Often the audience for devotionals is phenomenal. Mary Lou Redding, who is the managing editor for The Upper Room, says that their devotional guide is read or listened to by eight to ten million people in forty-four different languages. It is the most popular devotional guide in print. In 1990, I taught creative writing at the India Communications Institute in Mumbai, India An editor, who had read one of my devotionals in The Upper Room, traveled over 1,000 miles by train to attend my seminar.
Besides reaching many people, devotionals are an excellent way to break into print. A publishing house may not want to take a chance on a first-time author with a book contract because the risk involves thousands of dollars if the first print run does not sell out. But Mary Lou Redding says they would like to use 365 different authors in The Upper Room each year, and many are first-time writers. You can obtain their writers guidelines from their website at www.upperroom.org/ .
Daily Devotional Markets are listed in the Christian Writers’ Market Guide under that heading in the periodical section. Many of these are written on assignment only, but don’t let that stop you from submitting. If you write quality devotionals or get some published, you can send them as samples and ask for an assignment on speculation, meaning the editor is not obliged to buy them if you don’t deliver what he or she is looking for.