That’s a good question. Generally, I have always tried to publish my fiction stories in literary magazines. To identify likely candidates, I relied on the Writer's Market and the Novel & Short Story Writer's Market, two books that catalog a large number of print publications. The Writer’s Market covers fiction and nonfiction publications. Some good information about the publications is included in each.

The trick is to identify what publications where you would want to publish your work would be likely to want to publish your work. If you simply wanted to publish for the sake of being published, you could create your own web site, call it a literary magazine, and post all your stories.

Actually, people appear to do quite a bit of this. Some of them write Interactive Fiction—a sort of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. (Before Zork, there were printed Choose Your-Own-Adventure stories. Don’t know if they still exist. I read my first one in the first grade.)

Of course, vanity publishing have always been options. Do a Google search and you will find a lot of people that want to make it easy for you to self-publish.

Some writers get their chap books published when they’ve won a short fiction contest, so I suppose you could shop around your collection of unpublished short stories to book publishers the same way novelists do. What publishers are receptive to an entire book of unpublished stories? The Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market also includes a listing of book publishers, including those that are interested in short story collections and writing by new writers. Not all of them require an agent.

Unfortunately, I always wanted to be part of the literary crowd, and so I targeted literary publications with less than stellar results. When I was actively submitting stories I would pore through the Writer’s Market, trying to find those publications that accepted submissions from new writers of literary fiction (versus any number of other genres: contemporary, mystery, historical, western, romance, speculative—science if you are older than thirty—fiction, historical mystery horror, western sci-fi gay romance, and so forth). One thing that was nice was being able to see how many submissions were made versus how many were published to get an idea of the competitive environment.

Writer’s Market now has an online service. Sounds like it has all the Writer’s Market listings but not all the Novel and Short Story listings. Haven’t tried it, but perhaps I should give it spin.

The real trick would seem to be able to match your writing to an editor’s stylistic, theme, and subject matter preferences. I’ve been told that you should read the sample copies of publication you are considering. However, this doesn’t seem all that efficient, especially when literary journals are competing for my reading time. I have to admit, if I have a choice between spending my reading time with a literary journal and the latest Kazuo Ishiguro novel that has caught my eye, I am going to read the Ishiguro novel.

Why did I think it so important to publish in a journal that I don’t even read? I guess I was looking for some sort of stamp of approval: “Congratulations, your fiction has been approved by the literary poobahs.”

Another option if you are unable to secure a conventional publisher is subsidy or self-publishing, which in most cases requires some upfront costs.