Getting with the times: On not republishing old work

My perm, 1985

Writers at all levels often ask the same question about their older publications. Why can’t they publish the work again?

It’s a reasonable question, and it’s doubtful that the larger literary world would ever know if work a writer published in a tiny campus publication or on a now-defunct small web journal is republished in another venue—almost certainly a small venue itself.

But published work is published work—and I think it’s much healthier to move on than to try to wrong a second life out of a piece of writing. I’ll explain this momentarily.

It’s the rare journal that publishes reprints, although I’m sure a lot of magazines unwittingly do so when writers take a may-as-well attitude about the matter. It can be extremely difficult to take an honest route toward second publication—unless that is via a method everyone approves of, which is through the publication of a writer’s collected works.

If that hypothetical campus publication I mentioned had a print run of fifty copies, of which thirty were picked up for free from a table in the English Department and twenty are slated to sit on a shelf for a dozen years and then be recycled by an unsentimental assistant professor on a cleaning tear, then surely no harm can be done by sending them to a print journal, right? After all, the typical print journal has a press run of a few hundred, selections of which may be featured on a seldom-visited website. Overlapping audiences could not be less likely.

There is a very common way that published work disappears, too, and becomes, for all effects, unpublished. Sometimes on social media, I see writers complaining that the online journal that accepted their work just disappeared one day. Maybe the editors were dilettantes who only had a year or two of effort and commitment to offer. Maybe someone forgot to pay for web hosting. The writers probably presumed that their work would always be there, and in their disappointment with finding the work has disappeared, their thoughts turn to finding a new home for it.

I understand the disappointment when a good poem, story, or essay doesn’t get maximum reach. Disappearing web publications feel especially sad, since there remains no artifact that the work was ever published at all.

I do hate it when writers lament publishing in small venues, like a local zine or a printed campus litmag. After all, publishing in a venue like that is a nod toward community—a way to participate and bond with other writers who share a ZIP code or an alma mater. I have participated in a lot of local ventures like this, always with my best available work, and I have never regretted “wasting” good work on a  small audience. Instead, I’ve been proud of each publication, and each trip to a mic at a release party. Publishing a poem is nice. Publishing a poem and getting some free cheese and cocktail sausages in the company of like-minded people? That’s even better.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to get a larger audience for a piece of writing, provided a submitter is honest. A cover letter can just admit that the work was in a local zine with a print run of twenty. The average editor won’t bat an eye at considering the work—but as an editor myself, I have to admit: I would.

The joy of publishing writers’ work is in the unveiling of it. As an editor, I have always loved the pure glee of introducing new writers to the world, or of pulling back the curtain on bold new work that no one has ever seen before. This is the big payoff—the reward of being involved in publishing.

I’ll admit up front that I’ve made practically no money in my life from editing literary journals. Oh, occasionally I was able to take home the cheese and sausage from a public event if I perfectly timed the pulling of plasticware from my tote bag in the moments after the crowd left and before the catering staff came to clear the platters. And I love cheese. But as payment goes, that’s not really sufficient for the effort.

What is sufficient is the feeling I get from helping to propel the ship of American letters. And republishing some old poem, essay, or story? Well, that’s a poor propeller—and choosing to reprint work from among a submission pool of hundreds upon hundreds of unpublished pieces is an activity that holds little appeal to me. The unveiling is the thing. The re-unveiling? That’s kind of meh.

I repeat myself a lot in this blog I think, but that’s because I repeat myself frequently in my thinking about what it means to be a writer and publisher. And I know I’ve mentioned this before, and recently—but writers should focus on writing. If I won’t print your essay from when you were a junior in college (and I won’t), I hope that compels you to write something brand new.

An acquaintance of mine is always trotting out the same essay. She is a wonderful writer, and she has sent this short-form essay to dozens of outlets. No one has snatched it up, and so she keeps revising it, and keeps asking people like me to read the latest version and weigh in.

I’m tired of that essay. My friend is too talented to stop at just one, and I feel a little vexed to see it again and again. What’s more, it’s probably over-revised—I believe it’s possible to polish the spark away. I’m hardly the first to note that there is an energy to rawness—like in the beginning of “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd, when it’s possible to hear David Gilmour’s finger rub across the string to produce an involuntary enharmonic tone, and to hear another person, I’m not sure who, cough once in the background. I know it’s possible to attain a cleaner version, but I listen for the rub and the cough. They’re my favorite parts.

Work a piece too hard and we lose the edge. I believe this. But I also believe that if we work a piece too hard and too long, we’re ignoring all of the work that waits to be written. And that’s the real tragedy of doting on our past publications.

.

Simultaneous submissions: A horserace

It’s time someone attempted to explain the ethical horserace of simultaneous submitting.

I am a big believer in simultaneous submitting—that is, submitting the same work to multiple outlets at the same time. It’s the only reasonable way for a writer to operate in today’s publishing environment. Thirty years ago, a few dozen journals considered postal submissions from a much smaller pool of writers, but today, new journals are created all the time, and all typically receive thousands or even thousands of submissions per year.

It’s hard to swim to the top of a submission pile when dealing with those numbers. Response times are frequently slow, if responses are offered at all—more and more journals seem to be adopting the “no news is bad news” model of submission responses—and serial, rather than simultaneous, submissions could mean a lot of wait time.

But there are right ways and wrong ways to simultaneously submit, and there is a cardinal rule that ethical writers must follow: The first journal to accept a piece wins.

To a savvy submitter, this cardinal rule should suggest a few practices for sending out work. 

* First and foremost, aim high. The only practical place to start with a submission is the top. I guess the top varies from writer to writer, but when I invoke the term, I mean to reach up, over our own head. I’ve been in Poetry, which is an excellent journal and a publication I’m very proud of, so for me the top is higher than that—maybe The New Yorker, if the top is determined by the number of readers.

* Also, aim equally. It would be the height of folly to submit simultaneously to The New Yorker and a brand-new, unknown journal. Submitting should be a patient practice, governed by the idea that we’re trying to get each piece into the best possible journal, and for my money, that means the journal with the biggest readership. With all else being equal, I want my poems, stories, and essays to be widely read.

* Aim reasonably. When I was first starting to submit, it made sense to send the same work to, say, eight different journals. I made progress quickly; at first there were more rejections than acceptances, but then my success turned—with a few good credits in my bio, probably, but also with more experience and growth as a writer and submitter. I gradually lowered my simultaneous submission rates to six or four or three journals, and I must confess that these days, I’m pretty lucky with poetry submissions, and I no simultaneously submit in this genre. (Fiction, my weakest genre, is a different story—I still simultaneously submit those few stories I send out because these aren’t as readily accepted by journals.)

* Remember, it’s a horserace. If we submit to multiple journals, and we were careful to aim high and to target journals of similar prominence, we should be prepared to allow the first journal to accept our work to print it. This is one of the main reasons we submit to similarly tiered journals; in the example above, if The Podunk Journal accepts our work on Monday morning and Poetry accepts it on Monday night, we’re honor-bound to go with Podunk. That’s the journal that won the race. Acknowledgement of any acceptance should be immediate, and so should withdrawal from other journals. We must drop everything to take care of this crucial piece of business, mainly so that editors won’t waste time on unavailable work.

* Know the journals you submit to. It’s best to obtain or view a full issue, but most journals have sample contents online. A lot of precious time can be wasted by writers who send poems to fiction journals or traditional work to experimental journals. Investigating the market helps writers to submit respectfully.

* Thank an editor. Respect should be the name of the game when submitting. Editing a journal is hard work, and most of the time editors are either uncompensated or poorly paid. I definitely think the respect should go both ways, and I have a dim view of disrespectful correspondence from editors. But both parties have to make an effort to achieve a positive atmosphere in publishing. No one wants an antagonistic relationship among people who operate within our field.

* Follow journal guidelines to a T. A journal announces its rules and intentions, and writers should abide by them or avoid them. There are enough journals that we don’t have to submit to journals whose policies we dislike. This is especially true for simultaneous submissions. Some old-guard journals don’t allow simulsubs, and that’s their prerogative, to an extent. (They don’t actually have a right to tell writers what to do with their work, but it’s the principle of the thing. There’s no reason to send to a journal with policies we don’t like.)

Beyond all of these rules and best practices, the most important part of submitting is the writing part. One reason I gave up simultaneous submissions for poetry is that it prompted me to finish and refine more work and to keep my creativity going.

Submitting should be a deliberate and thoughtful process, but it’s not a writer’s main job. When publishing is our primary focus, our writing suffers, and we become something other than an artist.

Writers write. And then, in their non-writing time, they work to find an audience—the largest and best one they can.

What is your good name worth?

I have a friend who is an astonishingly talented poet. She writes work that has something to say, she is adventurous with syntax and form, and her work looks altogether fresh and interesting on the page.

Although she has a gorgeous first book, she is not having the success she aspires to with poetry, or at least not at the pace she would choose.

With work at a top-tier journal, she asked an interesting question: Exactly how helpful is a recognizable name for poets in the general submission pile?

The answer is complex, and it varies from journal to journal. An old, established journal isn’t likely to be excited by encountering a well-known name, but editors who have been working on journals for only a short time may feel downright thrilled.

And doesn’t it depend on the name? I can think of many writers who are coming onto the scene and getting a lot of social media buzz, but the fact is, an editor who is not very connected to social media may not even recognize such a poet. Sounds crazy, but you do run into the occasional (paper) bookworm on literary journal staffs, and some have no interest in networking, social or otherwise. That’s the kind of job they pawn off on to the intern while they interact with work, as editors have done for as long as there have been editors.

Certain names are so prominent in the field that nearly anyone would take notice. That’s not to say those prominent writers get an automatic in. Once, I was editing a themed issue of a journal for people from a specific region, and a writer I’d been hoping to include sent work. I was thrilled! This was one of the most notable names in the region, and a publication dedicated to that area would not feel complete without a representative sample of his work.

But then I read it. Instead of the guy’s usual work, which was fresh and contemporary, he had sent the worst kind of doggerel—straight and obvious rhyme, insipid subjects, unsurprising delivery. I really examined it, wondering if something important was happening and I was missing it. Was this a brilliant commentary of some sort that I wasn’t picking up on?

And that’s an example of one thing a name does for a writer. If that name is on something horrible, an editor might pause to ask, “What the hell?” That’s what I did, and for several minutes—before I wrote my “Thanks, but” letter.

Of course, a small journal that gets few submissions may be willing to let go of a few standards for the opportunity to print work by a well-known writer. That sounds like an unequivocally bad thing, to change standards for an elite writer, unless we consider why an editor might do that.

When prominent writers send to small journals, they often don’t send their best work. That’s a big danger of soliciting their submissions; on occasion, the journal ends up with a large selection of B-sides from such a writer. I like to think that big-name writers sometimes try out their risky new work with smaller journals, but that’s an optimistic take. The chances are that good work goes to prominent or paying journals, and lesser work, the stuff that has made the rounds many times, goes to lesser-known journals. I suppose they think they’re doing the small journal a favor—and the small journal often agrees.

But these same journals print work, often the best available work, by unknown writers, and the fact is that a beginning writer gains exposure and stature by appearing in an issue with a major prize winner or a beloved name. Some magazines even have the expressed mission of publishing emerging writers alongside established ones. I happen to think standards should remain high, regardless of who sends work, but although I never printed work of low quality, I can’t swear that I never bent a little.

This takes me away from my friend’s query. What does a name do for a writer?

Mind you, my friend is getting some recognition. She has a great blog that gets a lot of attention, she’s an editor for a small literary press, and she has an absolutely beautiful book. But she doesn’t consider herself to be prominent, not that the idea has much meaning in the poetry world. (Is the well-known poet the one who sells 2,000 books instead of 200?)

For me as a reader, a recognizable name serves one useful purpose. If I’m not sure about what it is I’m seeing—if I’m asking myself, “Is this good?”—I might trust a poet whose work I know in a way that I wouldn’t trust a stranger. When an editor is doing first readings of work, the desire is to cull the pile. Nothing in the life of an editor is more troublesome than the “maybe” pile, and anything that can knock a submission out of contention is a good thing. Otherwise, it goes into the small stack of possibilities—a stack that still contains fifty times more work than the editor has room for.

In my desire to reject as much as I can, I want to keep the maybe pile small. A recognizable name might keep a submission alive a little bit longer. That’s the advantage when I’m at the helm, and it’s a pretty good one. I’ll give that submission another look; it stays alive another few days.

It’s useful to remember how prominent writers became prominent. They’re good. Oh, occasionally they become prominent for other reasons—risk-taking, timely subjects, a gimmick, fame from another field—but in general, a poet whose name we know is a poet who has broken into many a journal, and whose work is very strong.

I think that’s what we want—to be good, first, and then for people to recognize that we’re good. And my friend is much more than good—the kind of good that makes it into the maybe pile, and beyond, solely on its merit.

I’m sort of excited for the future, when I can say I knew her when.

When you get a "send again" ... again

So you got rejected. If you’re like me, you utter a “darn” and then update your log and wait for some acceptances to roll in.

But wait. What if you came close … again? What if editors really admired your work … again? What if editors want you to try again … again?

I know a lot of writers who can handle a straightforward rejection, but who feel tremendous frustration with the “almost” rejection. It’s especially hard when a journal has sent more than one of these rejections with a note saying a particular element of the submission was appreciated, or editors would like to see more work.

I’m not sure why slightly warmer rejections cause such frustration among writers. They strike me as a very positive message. I’m always in favor of a little encouragement—a small sign that I’m on the right track.

But they do cause a fair bit of consternation, and for an obvious reason. Lose a footrace by a furlong, with dozens of people between you and the tape, and you’ve lost a footrace. Lose a footrace in such a way that you brush against the falling tape another runner has broken, and that hurts. You nearly had it.

As an editor myself, I can attest that these rejections are not, in fact, a silver medal, but they’re also not a green participation ribbon. They offer some useful information for submitters, and the encouragement is real.

A major literary journal might get five thousand submissions per year. Most of this work is instantly rejectable—and some of it is very solid and good, but still instantly rejectable. Editors sometimes complain about their volume of submissions, because the work can be a lot to weed through. But the great boon of a huge submission pool is that editors can let good work go and still have a lot of really good work to choose from—so much, in fact, that not all of the really good work can fit.

The fact is that it isn’t enough to write good work, when it comes to top journals. A good story has interesting characters and a compelling plot. A great story has unforgettable characters involved in a series of events that compel a reader’s attention.

Likewise, a good essay has strong writing and some interesting ideas. A great essay changes the way we think about some aspect of the world, and it remains on a reader’s mind for a long time after it is read.

And the difference between a good and a great poem is pretty obvious, too. A good poem may have some clever wordplay, some images that linger, a set of ideas that matter. I can think of plenty of good poems that I really appreciate—that speak to me and have memorable passages. But an editor can usually do much better than good. An editor with thousands of poems to choose from can probably find something that approaches a level of really-goodness or even, we can dare to hope, greatness.

Let’s be clear—greatness is a pretty high expectation for even a large slush pile. But it becomes harder to stand out when our work is among other work, some of it excellent or at least memorable and different. It’s especially hard for those quieter pieces to break through.

What an encouraging rejection means is that the work is good, or even very good. A personal note from a busy editor is like gold; when a piece of writing is singled out for praise, there is a reason. Someone who reads a lot of stuff thought this particular stuff had, well, the stuff. Because most editors care deeply about writing, their encouragement reflects a wish by an educated reader for more work from a specific writer. They’re in a position to know when a voice is special and the work has promise, and their sheer busy-ness ensures that they aren’t sending this personal encouragement to everyone (although I certainly hope they’re taking the time to say thanks—but that’s a post for another day).

My suggestion: Writers should try to resist feeling frustrated by specialized rejections. They’re a good thing. They show the writer’s progress; they offer an endorsement by an educated reader who sees promise in the writer’s work. And that’s something to celebrate.

In Praise of Rejects

            True or false: There’s no such thing as a good rejection.

            The answer is complicated. Most magazines use a system of tiered rejections, so there is, quite literally, a “good” rejection, as opposed to a “regular” rejection. I used to work at a magazine that even had a “bad” rejection, although we nixed that pretty quickly.

A “good” rejection slip typically invites another submission, and it is unambiguous in that message. Such a rejection may read, “We read your work with interest, and although we are not accepting it, we would like to consider more.”

A “regular” rejection just turns the work down, ideally with a word of appreciation: “Thank you for submitting; unfortunately, we are not going to accept any of your work at this time.”

My former magazine’s “bad” rejection was reserved for only the worst work (rhyming doggerel and the like), and its language aimed to discourage further submissions. It contained the text, “Please familiarize yourself with our magazine before submitting again.” I refused to use this rather rude rejection, and shortly after I joined the staff, the text of the “bad” rejection disappeared mysteriously from the office computer leaving, rather incongruously, only the files for the “good” and “medium” rejection slips.

So that’s the basic answer—magazines have a “good” rejection, so there is, in fact, such a thing. I would go a little bit further, though, to say that all rejections are good rejections.

As literary artists, we try to publish in an effort to find an audience. Our goal is to have our work accepted by a literary journal and, ultimately, to gain an even wider audience through books, anthologies … heck, canonization, while we’re at it.

As a post-MFA writer who operates more or less alone in the universe, I don’t have many readers. I float a few poems by my husband and post the occasional piece to Facebook; I have a writing group, and of course I have my blog. Other than these venues, efforts to publish provide my only audience. Sometimes I hit the jackpot and have a poem accepted, and sometimes I have a much smaller audience—an editor and maybe her staff.

When a poem is read with the kind of care a publication decision requires, it has truly found an audience. When I am functioning as an editor, I put a lot of time and thought into each and every manuscript I consider. All work gets a good look; the better work gets several readings. The care of a good editor is not to be discounted; that is an audience of great worth.

Beyond these actual readers, though, a rejection also provides proof that I am in the game—I am an active poet who is putting forth effort to increase my audience.

There’s nothing inherently hurtful about a rejection. Each one just means that some (shortsighted) editor didn’t like my poems and (foolishly) chose not to accept them. And with each rejected submission, I have three or four more poems to shuffle into new submissions for other magazines. There are hundreds of them, and new ones are launched almost daily.

Another benefit of rejections is that they give a writer a fairly good sense of the effectiveness of her work. After a poem is rejected a dozen times, I start to get the idea that it may not be very good. I can eyeball it for possible revisions, or I can shitcan it, or I can keep it circulating, because why the hell not. At some point, the much-rejected poem becomes the filler poem, the one you stick in with the better pieces to round out a manuscript. (Once you start regarding it as a filler poem, it will probably be accepted right away—or is that just how my luck works?)

Despite the fact that some rejections feel deeply disappointing, and despite the fact that they seem to represent wasted time and effort, and despite the fact that a rejection stalls us on our route to inclusion in a Norton Anthology, rejections are not bad things.

In fact, upon reflection, I would maintain that the opposite of the opening question is true. There’s no such thing as a bad rejection.

Why I Don't Simultaneously Submit

           Yesterday’s post introduced the topic of simultaneous submissions—the only sensible option for maximizing one’s audience. Today, though, I have to come clean—I typically avoid simultaneous submissions.

            Truth is, my workplace doesn’t care about publications. (As an instructor instead of a professor, teaching, not research, is my focus.) I have no outside push to publish, although I love to do so; the poems can make their public debuts on their own time.

            What’s more, when a poem is saying something that I feel deeply, I find a certain amount of satisfaction from just posting it to social media—Facebook, in particular, with its limited distribution—or from including it in a blog post here. When I’m communicating something essential to me—to my thinking, my spirit—I just go ahead and find an audience. (An important caveat from this long-time editor: A poem included in a blog post isn’t unpublished, and most journals do not accept previously published work.)

            But communication should be two-sided, and you won’t find my poems wrapped up in little ribbons in a trunk when I’m dead. I’m sticking them in the faces of readers whenever I want to, because for me, poems are both art and expression.

            I do like to publish my work in journals, though, in order to find different audiences, and more neutral ones—I daresay my friends sort of like me and have an interest in hearing what I have to say. The particularly accomplished poems, the ones I consider my strongest work, I reserve for journal and eventual book publication.

            Some journals offer lightning-quick responses—within a day, even. But there are plenty that take months or even a year to respond. Simultaneous submissions prod slow mags into faster responses, and they make good use of writers’ time. Simulsubs are also the industry standard, so they are expected by editors—they don’t even surprise those editors who announce a no-simulsub policy that writers violate, although I think that’s a pretty impolite thing to do.

            My submissions that are at magazines right now are, for the most part, simultaneously offered to three or four magazines, but my norm is not to simultaneously submit at all. I have been having very good luck with my submissions, and I find withdrawing inconvenient, so I like to try my luck one at a time.

            By not simultaneously submitting, I avoid a pitfalls that most active publishers encounter—the acceptance of a piece that we thought we had withdrawn, the sudden realization that work we submitted is previously published, or confusion about release dates for pieces that are being published in two forums, one of which allows previously published work (e.g., a journal and an anthology). The simultaneous submitter must keep meticulous records and communicate quickly and clearly to editors as the need arises. I am not a great record-keeper, so tracking submissions is a challenge for me.

            The most important reason that I avoid simultaneously submitting is that I am forced to write more poems to keep several submissions in the hopper at any given time. Quite simply, I have found that a single-submission practice results in the composition of more poems. If I have part of a submission packet ready to go, I’m likely to revise some work to complete the grouping, or even to write a new poem. A week of earnest work can result in a submission packet’s worth of work, provided I’ve come up with a few good poems in that time.

            I do not write a packet of poems in a week and send it out on Saturday, of course—I’m always writing, and two or three good submission packets may well present themselves at the end of the month. I usually get submissions together every month or two, so there is plenty to choose from (and rejections are always streaming in to pad those packets further!).

            It’s nice not to have to publish for any outside reviewer or evaluation team. Maximizing one’s writing career suggests that simultaneous submissions are absolutely the way to go. Personally, though, I like prodding myself to write more and more and more, if only to make up for the years when I did no writing at all. Avoiding simultaneous submissions won’t make me a household name, but it is a personal strategy that works quite well for the artist in me.