Duotrope Tutorial: How to Use Duotrope

Hi, welcome to this tutorial on how to use Duotrope. It’s a paid software, basically designed to find publications to submit to. And I’m just gonna guide you through the first few minutes here. Here is my Duotrope Tutorial

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So, this is Duotrope, or Duotrope, as it’s called. It’s duotrope.com, D-U-O-T-R-O-P-E dot com. And I’m just gonna get inside of it and show you how it works. So, first, you sign up for a Duotrope account and you put your legal first name, your preferred first name, and all this business, and then you press Sign Up. And I’ll go ahead and log into my account to show you exactly what it looks like. So, this is what it looks like, the Control Panel. So, you got a Report a Submission, you have View and Update your Submissions, and See Recent Responses. And here are the overall statistics right here. So, I have 11 pending submissions and sent in the past 12 months, sent this month, acceptance ratio. And there is a subscription plan, it’s $5 a month. It’s not a free software, unfortunately, but it’s well worth it, that I can tell you. And let me go into the basics of how it works. So first, we’re gonna look for searching for publishers. So, this is under poetry, you know, as you see up here, it has fiction, nonfiction, visual art, and of course poetry. So, for the sake of this video, we’re gonna look at poetry.

In this Duotrope tutorial, we go to the Basics and see, this is a whole form you fill out to look for specific publications to submit to. So, let’s say, I want to write, I want my poem categorized under free verse, so I click Free verse. And then I go to the genre, we’ll just say General, and style, hm… I’d say Dark, topic, um…. Performing Arts, any length, and this is a really useful one to use, the length, of the… Or either a poem, a poetry chapbook, or a poetry collection, all different lengths. So, let’s go to poetry and I’ll just go to Poem, minimum payment, you can decide if you want to look for paid publications that pay you for your poetry or fiction, nonfiction, or visual art. But I’m just gonna say Any, submission type, I’m gonna go to electronic, they also have postal, so you can decide where you can mail them, your submissions, but I don’t want to do that. Okay. Let’s see. And then over here, we have a whole nother list of categories you can go over. But I don’t want to look at that right now. Let’s just go to Search and see what happens.

Okay, we only have one exact match and this is common with Duotrope. You want to go… I’ll show you. So, Typehouse Literary Magazine. It’s got the genres right here. See, general, and then length, you got poem, payment. Okay, well, let’s go back. See, down here, it says Search Level Exact. If you see what I’m looking at here, Search Level Exact, and a lot of the time, when I’m using it, at least, I have to go to either Fuzzy or Broad to get more publications to show up, meaning the search in the category isn’t exact, it’s a little fuzzy or broad. And as you see, we have a lot more publications going on here and I’m gonna click one to show you how it works. Let’s try this one. And then as you see in Duotrope, there’s a whole, long list of information about the publication, for instance, where it’s from, it’s in Canada, countries of publication and Year Established, Canada, established in 2017. Publication Medium and Frequency, you got electronic publication, so it comes out of an e-version four times per year. They don’t do print. And now it has information about the genres you can submit to for the publication. So, it’s got fiction and it shows you all about what you need to know about the fiction. So, they accept flash fiction, and short story and novelette, but let’s focus on poetry. What it’s looking for here, or what it says, is you can send up to eight pieces. That’s usually a piece of information I look for, types and lengths, so you know exactly how many poems you can submit to them at a time. And I also look at price. They sometimes pay, it’s a paying publication, five to 49 per poem.

And here’s where you really want to pay attention, their submission statistics. So, to see if it’s an act of publication is probably the first step. And to do that, you see when the last submission was, like 229 reports from 120 different members in the past 12 months. So, that’s probably pretty active, it sounds active. If you only see one or two from the past year, it’s probably not worth submitting too, honestly, because there just isn’t that much going on there. The editors aren’t active. And another thing you look for is responses for that reason. So, they have 75.98% responses, meaning that’s how often they respond to the work. That’s an important factor. And then you go to Acceptances, so this is what I look at. See, only 1.31% acceptance rate. That’s hard, that’s hard to get into. And also the row over here, you have, how many days per acceptance. 50.7 average days per acceptance. So, what I do is I look for, when I’m submitting, if I want to get work published fast, I’ll look at the days per acceptance average. And I’ll always submit to the ones that issue rejections or acceptances really soon. And this case, this is pretty average, 50 days. But some magazines on here, you only have to wait a few days. And then you have rejections, 74.67%. Non-Responses. And this is another good tool, if you travel down here, it’ll say Work submitted here was also submitted to, so, if you’re submitting the type of work that this magazine is looking for, it’ll give you a list right here of other things or other magazines that like this kind of work. And that can be really useful.

Okay, let’s go look at something else now in this Duotrope Tutorial. There’s also a Search for Agents on here, which is really cool. I haven’t used it much, but I’ve used it enough to tell you how to use it. So, here we go, Search for Literary Agents Representing Poetry, and right here, it’s another dropdown list. You have the country, so you can… It’s got Australia, Canada, International, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States, and Iran. I’m just gonna go to United States. I’ll say Any Genre, style, Any Style, topic, I’ll go Philosophy, submission type, Electronic, Any Poetry Form, I’ll go to Free verse, Any Audience, there we go, let’s search. No exact matches found. I’ll have to update my search level to Fuzzy. So, you can go to Exact, Fuzzy or, Broad. I don’t know if I elaborated that enough in the last section. Let’s go to Fuzzy. And here we go. We have a list of agents based on our search criteria. And it looks like all of these agents represent poetry. And you can click on any one of these and it’ll show you that they are indeed looking for both poetry or all three, poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. And so, you go to the About section, that’ll tell you who the poet is, or agent is. And let’s see… Oh, down here, it’ll say, Other Agents at this Agency. So, we saw them in the list too. In some agencies, they don’t want you to send your work to simultaneously to two of their different agents at once. So, you want to really look at the submission guidelines on the website before you submit to anything really, that’s my advice, follow the submission guidelines verbatim. Okay, that’s enough of the agents.

What else should we look at? And here’s another good tool. This is under the Search. If you go to Index of Listings under the Search key, you can find New Listings, which will show you all about the new publications that are coming out. This is really useful if you’re into new publications and getting your work into fresh formats, this is the tool to use. And again, that’s under Search, Index of Listings, and right here, New Listings and Fledgling Markets. All right, well, I hope this Duotrope Tutorial showed you a little bit about Duotrope and what you can do on it. Remember to subscribe and like my channel and the video. And thank you. bye for now.

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