Most writers subscribe to at least one (usually more) market newsletters that provide lists of places to pitch work. In addition, these newsletters offer advice from experienced writers about writing and the business of getting published.

I’ve been a subscriber to FundsforWriters since 2011, and I have what I thought was a bad habit of not deleting enough of my emails. As it turns out, this has been a blessing in disguise.

I wasn’t writing short stories or essays back in 2011 so I didn’t pay much attention to the markets that catered to those genres. However, in looking for new places to submit, I searched through older copies of FundsforWriters (as well as from one other writing site). I was thrilled to find a market I’d not only never submitted to before but never remembered reading about. Podcastle narrates fantasy/speculative short stories up to 6,000 words. And I’d been looking for a home for a story I’d written on a whim.

That discovery led me to review two more newsletters from 2011 and one from 2019. I found a place for an article I’d written about a small Missouri town I’ve visited on several occasions as well as a travel site interested in unique travel stories from authors who have at least one published book. I’d just returned from a trip to Antigua so that sparked an idea. Needless to say, I added “check old newsletters” to my weekly list of to-dos for writing.

I would have been happy to have just discovered the markets, but I found nuggets of wisdom that I overlooked at the time, like Hope’s advice in 2017 to “skip the first four or five pages of search results and lean deeper in, where most of the other writers never reach” when Googling “Write for Us” and the like.

On top of that, at the time of some of these newsletters, the ads weren’t applicable to me as I wasn’t doing much self-publishing.

The one for https://www.bookdesigntemplates.com/collections sure is now as it provides an inexpensive way to format ebooks. I also rediscovered Written Word Media‘s book promotion sites in a 2018 newsletter, and after using one of them, I added over 400 newsletter subscribers.

Sometimes, when you sign up for newsletters, you are offered bonus content. Maybe you don’t have time to read it right away so you don’t bother to download it. That was exactly what I did when I subscribed to a newsletter, and I was excited to discover I had a free ebook for “Query Letters that Worked” from Women on Writing. That discovery had me searching back through my over 16,000 emails to see what other treasures I could find. That brought me to another ebook, Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran, an expert at advertising and promoting your books. I felt like Christmas had come early.

If you haven’t saved newsletters, you’re still in luck since some of the publishers archive their newsletters. You can find FundsforWriters’ archive here. You can find Writers Weekly’s archive here. Just Google the publication name and “newsletter archive” to find back copies.

If you haven’t been saving newsletters, I would encourage you to start doing so now. You never know when the information you don’t need at present will be beneficial for you in the future. There could be literally hundreds of markets waiting to be unearthed, ads you now need, freebies you’ve missed, and advice from writers who’ve been in the trenches for years. Don’t waste the opportunity to find what you never knew you’d been missing!

Bio: As well as being a published author of fiction, Rachel is also an entertainment journalist and nonfiction writer and has written for the New York Times, FundsforWriters, Startrek.com, The Writer, and many others. She can be found on the internet at www.rachelcarrington.com and on Instagram and Twitter @rcarrington2004.