I’m happy to make this week’s first announcement — our writers’ market directory is now live. You can access the writers’ market directory from any page on the site by clicking the “writers’ markets” link in the top navigation (where Freelance Theater and the QFF book info can be found).

I’ve been wanting to add a market directory here on AFW for a while. Back when this was still SixFigureWriters.com, we put a lot of effort into bringing you paying writers’ markets. And later on I launched a separate site devoted to them at Writers-Guidelines.com. That second site was shut down a while back to prepare for its merge with All Freelance Writing. While it’s taken a little longer than planned to find a solution I was willing to work with, I think we’re finally all set!

This is a directory of paying writers’ markets. The pay level isn’t always included. If it is, I mention it in the summary so you don’t have to click the link just to find out what they pay. Directory listings are for any paying market, and they don’t have to meet the requirements we have for job listings here. That’s because a lot of great open markets don’t list their rates publicly or they negotiate with individual writers. While I’m willing to rule those out for immediate-need gigs advertised where there might not be much time to research that info privately or try to negotiate, that’s not the case for writers’ markets like these. I also want to leave the pay issue a bit more open here so we’re freer to branch this off into a publishing market section as well down the road, where pay rates aren’t always clear-cut (not mentioned, negotiated, royalty-based, etc.).

We’re kicking things off with 50 markets in the directory. I’ll be adding to the list regularly. There is currently no way for you to submit listings. If you’re an editor and you’d like your market included, you can email me at jenn@allfreelancewriting.com. The only requirements are that it must be a paying market (I don’t consider residual or performance-based pay to be a paying market because payment isn’t guaranteed), and you must have a link to public writers’ guidelines. To make sure AFW readers aren’t getting outdated info or inaccurate info simply emailed to us, all listings must be tied to published guidelines on the publication’s website.

Writers — go ahead and play with it. When you first visit the page, you’ll get the master list with all markets. You have the option to search them or browse by category. When you choose a category or submit a search term, the results will appear on the same page. To get back to the master list, just refresh the page.

I’ll likely add more categories as I add more markets. If a market fits into more than one category, I can only put it  into one without messing up the master list. So if something isn’t where you think it should be, see if another category would apply. For example, there’s one on family travel for families with young children. It could have gone in the home & family section or the travel section. I felt travel was more fitting than lumping it in with things like parenting magazines. The regional section is a big one for situations like this — a lot of different niches can be covered with a regional focus, so be sure to check that too.

Let me know if you have suggestions. I’m limited to what I can do with the plugin we’re using, but if I think a suggestion has merit and it can reasonably be done, I’m more than willing to make changes to improve the feature.

Enjoy! :)