On sharing our submission news

I love good news. I love it so much, it doesn’t even have to be my good news in order to provide a lift.

And so when friends post good publishing news on social media, I get a little charge from it. I like seeing which magazines are accepting their work, which presses are biting, how response patterns are materializing. By that same token, I also appreciate it when fellow writers share their disappointments—especially on those occasions when I’m experiencing the very same disappointment at the same time.

Knowing which journals, presses, and contests are responding can be very useful. A spate of responses, good or bad, sometimes precedes the start or end of the academic year, or a coming holiday, or the annual writing conference. If a writer is accepted by a journal that rejects us, we learn a little something about the publication’s aesthetics and how our work might fit (or not). The same is true for those journals that accept us and reject our friends.

I know that when I’ve experienced a publishing dry spell, it has felt a little like a shot in the arm when someone I know and like has a piece accepted by a good journal. And it also gives me hope when I learn that someone has finally scored a book contract after years of trying. If it can happen for them, I remind myself, it can surely happen for me, too.

My pleasure in the successes of my friends is not entirely from altruism. I also find announcements of publications to be a great way to learn about journals I’ve never heard of, and just knowing about their activity spurs me to want to get in on the fun.

Even rejections are, for me, a kind of fun. Each one signals that I’m making forward progress and doing the work of getting my writing in front of readers. An editor who rejects me is also a reader who has read my work—and finding readers, any readers, is part of the contract I made with myself when I accepted writing as a calling. It’s great when the editor appreciates our work enough to put it in front of other readers, but even when that doesn’t pan out, we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we’ve done our job—we’ve attempted to close the circuit, to transfer the spark from our imagination to a reader.

I know so many people who are reticent about announcing an acceptance, a contract, a fellowship, or a grant. It feels like bragging to them. And honestly, I also know a lot of people who see it that way, and who absolutely hate announcements of good news.

I have made a point of not living my life to accommodate small-mindedness. My friends are going to hear my good news, and a lot of my bad news, too. “The Soul selects her own Society,” someone once said, and my soul chooses to surround itself with supportive people—both for the intel we can provide one another and for the boost to the spirit our good news can give.

Why you should submit to literary magazines: 5 insightful articles

Guest post by Trish Hopkinson, blogger at Trish Hopkinson: A Selfish Poet

It’s easy to get discouraged, to question the purpose or why it’s meaningful at all to send your poems and other writing out for what often results in rejection. We all do it. There’s not one poet or writer (alive or dead) who hasn’t questioned the quality of their work, questioned their reasons for writing, asked themselves if any of it is worth it.  I’m here to tell you IT. IS. WORTH. IT. And so are the authors of the five articles listed below.

Here’s my own short list of reasons:

#1 - Helps you to become a good literary citizen—support the art of literature. Read literary magazines online. Subscribe to a few. Request books of independent publishers and lesser known authors you love at your local library. And of course, submit your own work. In doing so, you become part of a community.

#2 - For the thrill—yes, it’s a bit of a rollercoaster ride to submit to literary magazines, but I actually think a better metaphor is golf. Very few people ever really get good at the game, it’s rare to get a hole in one, or even make par on most holes—but when you do? There’s simply nothing like it.

#3 - You will want to keep writing—sure, there are days when all those questions come pouring in. But ultimately, if you’ve ever had a piece accepted and published, you’ll want to continue playing the game, pushing yourself, improve and refine your art. This is where my tagline “selfish poet” comes in. When I write poetry, the process of creating, the act itself—that is for no one else but me.

Need more encouragement? These articles each take a little of a different approach and have something new for everyone. Each article is a page or so. Some focus on poetry, others on short stories, and some on writing in general. Bookmark your favorites and come back to it on those days when you need reasons for what you do.

4 Reasons You Should Submit to Literary Magazines by Crystal J. Zanders (Blue Mesa Review)

My favorite:

3. You is important: No one has lived through your experiences and can write about them with the style, grace, and beauty or starkness, darkness and terseness––or however you write––that you can. Your voice matters. We need to hear it. I believe that a story, a poem, or an essay can change everything. What if that essay is just sitting on your hard drive when it could be making the world a better place? You are an important part of the literary landscape. We need you.

Ten Reasons for Sending Your Poems to Magazines by Helena Nelson (Happenstance)

My favorite:

4. The poet who works at getting the poems out there is a member of the community of jobbing poets. It’s part of the apprenticeship, if you like. It’s an honourable striving. If the poems aren’t accepted, the effort is no less praiseworthy. Besides, you’re going to stick at it. You’re going to send them somewhere else. There are many publications for your messages in a bottle to float away to.

What's So Great About Submitting to Literary Magazines? by Becky Tuch (The Review Review)

My favorite:

See Old Work in a New Way: Many lit mags are either themed journals themselves (criminal justice, J Journal; music,Conduit; motherhood, The Mom Egg, etc.) Or else they are generalized magazines that publish to specific themes once in awhile (“In the Dark”, Hayden’s Ferry Review; “Southern Sin”, Creative Nonfiction, etc.) You might not think of a certain piece of writing as publishable. Yet when you look at it within the context of a particular theme, lo! Perhaps the piece is suitable for submission afterall. It might need work to get it into shape, but it’s worth a shot. Another advantage of pursuing this angle of publishing is that the competition may not be as stiff. While a journal’s ordinary submissions might be in the thousands, a theme issue may not have quite so many submissions.

Stubbornly Submitting to a Literary Magazine is Good by Michael Nye (The Missouri Review)

My favorite:

Assistant editor Evelyn Somers spoke up at this point, explaining that getting rejected by a magazine repeatedly and then, finally, getting work accepted is, actually, fairly normal. It’s a little frustrating for an editor, she said, when a writer submits to us five times and then just stops and we never hear get the chance to read the writer’s work again. She noted that TMR has published several writers who sent manuscripts to us for over a decade before we published their work.

Why You Should Submit to Literary Magazines (The Business of Books)

 My favorite (short story focus):

Yes, most literary magazines are small in circulation and have little (if any) money to pay you. But publication in one ups your literary cred significantly. Remember, these mags are used as scouting grounds for young, hungry agents and editors looking to make their mark. Think about it: You’re new at an agency or publishing house, and you dream of discovering an unknown writer and signing him or her to a book contract before anyone else does. Where’s a good place to look? The pages of these magazines.

If you like this post, please share with your writerly friends and/or follow Trish Hopkinson’s blog or like her Facebook page. You can see all the resources her blog offers poets/writers on her Blog Tour page. 

About our guest blogger: Trish Hopkinson has always loved words—in fact, her mother tells everyone she was born with a pen in her hand. She is author of three chapbooks and has been published in several anthologies and journals, including Stirring, Chagrin River Review, and The Found Poetry Review. She is a product director by profession and resides in Utah with her handsome husband and their two outstanding children. You can follow Hopkinson on her blog where she shares information on how to write, publish, and participate in the greater poetry community at http://trishhopkinson.com/.

Good news for the irredeemable: There is no naughty list

Let me just say this up front: Editors do not share a blacklist.

I’ve heard writers worry about this when they’ve made a particularly egregious misstep. Poor record-keeping can result in publishing the same piece in more than one outlet. We can forget to include a journal in a book’s acknowledgements. We can include a quote from another writer in our work and forget to include attribution. These are serious mistakes, and nothing to be proud of.

But the thinking among a lot of submitters is that editors share names of people who commit infractions, and this really isn’t the case. The fact is that the mistakes I mentioned are very common ones, and they are easily attributable to error instead of malice. Editors are in the practice of overlooking these issues. Most don’t even maintain their own blacklist, much less a common one.

Oh, sure, there are those submitters make missteps, and we remember them. I can think of one person who writes in three genres and always has a half-dozen active submissions at any one time. And I can think of another who used to stuff up to twenty dog-eared poems into an envelope—some of those duplicates, or the exact same copy, of poems sent before.

If editors had their druthers, submissions would be targeted with some care, and writers wouldn’t flood them with multiple submissions at one time. But that’s merely vexatious; it’s not sinful. 

Some of the things writers do are kind of charming, even if they undermine the work. One writer I can think of would always send a picture of herself astride an exotic animal (I’m being deliberately vague, since maybe I’m talking about you), and another who would take this a step further and include a signed, glossy eight-by-ten photograph with his work. Like most editors, I read the stuff, but it’s not propitious to elicit an eyeroll before the first “Roses are red.”

The secret lives of editors are not significantly different than the public lives of editors. I’m guessing most work harder than a lot of submitters realize, but the work itself is pretty transparent, thanks to Duotrope, Rejection Wiki, and social media. This is as it should be.

But editors do talk, especially when submitters behave badly. And our favorite topic is the angry rejectee.

On occasion, writers respond angrily, or even threateningly, to rejections. Over the years, I’ve read plenty of correspondence that asks me what the view is like with my head up my own ass, or why in the world I consider myself qualified to judge a poet’s brilliant response to a dead Turkish mystic, or what I have against [insert literary style or school here], or why I foolishly passed up work that [insert name of minor journal] just accepted.

I get it. I’m dumb. <shrugs>

Editors like to laugh about this stuff, but very often we do so without naming the writer. It’s hard to keep track of several thousand names, and not worth it anyway. To be honest, very few writers do anything new, on the page or with their behavior. I’m more frequently surprised by the work than by correspondence, even the most vile sort. It may feel like people are always coming up with new ways to be terrible to one another, but the categories tend to be predictable, and the ways the specifics vary aren’t significant. Whether insult, undermine, or guilt, the source of offense is seldom a source of surprise.

Exciting work is a source of surprise, and that’s the thing we’re hungry for. Even in a literary journal full of excellent writing, it’s only the rarest piece that actually offers something brand new. Believe me, we talk about these writers.

The closest a writer can come to landing on a blacklist is through true harassment, such as threats, unwelcome sexual advances, misogyny, or racism. There’s not a literal list—we’re not updating Google Docs with the names of jerks—but if a writer dares to threaten an editor, online or in person, word gets out—and not just among editors. Bullying is not afforded secrecy in the literary field. Those who would try to harm others through their power or influence can face a dire and deserved reward.

The writing world is a small one. This, though, is not the reason that submitters and editors alike ought to conduct themselves with courtesy and respect—attitudes that should extend both ways. The fact is that our small world is also, frequently, a mean one. And sometimes kindness is the only true surprise.

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 do journals owe to former contributors?

Image courtesy of ClipartFest.com

A friend wrote to me last week, and she was feeling very disgruntled over a rejection she had received.

This friend is an old war horse, like me, and she doesn’t get riled about rejections. When you’ve been submitting for a long time, you accept rejections as a matter of course, and they don’t make you especially sad. (The down side, of course, is that acceptances no longer thrill; they’re better than the alternative, but they don’t make a long-time submitter and publisher feel giddy.)

My friend was feeling irritated because she sent a submission to a journal that had published her work before, and she received what was probably some version of the journal’s “good” rejection. (Most journals have at least two different form rejections, one saying “Thanks,” and the other saying, “Please try again.”) 

What happened next was interesting. My friend wrote back to ask whether the journal would be interested in seeing a revision, since the rejection was positive. That editor wrote her back to say this: “You are welcome to send a revision to [Journal Name] through Submittable if you would like. As you know, we are a tough mark with a less than 1 percent acceptance rate, but we would be happy to review anything you would send our way.”

This response really wasn’t an appropriate one to send to a former contributor. My friend had obviously broken through once, despite the 1 percent acceptance rate. Yet the editor wrote to her as if she were a stranger—and a novice. This, despite the record of her having published with the journal. As a former editor-in-chief of a literary magazine, I can say definitively that I would recognize any name from the past twenty years of publication, and if pressed, I could probably match that name up to a title. These names matter quite a bit to a journal; they helped to build the magazine’s reputation, and we often refer to our contributors as family. Any correspondence, and particularly any submission, from a member of the family was enthusiastically received and cordially responded to.

My friend got no such acknowledgement. This is complicated by the fact that she is an important editor herself, and in that capacity she has worked closely with the editor-in-chief of the journal that rejected her.

She told me that she knew the main editor would have been more collegial, whether accepting or rejecting. If that editor had had no interest in seeing a revision, he would simply have said, “No, thanks”—an answer that would have been perfectly acceptable.

What was desired by my friend was not special treatment for her work, but something else: an acknowledgement, maybe, that she had shared her talent and her name (it is a somewhat prominent one) to help advance the journal’s mission. While she didn’t put it this way, I believe it could be said that she wished to be received as family, just as I used to receive the writers at my national journal.

My friend gives this assistant editor great benefit of the doubt. “I know if we talked to these editors in person, they would be shocked to hear how their words are being perceived,” she told me. “They’re just trying to be professional. There’s a huge disconnect.”

This friend didn’t write to complain about her treatment, though. Instead, she wanted to raise an issue that was most pertinent to her, as an editor herself. She wrote, “Maybe the larger question is, ‘What do journals owe the writers they’ve published?’ It’s a curiosity I’ve been exploring in my head both as a writer and an editor. What do we owe each other?

“And maybe the answer is nothing.”

I don’t think my friend believes journals owe nothing to writers, because I’ve witnessed her welcoming, collaborative attitude toward writers many times—including times we served on a masthead together. 

And I don’t believe the answer is nothing. I think journals owe everything to writers. As most journals have started charging for submissions, and as many never send rejection responses (and even announce this as policy), and as many close reading periods without notice, editors seem to forget that writers are vital—that writers, in fact, are the heart of a journal, and without them a journal would fold.

It is true that many magazines contend with large numbers of submissions despite a small staff. But whether ten writers send work or ten thousand, journals should be honored to be entrusted with it, and they should show graciousness and care to all submitters. 

And they should especially show care to family.