Duotrope Review – Is It Worth the Cost?

Last Updated on June 7, 2020 by Nathaniel Tower

This was originally a three-part series about the value of Duotrope Digest, which began requiring a $50 subscription beginning on January 1, 2013.  As of March 2019, the three parts have been consolidated into this single post to improve user experience. 

When I originally wrote this series of posts, I was still an active Duotrope user. I have since stopped using it because it no longer suited my needs. You can read about that decision here. Otherwise, here is my complete review of Duotrope’s worth to writers:

Part 1: Submissions Tracker

We knew this was coming. Anyone who’s used Duotrope Digest has surely noticed the constant red or orange notice reporting lack of donations. When they finally announced the site was switching to paid subscriptions, many writers were upset, and maybe rightfully so. After all, when something that’s free is taken away, we feel a bit cheated. Especially when the price goes from $0 a year to $50 a year.

But this isn’t about whether or not Duotrope is being unfair by suddenly charging writers for the service. This is about whether or not it’s worth it.

There are three main features of Duotrope that I’ll explore in this series. I consider these the three biggest features of the site: the submissions tracker, the market listings, and the response statistics.

Before we get to the first topic, let’s put the cost into perspective. $50 a year is less than 14 cents a day. While that might make it easier for some to swallow, the fact is that you aren’t asked to pay 14 cents a day. You’re asked to give them $50 up front (or $5 a month if you prefer to test out the waters and ultimately pay a little more). One time at a car dealer, a man named “Easy Art” told me the difference between the price I wanted and the price he was offering was fifty cents a day. Then he handed me fifty cents and said that he would give me my first payment. Needless to say, I didn’t buy the car from Easy Art.

Easy Art and his shady sales habits aside, is Duotrope worth $50 a year? In short, it depends on how you use it. Personally, I made over $300 (I think that puts me right up with Stephenie Meyer) in 2012 through my short fiction, and most of that money came from markets I learned about on Duotrope. Does that mean I’d gladly pay $50? Well, that’s a pretty big percentage of my earnings. Duotrope is asking me to do more than tithe. But more about that later. Let’s focus on the first big feature, the submissions tracker.

The Duotrope submissions tracker is an attractive feature. It’s fairly simple to use, other than the requirement that you enter each piece individually, find the right market, and click a few buttons and drop down menus. Really, none of that is hard. It takes about a minute, give or take a few seconds based on your computer knowledge. Of course, that’s only if you’re already logged in and the site is moving quickly.

For a minute’s worth of work, you get an organized tracker with many great features. Here’s a screenshot:

Yes, it looks quite nice. You can sort it anyway you want it. You can even compare the days it took for the market’s response to the average days reported for this market (we’ll deal with response statistics in part three of this blog).

Here’s the deal though: this isn’t worth $50. Not if you have Microsoft Excel or some other spreadsheet program. Tell you what. I’ll give you a free submissions tracking template. Scratch that. I’ll give you two different versions. You can access both of them here. To save, just go to File/Download, and it’s yours to keep and use (feel free to ignore the sample data). It automatically color codes submissions based on the response type. It calculates response time (or the days out if the response hasn’t come yet). It tracks your earnings. If it doesn’t do something you want it to do, let me know and I’ll fix it for you. Seriously, if you have any problems with this one, contact me and I’ll take care of it. The only thing Duotrope’s does that this one doesn’t is compare the response times to their data (the accuracy of which is a bit questionable, but that’s a discussion for another day).

Oh, and the greatest thing about the spreadsheet: it takes about half as much time to enter a submission. 30 seconds might not be much, but if you submit a lot (I submitted over 300 times last year) that adds up.

I do plan to subscribe to Duotrope. At least for the first month. But if all you are using it for is the submissions tracker, then don’t bother. You can do this for free. Use that extra $50 to buy yourself a writing class or submission fee for a few contests.

Now you just have to figure out how to find those contests.

Part 2: The Market Listings

When I started Bartleby Snopes around 10 years ago, I thought I was doing something relatively unique.

Then I stumbled across Duotrope and discovered there were over 4000 literary magazines out there. And that didn’t include all the ones that came and went before my time.

Today there are over 7,000 current active markets listed on Duotrope. While there are plenty of other resources for finding places to submit fiction and poetry (and now non-fiction as well), none of them come close to the expansiveness or usability of Duotrope.

For the last 6 months, my favorite thing on Duotrope has simply been to go to the Market News and Updates page. Several times a week, they update with new markets. This includes fledgling markets as well as established markets that for some reason hadn’t been listed before.

Here’s what it looks like:

Why do I like this so much? Because almost every week, two or three new paying markets will appear. Yes, that’s right, there are still places that pay for your work.

My favorite so far this year was the new listing for Jukepop Serials. They paid professional rates before their beta launch. Thanks to a quick perusal at Duotrope, I earned over $100 from my submission to Jukepop.

As I stated in part one of this series, I made over $300 on my short fiction in 2012. Yeah, it’s not enough to raise a family or even pay for a year’s worth of gas, but it is a nice little sum that makes me feel like a real writer. I have to thank Duotrope for most of this. Yes, I did the writing and the submitting, but they told me about these opportunities. It would have taken me a lot more time to find them elsewhere. More time finding opportunities means less time writing, less time submitting, less time spending the extra money I made.

Duotrope is by far the most comprehensive place to find markets. It has the best database. Its search features are fantastic. Search by genre, sub-genre, length, etc. Search by anything you want. You’ll find a venue that works for whatever you have.

In part one I concluded their submissions tracker isn’t really worth the $50 price tag. Their market listings more than make up for that. Sure, if you only plan to submit to Glimmer Train over and over until they finally accept you, then there’s no need for Duotrope. But if you want to find new places to submit, new markets that pay, or the best place to submit your multi-genre erotic horror comic book short story, then $50 is a small price to pay. After all, it’s not even 14 cents a day. There’s a lot of people willing to pay $10 or more to enter a contest they have very little chance to win. Spending $50 to find new paying places (hey, a new market often equals lower competition) to submit is just a smart move. It beats playing the lottery, that’s for sure.

And even if your goal isn’t money, Duotrope can help you find the best places for your work. As I mentioned before, you can conduct hundreds of different searches using various criteria of your choosing. No other resource gives you this power.

Before I stamp my seal of approval blindly on Duotrope, I do want to call your attention to some other options. None of these sites have the stats that Duotrope does, but that’s a discussion for another day.  Any of the markets below can point you to great places to submit your own work and read other people’s work.

New Pages: Very nice site with lots of information. Unlike Duotrope, it offers reviews. There are plenty of great (and completely free) features here that Duotrope doesn’t offer. However, the market listings are no match for Duotrope’s. You can’t search very effectively, and other than the sponsored listings, the markets are just listed alphabetically with short blurbs. The site requires you to spend more time on the individual lit mag pages (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). By the time you’ve sorted through everything and found a good place to submit, you’ve lost a lot of writing time. But maybe you discovered a great new magazine that you’ll actually read again and again.

Flash Markets at Flash Fiction Chronicles: Jim Harrington does a great job keeping this up to date. It includes paying markets, word counts, and a few other bits of information. Of course it lacks the depth and breadth of Duotrope, but it’s a good resource for the flash fiction author. I’ve picked up a few bucks submitting to the magazines listed here. It’s a very minimal design with no search features, but there aren’t enough markets here to need a search.

Ralan: Great for speculative fiction. Separates the markets by payment levels. Usually pretty up to date. Like the Flash Markets at FFC, the listings provide the most basic information and require the writers to spend a lot of time on the individual lit mag pages (which, again, is not a bad thing).

Every Writers Resource: This is a nice site with a pleasing design and plenty of info. The search features are minimal, so it’s going to take a while to find what you’re looking for. It does allow for user ratings, which would be a great feature if more people took advantage of it.

The Submission Grinder: Probably the best alternative to Duotrope. Pretty similar search functionality. Almost as many listings. And it’s all free.

And what about all those writing contests? There are dozens of sites that share all the contest information (including some of the above). After launching the Bartleby Snopes Dialogue Only contest 4 years ago, I found dozens of sites to list the contest. A quick Google search will lead you to plenty of writing contests.

With all these other resources, surely you don’t need to pay for Duotrope, right?

Not so fast.

Here’s the bottom line: Duotrope’s scope cannot be beat. All of the other resources combined don’t have as many listings as Duotrope. Duotrope is updated more frequently than the others. It has the best search features. If you want to save a lot of time and find the best stuff quickly, Duotrope is worth the price. There’s a reason Duotrope is charging $50 a year while Fiction Factor will continue to charge nothing.

But if you don’t have the money lying around, this isn’t a case of the haves versus the have nots. Duotrope’s required subscription isn’t going to force most of us to be the 99 percenters of writing. Your work need not go unpublished just because you can’t use Duotrope. You can find everything you want in those other places. You’ll save money, but it will be at the expense of your time.

Part 3: Response Statistics

To summarize so far: If you only use Duotrope for the submissions tracker, don’t bother subscribing (download this instead). If you use it mainly to find new and suitable markets for your work, it can’t be beat.

That leaves us with the response statistics.

There are two key components to the response stats: response time and acceptance rate.

No other site offers such detailed and specific statistics. Some will offer approximations, but no one gives an exact number of days or acceptance percentages.

The response stats can do a lot for us as writers.

Do you want a challenge? Duotrope can show you the publications with the lowest acceptance rates. (Let’s be honest though; this isn’t worth the money. If you don’t already know Glimmer Train, The New Yorker, and The Missouri Review accept pretty much nothing, then you have a lot to learn.)

Do you want a confidence boost? Maybe you have something that’s been rejected 50 times. Or maybe you haven’t had a story published for six months. Just send it to one of the most approachable markets. Duotrope will show you those.

Do you have a great story you want to see published now? Duotrope will point you to those publications that respond within a week (some even do it within a day).

Whenever we send out our work, we like knowing about how long it will take to hear back. No one likes waiting three hundred days to get a form rejection. Or a personal rejection. Heck, we probably don’t even want to wait that long for an acceptance.

When I see that a market takes over a hundred days and doesn’t allow simultaneous submissions and has a 0.25% acceptance rate, I usually don’t submit. Even if I have a lot of confidence in a piece I’ve written, that’s a lot of time for that story to be swallowed up by one publisher who probably won’t accept it. I’m not saying you shouldn’t send to these places. I’m just saying I’d prefer not to (get the reference?).

Duotope’s numbers are certainly great tools that can’t be found elsewhere. But are they reliable?

Let’s take a look at the response stats for Bartleby Snopes.

As of 12/29, Duotrope reports a 2.4-day average response time based on 399 submission reports. Thankfully, Duotrope eliminates outliers. That vindictive person who wants to sabotage a magazine’s response time by claiming it took 300 days won’t actually affect anything.

Is that 2.4 day average correct?

It’s pretty darn accurate. We average right around 3 days for a response. If this is upsetting to you, if you throw a fit because Duotrope is off by half a day, then you need to learn some patience. Writing might be the wrong thing for you.

Bartleby Snopes has never taken more than 10 days to respond to a regular submission. Never. Yet the max days reported is 13 (unless you consider the outliers, and then it’s 66 days). But these little errors don’t affect the overall number. In fact, Duotrope’s listed response time is a little faster than what we are really capable of. But it’s close enough that no writer should panic.

So what about the acceptance rate?

Without the outliers, Duotrope has us at a 6.77% acceptance rate. With outliers, it goes to 11%. I’m not sure what the reason for that big of a difference is, but it doesn’t really matter. Let’s look at the real facts.

During 2012, we accepted 7.22% of the submissions we received.

Wait a minute. Bartleby Snopes accepts more submissions than Duotrope claims (albeit by a statistically insignificant difference)? Duotrope suggests the acceptance rate is probably lower than what they say.

Well, sometimes it is.

I spoke with Matthew Guerruckey over at Drunk Monkeys. At one point, Duotrope listed a 60% acceptance rate. He confirms it was never anywhere near this high. But as more reports came in on Duotrope, the acceptance rate went down and is now much more accurate.

As long as enough people report their submissions, the numbers are accurate.

Which leads us to the much bigger question: will those numbers become less reliable with the subscription-only service?

Duotrope says no. They claim it will actually be more reliable. The people who pay are more likely to track all of their submissions accurately. This makes sense. If you pay for a service, you are more likely to use it. If you’ve used a service avidly, you are more likely to pay to continue to use it. Currently, many users of Duotrope forget about their submissions, or don’t bother to report things accurately. Fortunately, those users aren’t the ones who are going to subscribe.

If you follow Duotrope’s updates, their statisticians suggest that the reports of subscribers so far have effectively reduced the unreliable data by 89.6%. That’s a pretty precise number. It sounds credible, doesn’t it?

I have no doubt that the days reported will become more reliable. Paying subscribers aren’t going to let submissions sit around unreported for hundreds of days. They probably aren’t going to lie about response times. They’ll actually pay attention to the real dates they submitted and received responses.

But what about the acceptance rates?

What if the people who pay for Duotrope are a special class of writers who are more likely to get their work published. Will this skew acceptance rates?

Now, this might be a moot point. After all, if you are one of the subscribers, then theoretically you are in this same class, and your acceptance chances will be the same as theirs.

The days reported stats should remain similar to what they are now regardless of whether or not this elite class of writers really exists as the population of Duotrope subscribers. There’s no reason why response times should change. The population of people reporting shouldn’t matter. Most magazines are pretty consistent in response time, whether we’re talking about submissions from 20 great writers or 20 terrible writers (it is interesting though that some magazines take much longer for acceptances while others take much longer for rejections). Duotrope already throws out the outliers, so these stats shouldn’t change.

Wait a minute. We established earlier that Duotrope is more accurate when it has more reports. Won’t the reports go down because of the paid subscription requirement, thereby making it less accurate?

Theoretically, yes. But according to Duotrope, only the number of users will go down significantly, not the number of reports. Approximately 80% of their data came from 20% of their users, and most of those users have already subscribed. And almost 10% of their subscribers have never used Duotrope before. Surely they’ll report all of their submissions accurately. If you’re not going to, why bother paying for the service?

Of course, the question of whether or not the stats will be more or less reliable can only officially be answered once those stats actually become available.

For the next few months, I plan to closely track the changes in the statistics for 5 different markets. I’ll post updates periodically to let everyone know how the statistics change, and I’ll attempt to answer the question of whether or not the numbers are more reliable with the subscribers-only model.

Now, for my final evaluation. First off, the point of these posts is not to give a blanket endorsement of Duotrope or any other service. It’s not to make someone feel bad for subscribing or not subscribing.

But here’s my honest opinion:

If you’re really serious about your writing and you want the best opportunities to publish your work, subscribe to Duotrope. At least on a trial basis (go for the monthly rate at first and see if you actually do use it and benefit from it). The $50 will save you a lot of time and point you to the right places to send your writing. Yes, you can do these things without paying the money, but the time saved is worth it. Besides, using Duotrope also helps your fellow writers.

And without the help of other writers, where would any of us be?

On the other hand, the best way to help your fellow writers is by reading and sharing their work, not by reporting how often you get rejected.

So maybe if you’re on the fence, it’s better to go without it and see if you need it rather than go with it and see if you use it. The choice is obviously up to the individual. I am choosing to subscribe because I think it will be worth it.

Either way, as long as you keep writing, you can’t really go wrong.

Do you still use Duotrope? Is it worth it to you? Share your experience in the comments.