Magazine Submissions - Mostly a Publicity Tool

 One of my MFA students has asked for advice about submitting her stories for publication, and my reply touches on so many of the concerns of this blog that I'm posting my reply to her here.

 

Here's the situation. The student writes short fiction, and so far has been successfully self-publishing in the form of chapbooks or zines. That is, she brings out her work in handmade editions, laser printed, saddle-stapled, and mailed to readers who fund these publications on Kickstarter.

 

She also sends her individual stories out to literary magazines and web sites and is frustrated by the high rates of rejection. The effort it takes to research these publishers and send her work to them takes a lot of time, time that she could be using to self-publish. So she is asking a small constellation of questions about the submissions process. Her concerns boil down to:

• Why should I seek to publish in these outlets at all?

• How do I decide where to submit?

• How do I manage the mechanics of submission?

Why Seek Another Publisher At All?

There may be other reasons such as the personal gratification that comes with acceptance, but in career terms, publishing in a magazine or a literary web site offers two benefits: money and publicity. And the money, even in the best of magazine markets for fiction, is negligible. Most literary magazines pay nothing, or pay a token amount. Some of the top journals just below the mass commercial general circulation magazines might pay a few hundred dollars. At the top, the commercial market that very few writers will reach, are magazines that pay a thousand dollars or more for a story, but even writers who crack these markets can't expect to sell to them more than a few times a year. The money that comes from publishing fiction in magazines is a bonus, but it's not reliable as the basis for a career.

(It is still possible to sustain a freelance career in nonfiction magazine writing. But there isn't enough fiction featured in well-paying magazines for the writer to rely on being paid regularly.)

The main benefit of publication in magazines, in anthologies, and on literary web sites is publicity. Even the goal of “having readers,” which is the first benefit of publication, serves this goal of having still more readers for one's work published elsewhere. The byline on a good story is a line of advertising for all of the writer's other stories. It says, in effect, “If you liked this reading experience, look for this brand again for similar experiences.” The contributor's note, and the URL of the author's web site, is, along with the byline, the second half of this publicity package.

It's true that publishing in these venues also helps to establish the writer's credentials, but those credentials are easy to re-frame as yet another form of publicity. Editors and readers alike will see these credits as an indication of quality.

So publication is a step toward building audience, and that means that the writer should have thought in advance about what she is going to manage and build the traffic that publication brings to her web site. Does she offer her existing publications for sale at the web site mentioned in her contributor's notes? Does she offer visitors a newsletter so she can maintain a mailing list of people who are interested in her writing?

Where to Submit?

There are so many venues for publication that my student feels daunted by her choices. Where should she be sending her work? No matter what the goals of publication might be, some of the oldest and most basic advice should serve as the writer's first selection screen: Submit to publications that publish work like yours.

Of course, this rule is easy to follow in general, but trickier in the details. At a minimum, the writer should read the publication's description in the various market listings and refrain from sending a realistic literary story to a publisher of mystery stories or science fiction. And, yes, it's a good idea for the writer to have a look at an issue or two before submitting. But it's also possible for a writer to talk herself out of a submission that would have been successful. If she notices that a magazine has a pattern of publishing only sad stories, she might fail to send a story with a happy ending. If sad endings aren't mentioned in the editor's description of what he's seeking, then it is at least sometimes a mistake to invent editorial policies for a magazine based on what they are already publishing. It's the editor's job to reject work, and unless a submission is clearly inappropriate, it's worth a try.

If the primary benefit of publication is publicity, then the question of where to submit is clarified some more. Where will the writer get the most publicity. In general, the larger the circulation of the publication, the more useful it will be to appear there.

The Mechanics of Submission

My student expressed some dismay over how little information she typically gets when her work is rejected. She would like to be able to fine-tune her submissions to have a better sense of which stories to try with which editors, but when the only data point she gets from a submission is, “No,” she has little to work with when she's allocating stories to editors in a new round.

It's reasonable for her to feel frustrated. She wants to feel that if she sends out a dozen stories and all of them come back, she has at least learned something that will increase the chances for acceptance when she submits again. But the truth is that she needs to make her peace with that frustration and understand that submitting for publication is a matter of persistence in the face of little feedback. If she has reason to believe that her work is good (and her work is good), then she just needs to keep the work in circulation until, by chance, she begins to get some of the feedback she is hoping for. An editor who sends specific comments about a story is an editor that she should send to again, and again, and again. An editor who accepts one piece deserves to move to the head of the line and be the first person to see new work.

Chance plays a big part in submission. A story that might have been accepted yesterday might arrive just after a similar piece has already been accepted. Rejection can mean that the story is of poor quality, but what editors are saying when they reject work is, “I can't use this right now.” The writer won't usually know why that's the case, but the reasons can be completely extraneous to the quality of the work. Additionally, editors are readers, too. They have good days and bad, days when they are inattentive and just don't get a story that, on a different day, they would recognize as wonderful. An acceptance is a happy confluence of a quality story, a suitable slot for such a story in the publication at that moment, and recognition that the story and the slot are a good match. The writer can control only the quality of the story and whether the story is given a chance to appear in the right hands at the right time.

So other than seeing to the writing, all the writer can do is put the work in circulation and keep it circulating until it finds a home. The mechanics of submission should be, well, mechanical. Once the writer has identified some possible venues for her work, she should send her work to one after another, keeping track of where each piece has been, probably with a spreadsheet. When something returns, it should go out again for consideration elsewhere, ideally in the same hour. Every finished piece should be under submission somewhere.

And when pieces are published, and when some small percentage of their readers follow a link to the writer's web site, that's the first small step in the writer's strategy of bringing more readers, ideally paying readers, to more of the writer's work.