The Submission Grinder

ABOUT

The Submission Grinder is a free, donation-supported market database and submission tracker built for writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, run by the team behind the speculative fiction zine Diabolical Plots. It grew out of the same community that produces Diabolical Plots' short fiction, and it has become a de facto successor to older tools like Duotrope's early free model, tracking tens of thousands of markets across genres. The site is maintained largely through volunteer-submitted corrections and market suggestions from its user base, alongside a small paid staff funded by Patreon, PayPal donations, and merchandise sales.

Use is free: writers create an account, log submissions to specific markets, and the system aggregates response times, acceptance/rejection patterns, and payment rates crowdsourced from actual user data rather than editorial self-reporting alone. The advanced search lets poets filter by genre, form, line/word count, and payment, and the pay column auto-adjusts to length parameters entered, which is useful for comparing per-poem versus per-line rates across the thousands of listed poetry markets. Because listings are largely crowd-maintained, some entries lag behind reality (temp-closed markets, defunct zines, or updated guidelines), so poets should verify current submission windows directly with a market before sending work; the site does show market update recency and open/closed status to help with this. The database currently lists on the order of 19,000+ markets with several thousand open at any time, spanning wildly different pay scales from non-paying to token to professional rates.