Chris D'Iorio on Duotrope’s Digest

By Chris D'Iorio

Movers & shakers:  Duotrope’s Digest is run by a small admin team of a few writers and editors out of (as far as I can tell) New Mexico (at least that’s where Duotrope LLC is incorporated). They keep themselves anonymous, but they offer up a free and decent resource to take some of the pain out of the literary submission process.

Brief history:  I think the Duotrope site has been online since about 2005.

Highlights of venue:  Duotrope’s Digest provides a searchable database of over 2800 current fiction and poetry publications. They also offer calendars of upcoming deadlines by way of either email newsletters or RSS feeds.  The really useful tool they make available (to registered users) is a submissions tracker: they’ll let you use their servers to keep track of what you sent who and how long they’ve been ignoring it, and then they take that information and put together some rather interesting reports on average response times, acceptance rates, etc.

I know that there’s a venal industry around getting published that lives off the blood of the naive, and I also know that marketing oneself has little to do with whatever it is that could or should keep somebody writing, but I admire that someone put code to hard drive and came up with this handy little tool that takes some of the drudgery out of keeping your work in circulation.

Of special interest to poets:  Duotrope breaks out its database into two basic sorts: poetry and fiction. You can filter search results by country, and while they list only eighty results for Canada, those results include, among others, The Antigonish Review, Arc, The Capilano Review, Carousel, Contemporary Verse 2, Descant, Exile, Fiddlehead, filling Station, Grain, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and Taddle Creek.