Fiction Writing - Where to Publish Your Short Story

The world of short story fiction writing has a wide range of publishing available to help provide prose and poetry to the extremely diverse readers that make up the audience. The audience ranges from Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Drama, Romance, and if you want to avoid writing in a genre, you can always keep your work in the 'General Literature' category.The fiction world today provides a number of opportunities available to have your work published. Sure, its hard to get the big time money in short story writing but to be published and see your name in print is not as hard as most people think. Let's talk through all of the available publication options:

• Print Magazines / Digests: Most short form writers (poetry, flash fiction, short story) tend to look here first for homes for their writings. These types of publications tend to pay more then a simple token payment and, well, its print. While this may be the first stop for most, it is also the most competitive place for short form writers to get published.
• Online Magazines / Digests: Everyone spends countless hours on the web surfing and looking to pass the time. With that, many online magazines have popped up to provide great stories for those looking for them. These tend to pay very little or not at all as they generally do not charge their readers. These publications will be easier to gain entry into and are a great place to start when beginning your writing career. As this is the web, most places tend to not accept anything over 5,000 words as it is hard to read that much on the screen.
• Contests: The positives are that they tend to provide the winner with a nice sum of money for winning and the top 10 or 20 stories end up in a print publication. The negatives are that they make each writer pay a good amount of money to submit one story. The general rule of thumb I have always been told is, as a writer don't pay for your story to be published. So I tend to be somewhat against this form of publication or avenue for writing.
• Anthologies: Many publishers specialize in producing a publication each year for specific genres. They accept submissions and will compile the best ones into the anthology. The winner gets money and usually should get a free copy of the publication. I think these types of competitions are much better for writers then the contests as they should not charge you to read your work.

Always keep in mind that the writer is the special thing here, not the publisher. Writers should never have to pay for someone to look at their work and that goes for contests too. The second thing to keep in mind is that if you don't publish your story, no one will ever read it. Very few people make a living off of short story writing so don't hold back from submitting because of pride. Get it out there and get it published!