Writers doing no-no's; new editor at Poetry; review of The Drift; new workshop from SmokeLong Quarterly; jobs at Poetry, BOMB, Vallum; 200+ markets for your work...
Great topic, Becky. I'd like to suggest one for the future; the potential for a publisher rating site for authors. I get a little tired of submission pages having a string of conditions as long as the menu in a Chinese restaurant. I think we need something like a TripAdvisor where writers can rate their experiences with publishers as an encouragement/warning to others.
The multiple submission issue for anything other than an actual book is a huge pet peeve of mine. In today's world of millions of online magazines most with a readership of a couple of hundred subscribers if lucky it is totally unfair of these publications to want work that has not been submitted or published in another online magazine or personal blog site. They are not offering us pay at all, they cannot give us any huge exposure, so asking us to submit a piece one and at time to each magazine and then wait for a reply is ludicrous. This isn't the days of huge overhead for a print magazine. Every wanna be writer has pretty much set up an online magazine of sorts. So unless an online magazine has a readership of in the tens of thousands it is totally unfair to ask us to write for them for free, and most even charge us a fee for submission, and then think we should not be allowed to have our essay or poem printed in as many of these small magazines as we can at once. We need lots of these to expose our work and so should not be constrained. I'm reasonably sure that these sites of a few hundred readers are not going to overlap in terms of audience so why not allow us to simply submit to as many as we like and get published in as many as possible to get our work out there. I mean it's a huge difference between the New Yorker requiring exclusive rights to print and a small online mag of a few people. Sorry but this is a huge pet peeve of mine and I'm sure to many writers as well. The same goes for a personal blog site. Mine has all of 170 followers, so really this is will impact the readership of my piece on a totally different small online magazine? I don't think so.
Great point. I guess where it gets tricky is if writers resubmit after their work has appeared in larger journals. I assume most people wouldn't bother submitting work once it's been accepted in a big-circulation magazine. But some might. And is that fair to writers who've not published anywhere at all? On the other hand, I totally see your point and agree with you about writers wanting and deserving greater exposure.
May 10, 2022·edited May 10, 2022Liked by Becky Tuch
With all due respect if some large publication published a piece of mine, my submittable account would be closed in a second . I m talking strictly about the bazillion ones out there all using this rule when their readership is basically 50 of their closest friends and relatives and that unfortunately is the majority . Just about a year or so ago it was rare for me to see a site that asked for a payment just to submit now it’s the norm for all of them just about
Couldn't have expressed this better myself about this perniciously pretentious practice, especially from non-paying sites. I try to keep track of what I send where but mistakes will happen, especially for those that demand email submissions instead of using Submittable, Duotrope etc.
Finding paying sites is like in a needle in a haystack . I’ve sent submittable a lot of improvements I’d like to see there like having a query for paying sites only and with every mag now asking for a submission fee it’s also impossible to know the legit ones . I have submissions from
Last December still not answered . Makes you wonder right ?
I find Duotrope has a much more useful search function for finding smaller paying publishers. I have to say that the vast majority of places I submit to eventually get back to me, albeit mostly with bad news. :-)
I never have a problem with the rejections . I save every one of them . It’s part of our art. If you get one out of 10 to say yes well who cares about the other 9, that’s my humble opinion . I ve never used Duotrope I ll have to check it out but I’m basically the laziest writer ever lol I’ve got two pieces coming out in the next 2 months actually so with like 8 submissions for that I m pretty happy right now
We had a stipulation at Thrice that reprints were okay so long as we give full mention of the first publication in the credits. In the case of our latest iteration, we collected a basket of work by a featured writer and listed full credits of any first appearances. Especially proper because we were publishing a collection as a showcase. We've been lucky in that writers usually tell us in their submissions. Our guidelines said we will take stuff that has appeared elsewhere, but only if we could credit the other venue. But I guess I, personally, trusted the writer to tell me. Maybe being specific in the guidelines about this helped. I never ran into the problem.
Tangentially-related question about reprints: I've noticed that a number of writers promote their short, published pieces on Twitter/Instagram by posting screenshots/photos of the work in its entirety, versus only links to the pieces. These posts seem to do better in the algorithm than those with only links—however, is it kosher, or does it somehow take away from the lit mag by driving traffic away from them? If there's a contract and it stipulates that after being published by the lit mag you own the rights to your work and can do whatever you want, posting the piece seems fine, but if there's some sort of exclusivity in the contract, seems like the screenshot/photo would be a violation. (Maybe I just answered my own question, lol.) Does anyone have direct experience with this? Trying to figure out the best way to promote my work. I've always posted links, but I worry that I may be losing readers in asking them to perform the step of clicking to navigate elsewhere versus having the work right in front of them.
I have the same question. I've posted to my blog a photo of the printed magazine page in when the work is only available in hard copy. I hesitated to do that, etiquette seeming to be that readers should get a copy of the magazine. I still feel conflicted. But I've seen others do it, poets who are far more published than I, and I want my work to be read. Example: http://lovesettlement.blogspot.com/2021/03/yes-in-haight-ashbury-literary-journal.html
I've also seen famous writers do this (Ocean Vuong shared a photo of his poem in The Paris Review on Instagram, for example). Recently, I saw in the submission specifications of a print-only journal that they want accepted writers to share their acceptance and promote the magazine online, but explicitly don't want writers sharing the actual work (because as you said, they want people to buy the magazine). However, unless there's some sort of exclusivity rule like this laid out on the site or in your contract, it seems like it should be okay to share the work. I notice with some mags that they own the rights before or maybe 1-3 months after publication, and then all rights revert to the writer.
First, best to clarify distinction between "simultaneous subs" and "resubs of previously published work." Most mags address that question in their guidelines. If they don't speak to either of those questions, I assume it's a no-no. It's incumbent on us writers to figure out a submission logging system. I use the submittable submissions window for my account, even if the sub was via email or through Duotrope or one of the proprietary submission utilities. Here's how: 1 - Log every submission in Submittable, 2 - When you get an acceptance, go to Submittable and find out who else might be considering that work. 3 - Send each of those pubs a polite withdrawal notice. No "neener-neener" or "you really missed the next Nobel winner, dude" sort of language. Courtesy, courtesy, courtesy. We're writers, after all, not cretins. Most of us. Even if we ARE cretins, it's still no excuse to act like one. Keep it part of the mystery of your authorial persona.
I had to add this quotation from the notes section of The Best American Poetry 2021, edited by Tracy K. Smith; it's by Shane McCrae, who, the bio says, has published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux; he's gotten the Guggenheim, the Lannan, and an NEA, and he teaches at Columbia: "Although [the poem included in BAP] was selected from The Yale Review, where it was published in 2020 -- for which I will be forever grateful -- it was first published in The Baffler in 2019, for which I will be forever grateful. I screwed up, and as a result the poem was accidentally published twice ..."
Having never had a poem accepted by The Yale Review I have no information on whether they require their authors to sign a contract saying the accepted work is previously unpublished -- but I'd think it a pretty safe guess. So, not only did McCrae publish his poem in two different high prestige periodicals -- and likely certified that it was unpublished for the second, the poem was chosen for the BAP annual. Congratulations to him! I'm not going to hate on him for it. But it does remind one that you can do things that all those editors claim to hate you for -- and still do fine.
What is considered prior publication is too broad. Posting to friends and private facebook groups is considered prior publication by many. Posting to my own blog or poetry site is considered prior publication. I find that to be terribly naive.
May 10, 2022·edited May 10, 2022Liked by Becky Tuch
I was at a book fair a few years ago and picked up a copy of a literary magazine I was interested in, and by some stroke of coincidence saw the exact story that I had chosen to publish years ago in the magazine I edit (The Summerset Review). I think submitting previously published stories to places that specifically say they do not accept them is a rather dishonest thing to do, but it probably happens more than we might imagine.
Yeah, Becky. I brought it to the attention of the editor who was at the table, and he did get a bit irritated. He said they don't accept reprints. I checked the issue and Summerset was not given credit. I wonder if the editor got hold of the author and said, "Hey, pal, on that story you published with us, well, you know..." !
I just had a client ask if she could publish a story on her blog while waiting to see if a journal accepts it (I'm an editor and I'm submitting the story for her). I told her, probably not. Publishing is publishing, even if it's self-publishing. Curious if any journal editors out there agree. And what if this writer immediately took the story down if it got accepted? And for that matter, assuming the blog is small, would anyone even look or notice or care? . . . Also, I know there's at least one journal out there that publishes previously published work. Second Chance journal? Something like that. I'll add a comment if I can find it.
That is so interesting, Erik. I've had writers ask me that too. I usually tell them not to do it, because it is indeed considered publishing. However it's so important for writers to share their work, and can be empowering to have those early readers, whereas waiting to hear back from lit mags is no fun at all. Maybe there's a compromise situation where the writer can keep the blog private and only share it with a small handful of people? Then immediately take it down upon acceptance in a magazine?
I don’t know what level you’re at in terms of the journals you are frequenting but perhaps the “previously published “ caveat should just be removed from the “online magazines on training wheels” , those with so small a readership it really shouldn’t matter if a piece also gets published elsewhere and no idea why a personal blog should even matter if the readership is tiny and the blog is largely unknown
Could be that a previously published poem was not sent out again, but rather was a poem simultaneously submitted but not withdrawn, that is, the poem was taken up by one literary venue and the poet neglected to withdraw it from the others to which they'd sent it.
I have had the experience of seeing a poem accepted by one ezine, then withdrawing it from others, only to have the poem accepted by a second ezine. The withdrawal email had been missed. The confusion was cleared up, and the poem did not appear in two places.
On the other hand, in my case, at least, that sort of problem has been so rare as to be hardly worth mentioning.
Your method (of withdrawing the work) sounds like the responsible thing to do, Glenn. I'm also guilty of that, just totally forgetting that I sent a piece somewhere and then having it accepted months after it's been accepted elsewhere. This tends to happen with places that require email submissions. I try to keep a record...and then forget where I kept the record...Thankfully, the one or two times this has happened the editors were really nice about it.
I'm surprised to see this from this mag. I'm widely published, 2018 and 2019 64 Best, two-time Pushcart nominee, various awards and such, and never even got a notification of receipt from the mag. I thought it had gone pandemic-defunct. It might be the case that people like me assume that if you're collecting for a MO or Midwestern "anthology," these poems you're submitting may very well have been published before. Maybe my interpretation of "anthology" or a regional or state collection is different than what the editor thinks. Anyway, there are various anthologies that take previously published material because that's sometimes in the nature of topical or regional anthologies. I say it's an editor's responsibility to be explicit about first publication rights, especially where the context may be ambiguous, such as an anthology. (By the way, I'm not the author complained of here--I have not even received an acknowledgment of previously submitted work from the mag.) Respect is a two-way street, and I acknowledge that this mag is swimming in a pool where about 10 editors blackball anything new, different, or NOT university-affiliated. I hope one of you will check out one of the three books I have published in two years' time without notice from the university-affiliated presses. You've got all those free hands in students, after all.
Great topic, Becky. I'd like to suggest one for the future; the potential for a publisher rating site for authors. I get a little tired of submission pages having a string of conditions as long as the menu in a Chinese restaurant. I think we need something like a TripAdvisor where writers can rate their experiences with publishers as an encouragement/warning to others.
The multiple submission issue for anything other than an actual book is a huge pet peeve of mine. In today's world of millions of online magazines most with a readership of a couple of hundred subscribers if lucky it is totally unfair of these publications to want work that has not been submitted or published in another online magazine or personal blog site. They are not offering us pay at all, they cannot give us any huge exposure, so asking us to submit a piece one and at time to each magazine and then wait for a reply is ludicrous. This isn't the days of huge overhead for a print magazine. Every wanna be writer has pretty much set up an online magazine of sorts. So unless an online magazine has a readership of in the tens of thousands it is totally unfair to ask us to write for them for free, and most even charge us a fee for submission, and then think we should not be allowed to have our essay or poem printed in as many of these small magazines as we can at once. We need lots of these to expose our work and so should not be constrained. I'm reasonably sure that these sites of a few hundred readers are not going to overlap in terms of audience so why not allow us to simply submit to as many as we like and get published in as many as possible to get our work out there. I mean it's a huge difference between the New Yorker requiring exclusive rights to print and a small online mag of a few people. Sorry but this is a huge pet peeve of mine and I'm sure to many writers as well. The same goes for a personal blog site. Mine has all of 170 followers, so really this is will impact the readership of my piece on a totally different small online magazine? I don't think so.
Great point. I guess where it gets tricky is if writers resubmit after their work has appeared in larger journals. I assume most people wouldn't bother submitting work once it's been accepted in a big-circulation magazine. But some might. And is that fair to writers who've not published anywhere at all? On the other hand, I totally see your point and agree with you about writers wanting and deserving greater exposure.
With all due respect if some large publication published a piece of mine, my submittable account would be closed in a second . I m talking strictly about the bazillion ones out there all using this rule when their readership is basically 50 of their closest friends and relatives and that unfortunately is the majority . Just about a year or so ago it was rare for me to see a site that asked for a payment just to submit now it’s the norm for all of them just about
Couldn't have expressed this better myself about this perniciously pretentious practice, especially from non-paying sites. I try to keep track of what I send where but mistakes will happen, especially for those that demand email submissions instead of using Submittable, Duotrope etc.
Finding paying sites is like in a needle in a haystack . I’ve sent submittable a lot of improvements I’d like to see there like having a query for paying sites only and with every mag now asking for a submission fee it’s also impossible to know the legit ones . I have submissions from
Last December still not answered . Makes you wonder right ?
I find Duotrope has a much more useful search function for finding smaller paying publishers. I have to say that the vast majority of places I submit to eventually get back to me, albeit mostly with bad news. :-)
I never have a problem with the rejections . I save every one of them . It’s part of our art. If you get one out of 10 to say yes well who cares about the other 9, that’s my humble opinion . I ve never used Duotrope I ll have to check it out but I’m basically the laziest writer ever lol I’ve got two pieces coming out in the next 2 months actually so with like 8 submissions for that I m pretty happy right now
Does make you wonder.
We had a stipulation at Thrice that reprints were okay so long as we give full mention of the first publication in the credits. In the case of our latest iteration, we collected a basket of work by a featured writer and listed full credits of any first appearances. Especially proper because we were publishing a collection as a showcase. We've been lucky in that writers usually tell us in their submissions. Our guidelines said we will take stuff that has appeared elsewhere, but only if we could credit the other venue. But I guess I, personally, trusted the writer to tell me. Maybe being specific in the guidelines about this helped. I never ran into the problem.
Tangentially-related question about reprints: I've noticed that a number of writers promote their short, published pieces on Twitter/Instagram by posting screenshots/photos of the work in its entirety, versus only links to the pieces. These posts seem to do better in the algorithm than those with only links—however, is it kosher, or does it somehow take away from the lit mag by driving traffic away from them? If there's a contract and it stipulates that after being published by the lit mag you own the rights to your work and can do whatever you want, posting the piece seems fine, but if there's some sort of exclusivity in the contract, seems like the screenshot/photo would be a violation. (Maybe I just answered my own question, lol.) Does anyone have direct experience with this? Trying to figure out the best way to promote my work. I've always posted links, but I worry that I may be losing readers in asking them to perform the step of clicking to navigate elsewhere versus having the work right in front of them.
Ah, what a great question, Goldie! I'll defer to journal editors on this one, as I'm interested in the answer myself.
I have the same question. I've posted to my blog a photo of the printed magazine page in when the work is only available in hard copy. I hesitated to do that, etiquette seeming to be that readers should get a copy of the magazine. I still feel conflicted. But I've seen others do it, poets who are far more published than I, and I want my work to be read. Example: http://lovesettlement.blogspot.com/2021/03/yes-in-haight-ashbury-literary-journal.html
I've also seen famous writers do this (Ocean Vuong shared a photo of his poem in The Paris Review on Instagram, for example). Recently, I saw in the submission specifications of a print-only journal that they want accepted writers to share their acceptance and promote the magazine online, but explicitly don't want writers sharing the actual work (because as you said, they want people to buy the magazine). However, unless there's some sort of exclusivity rule like this laid out on the site or in your contract, it seems like it should be okay to share the work. I notice with some mags that they own the rights before or maybe 1-3 months after publication, and then all rights revert to the writer.
First, best to clarify distinction between "simultaneous subs" and "resubs of previously published work." Most mags address that question in their guidelines. If they don't speak to either of those questions, I assume it's a no-no. It's incumbent on us writers to figure out a submission logging system. I use the submittable submissions window for my account, even if the sub was via email or through Duotrope or one of the proprietary submission utilities. Here's how: 1 - Log every submission in Submittable, 2 - When you get an acceptance, go to Submittable and find out who else might be considering that work. 3 - Send each of those pubs a polite withdrawal notice. No "neener-neener" or "you really missed the next Nobel winner, dude" sort of language. Courtesy, courtesy, courtesy. We're writers, after all, not cretins. Most of us. Even if we ARE cretins, it's still no excuse to act like one. Keep it part of the mystery of your authorial persona.
I had to add this quotation from the notes section of The Best American Poetry 2021, edited by Tracy K. Smith; it's by Shane McCrae, who, the bio says, has published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux; he's gotten the Guggenheim, the Lannan, and an NEA, and he teaches at Columbia: "Although [the poem included in BAP] was selected from The Yale Review, where it was published in 2020 -- for which I will be forever grateful -- it was first published in The Baffler in 2019, for which I will be forever grateful. I screwed up, and as a result the poem was accidentally published twice ..."
Having never had a poem accepted by The Yale Review I have no information on whether they require their authors to sign a contract saying the accepted work is previously unpublished -- but I'd think it a pretty safe guess. So, not only did McCrae publish his poem in two different high prestige periodicals -- and likely certified that it was unpublished for the second, the poem was chosen for the BAP annual. Congratulations to him! I'm not going to hate on him for it. But it does remind one that you can do things that all those editors claim to hate you for -- and still do fine.
Whoa. Thanks for sharing this. That's wild. I wonder at what point in the process Yale Review learned it had been previously published.
When they got the new Best American Poetry?
What is considered prior publication is too broad. Posting to friends and private facebook groups is considered prior publication by many. Posting to my own blog or poetry site is considered prior publication. I find that to be terribly naive.
I was at a book fair a few years ago and picked up a copy of a literary magazine I was interested in, and by some stroke of coincidence saw the exact story that I had chosen to publish years ago in the magazine I edit (The Summerset Review). I think submitting previously published stories to places that specifically say they do not accept them is a rather dishonest thing to do, but it probably happens more than we might imagine.
Wow, Joe, that's wild. But maybe that magazine was open to reprints? (In which case Summerset Review should definitely have been acknowledged.)
Yeah, Becky. I brought it to the attention of the editor who was at the table, and he did get a bit irritated. He said they don't accept reprints. I checked the issue and Summerset was not given credit. I wonder if the editor got hold of the author and said, "Hey, pal, on that story you published with us, well, you know..." !
Oh wow. Yikes!
I just had a client ask if she could publish a story on her blog while waiting to see if a journal accepts it (I'm an editor and I'm submitting the story for her). I told her, probably not. Publishing is publishing, even if it's self-publishing. Curious if any journal editors out there agree. And what if this writer immediately took the story down if it got accepted? And for that matter, assuming the blog is small, would anyone even look or notice or care? . . . Also, I know there's at least one journal out there that publishes previously published work. Second Chance journal? Something like that. I'll add a comment if I can find it.
That is so interesting, Erik. I've had writers ask me that too. I usually tell them not to do it, because it is indeed considered publishing. However it's so important for writers to share their work, and can be empowering to have those early readers, whereas waiting to hear back from lit mags is no fun at all. Maybe there's a compromise situation where the writer can keep the blog private and only share it with a small handful of people? Then immediately take it down upon acceptance in a magazine?
I don’t know what level you’re at in terms of the journals you are frequenting but perhaps the “previously published “ caveat should just be removed from the “online magazines on training wheels” , those with so small a readership it really shouldn’t matter if a piece also gets published elsewhere and no idea why a personal blog should even matter if the readership is tiny and the blog is largely unknown
Could be that a previously published poem was not sent out again, but rather was a poem simultaneously submitted but not withdrawn, that is, the poem was taken up by one literary venue and the poet neglected to withdraw it from the others to which they'd sent it.
I have had the experience of seeing a poem accepted by one ezine, then withdrawing it from others, only to have the poem accepted by a second ezine. The withdrawal email had been missed. The confusion was cleared up, and the poem did not appear in two places.
On the other hand, in my case, at least, that sort of problem has been so rare as to be hardly worth mentioning.
Your method (of withdrawing the work) sounds like the responsible thing to do, Glenn. I'm also guilty of that, just totally forgetting that I sent a piece somewhere and then having it accepted months after it's been accepted elsewhere. This tends to happen with places that require email submissions. I try to keep a record...and then forget where I kept the record...Thankfully, the one or two times this has happened the editors were really nice about it.
I'm surprised to see this from this mag. I'm widely published, 2018 and 2019 64 Best, two-time Pushcart nominee, various awards and such, and never even got a notification of receipt from the mag. I thought it had gone pandemic-defunct. It might be the case that people like me assume that if you're collecting for a MO or Midwestern "anthology," these poems you're submitting may very well have been published before. Maybe my interpretation of "anthology" or a regional or state collection is different than what the editor thinks. Anyway, there are various anthologies that take previously published material because that's sometimes in the nature of topical or regional anthologies. I say it's an editor's responsibility to be explicit about first publication rights, especially where the context may be ambiguous, such as an anthology. (By the way, I'm not the author complained of here--I have not even received an acknowledgment of previously submitted work from the mag.) Respect is a two-way street, and I acknowledge that this mag is swimming in a pool where about 10 editors blackball anything new, different, or NOT university-affiliated. I hope one of you will check out one of the three books I have published in two years' time without notice from the university-affiliated presses. You've got all those free hands in students, after all.