addition to your list of publications. A third is that some are easier to bring a successful submission than some other publications. Not all, but some of the smaller ones are not as choosy. Chicken Soup for the Soul, being the Queen Bee, has rigid guidelines and great competition. 

If you want to write for anthologies, find some of those lesser ones to start with. Move on up when you feel confident about the stories you're writing for the various anthologies. 

One of the most important things you should do is to study the guidelines. You will find books that have minimal guidelines all the way up to Chicken Soup for the Soul which has lengthy and rigid ones. Pay attention, no matter which anthology where you want to submit your work. 

Last, but not least, read a variety of anthologies to help you get an idea of the kind of story or poems they publish. It helps you get a feel for what you should keep in mind when writing and submitting your own stories or poems.