Essential Writers' Resources

It's tough trying to be a writer, even if it's only a hobby. Fortunately there's a real sense of camaraderie within the writing community, because we're all in it together. Every writer, even including all the lucky successful ones, all know what it's like to receive rejection after rejection.

The purpose of this page is to share with you resources that I have found that are invaluable to me, and hopefully will be invaluable to you.


Essential Websites for Writers

The great news is there's millions of magazines and anthologies out there looking for fiction submissions.

The bad news is that many of these wonderful magazines and publishers are very small independent organizations that are run by an amazing group of people who do it not for money but out of love. What's amazing about these people is that they run their publishing companies alongside their day job. Anyway I digress, the point I'm trying to make is that because they're so small they can be quite hard to find.

I began to compile a list of magazines that accepted dark fantasy and horror fiction through spending hours trawling through google  and decided to publish this list so it would be of use to others like me.

There's a whole load of people doing this too and they are;

http://ralan.com/m.token.htm

This is like the Daddy of websites that are dedicated to speculative and horror fiction. You could spend weeks looking at all of Ralan's listings of magazines and anthologies. This is a free service and also offers tips on writing, how to submit your work, as well as providing some amazing links for more invaluable advice on Agents, Author Associations, the whole works.

I only wish I'd discovered this site much sooner!

http://horrortree.com/

This is another essential resource for horror writers which lists all anthologies and publishers who are taking submissions. What's really great about it is that you can sign up for their free mailing list and each Friday you get all the details of the latest submission calls straight to your inbox. This always motivates me to spend a large chunk of my weekends sending off submissions.


http://www.christopherfielden.com/

Christopher Fielden has an amazing website that features extensive detailed listing for virtually every short story competition out there. He also offers tips on writing as well as providing writing services such as proof reading.

www.booktrust.org.uk

A huge website that's dedicated to inspire of a love of reading in babies right through to adults. They also provides details of short story competitions, literary prizes, listings of magazines accepting submissions, helpful hints, pretty much anything associated with reading and writing

Essential Reading for Writers

There's a multitude of books that claim to teach you how to write but you don't need to spend a small fortune on buying these sorts of books as there's only really a few you need.


Writing a novel ~ Nigel Watts

Elements of style ~ William Strunk Jr + E.B.White

Stephen King ~ On Writing



Manuscript Presentation

I find it embarrassing to think of the state and presentation of my earliest submissions, that I sent to actual people! At best the editor would have laughed at worst they would have set fire to my miserable attempt without reading.

But now I know how to present my work professionally. As a writer you want to stand out, but let it be for your writing skills not for your appalling manuscript presentation.



You may have heard of William Shunn, he's a published author in his own right but is widely regarded as a legend for creating templates for short stories and novels and letting millions worldwide use them for free.

This is considered the gold standard on how to present your work and has really cool features such as a word count calculator. These documents can be easily downloaded and saved. Just remember to save them as a template rather than a normal document.

Here's the link below, and do check out his website.

http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html






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