ASF is a quarterly magazine that accepts submissions all year long. Send submissions to Fiction Editor Stacey Swann at: American Short Fiction, P.O. Box 301209, Austin, TX 78703-0021. Ms. Swann advises authors to read through the current issue of the magazine in order to get a feel for what ASF publishes. “We pass on a lot of well-written work because it doesn’t fall under our aesthetic."
The Artful Dodge is a literary magazine that focuses on poetry and prose that show “an understanding of the cultural landscape” out of which the stories spring. They are looking for pieces that relate a sense of place. You can send up to 30 pages of short fiction to Artful Dodge, Department of English, The College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio 44691.
The New Yorker is one of the most celebrated publishers of short fiction, having launched the writing careers of numerous well-known authors. However, as they only publish one story per issue, the competition is intense. Send submissions to Deborah Treisman via e-mail at [email protected].
Almost all of the major publishing houses, like Random House and Harper, and a large percentage of smaller publishing companies will consider a short story collection by a single author. Approaching a publisher with a short story collection is similar to approaching a publisher with a novel because all the work is generated by the same writer, even if the theme changes dramatically from story to story.
Some publishers put together anthologies of short stories based around a central theme, within a genre like horror or romance, or based around criteria such as the religious or ethnic background of the author. These opportunities are offered by book publishers in such a random pattern that short story authors have to monitor the current market trends in writing journals and Web sites in order to find and take advantage of them.