Step 6a: Going the traditional route.
This is where this series of posts gets a little tricky. The next steps depend on whether you want to go the traditional route or want to self-publish, on what it is you want to publish (a short work vs. a book), and on whether you want to make money off your writing. In this post I'll focus on the traditional route for short works of fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction; in the next post (Step 6b) I'll focus on self-publishing.But first, I'd like to clarify what I mean by "the traditional route." For my purposes, it means that someone who's in the business of making writers' work publicly available makes something I wrote publicly available. (And by "in the business," I do not necessarily mean "gets paid" to do so. Some very reputable journals are run by a staff of volunteers.) This may be a looser definition than yours: it includes getting published online as well as in print, and under this definition someone publishing a podcast online of you reading your work at an open mic counts.
When I recently decided to go the traditional route with some of my poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, I asked published writers and people in the publishing industry for advice--and thought back to my ex-boyfriend's process for getting his poetry published (he was published a lot)--and here's the process I've settled on:
