I was wondering how long a short story (hopefully published in a magazine of some description) written for young adults would be, on average? Or should be, maximum? The genre is romance, just in case that helps clear things up...
Although I cannot speak specifically to YA magazines, it depends on the market you're targeting to sell to--in general check out the guidlines and they'll tell you. Most short story markets prefer works under 5000 words, and often the shorter, the better chance you have of selling the work. You can find a good number of short story markets (if you don't already have some in mind) via duotrope.com Good luck, Terry
As for duotrope.com, it seems to have a lot of great leads on there. My question is, I'm not sure sometimes which genre my stories fit into, so I'm not sure what to query on the main form. I'm not sure what types of magazines to target. Any ideas? Or should I fit my stories into a particular genre to be sold to certain magazines? I don't want to be limited based on genre, but should I try to stick to one? I feel my style is sometimes humorous, sometimes thriller, sometimes both, but maybe neither! I really don't know. Any thoughts?
only you can decide, since we haven't read your work... pick the genre it best fits and then query/submit to the venues that match...
The nice thing about duotrope is that you can do a filtered search that will bring you the best candidates for publishing your work. If you write a certain style, see if you can find journals that specialize in it. Then you can submit to them, and these journals even generally tell you the length of work that they're looking for. Drew
