Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.
As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been interrupted to braid hair, change a diaper, fix a snack, tie a shoe, read a book, and break up an argument.
I’ve been writing for ten minutes so far.
Writing from outside of academia—way outside it, like fifty miles outside it, where I’m more likely to be spotted at library story time than a poetry reading—it can be easy to neglect submitting my creative work to literary magazines. Why send out my work? Why take the time? I’ve got a playdate to catch.
Besides the little thrill I still get, even after fifteen years of publishing, from seeing my name in print, sending out work is something I consider an important part of being a writer, a task worth making time for with the limited time I have. Sending out my work is an act of respect for the work and for myself; it is stepping into the belief that my words are worth reading and that there are readers who need them.
You may not have five kids—hey, maybe you have ten!—and your life may look nothing like the life of a stay at home, online-adjunct, homeschooling mom in the suburbs—but I bet that you are busy too, with work or school or the sundry tasks that fill our lives. Even in the fleeting moments that make our days, carving out small pockets of time for sending out your work can make a difference in the long run. Just because you are busy, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be heard!
So how to make time for sending out submissions when time is limited? Here is how I do it:
Decide how often you want to submit your work.
Would it be great to submit my poetry to magazines every day? Yes! But that is simply not possible with my work and family life, unless I put other important tasks aside. For me to feel like my work is getting seen by a fair number of editors and to feel like my career is moving forward, I like to submit to five magazines a month.
How often you want to send out your work may look different for you than it does for me—perhaps you can use a lunch break once a week to submit poems. Or you are a teacher and find that you can only submit over the summer, but that you can submit every day during those months. When planning out how often you submit, take into account when magazines most often have reading periods (some do not read over the summer).
The important aspect of how often you submit is that you do not want to feel like you are so seldom submitting that you have fallen out of the writing world altogether. Even dipping my toes in once a month has helped me to feel connected to the publishing world, from my little bedroom desk in my suburban home.
Even in the fleeting moments that make our days, carving out small pockets of time for sending out your work can make a difference in the long run. Just because you are busy, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be heard!
Decide how many submissions you want to send out.
How many submissions do you have time to make during the time you have set aside for submitting work? I choose to send out five submission packets to five separate journals so that I can keep my time that I spend on submissions to a half hour or less, but you could do this many ways. If you are sending out during your Tuesday lunch break, perhaps you could set a timer for twenty minutes and send out as many submissions as possible during that time (reading the guidelines obviously!).
If you find that you can only send out poems once a month, but you can take an entire Sunday afternoon, you could try to send out a greater number of poems. Simultaneously submitting some of the work could also help you get it to as many editor’s eyes as possible in a short amount of time.
Choose which magazines you would most like to publish in.
If you have never done this before, I would recommend taking an hour or so one day to determine which journals you would really like to publish in. What journals do you read? Which ones publish your writer friends, your enemies, your teachers, and your idols? Are there journals that fit a particular niche of readers that you would like your writing to reach? Are there journals that pay a particular amount of money that you would like in your Paypal account? When you have less time to submit to journals, you have to be a bit more choosey.
Last year I almost exclusively sent to journals that paid—I have five kids and my husband is a high school math teacher, so my reasons for this are obvious—but this year I am hoping to get my work in front of readers who are interested in the topics I write on, whether this means getting paid or not.
You may want to make several lists—journals you aspire to publish in for their merit, journals that pay well, journals that are in your particular writing niche. Thinking through where you submit can make those acceptances all the more important when they happen.
Plan it out for the year.
I like to do this at the beginning of the year, but anytime works—now is better than never! I keep a physical, paper day planner and simply write “submit five poems” on my to do list at the beginning of each month. You could mark this in your Google calendar or however you keep track of your days, but don’t neglect this step. Making this appointment with yourself will make it more likely to actually happen.
Follow through!
Now make it actually happen.
You have a plan, a schedule, a strategy. It may not sound like much, sending out five submissions a month; but at the end of the year, I’ve sent out sixty poems to sixty different editors, and usually, along the way, gotten a few acceptances at places that really matter to me. I don’t send out a thousand submissions a year, or gather a hundred acceptance letters, or have a new poem in a new journal every time I turn my head—but persistent, consistent progress has helped my writing career keep chugging along, even in the midst of a busy season of motherhood.
It's tempting to set aside the work for “when I have time” to send it out; instead I’ve decided to make the time, however little. As the great science fiction author Isaac Asimov says, “You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.”
Great column Renee. I love your advice, in principle. I find that submissions can take me quite a while, in part, because I end up doing some editing while I am submitting. Also selecting which poems to send to a particular journal takes some time. And then there is the bookkeeping involved in documenting submissions. One question I would ask is how many journals would you send out a given poem to at a given time? Another criteria for sending workout, which is not always easy to discern, would be how long the journal takes to respond to your submissions.
"Sending out my work is an act of respect for the work and for myself; it is stepping into the belief that my words are worth reading and that there are readers who need them."
Thank you so much for this alone.