We accept novel excerpts at The Apostrophe and welcome them. But we don't get many! Please send us your incomplete novel pieces, your excepts, your first chapters, etc.
This is great. I actually published four(!) excerpts from my Korean War novel as short stories in journals. It was a way of tricking myself into finishing a novel — I'd write chapters as stories and send them out. Now I'm querying agents and small presses and the rejections are trickling in. What's interesting and weird is that an anthology editor first accepted and then rejected one story because it was an excerpt.
Congrats on the lit mag publications! If all those editors loved the pieces, the whole will find a home in time. It's just a long process. Don't overlook academic presses.
This is such a good thought. I have been working on a couple of novels and was just thinking I don't have many short stories or poems left to submit. It's hard to take a break from the longer pieces when they are moving along. But it would be so good to extract some excerpts and see if they're publishable!!! So, thanks for this. You are an inspiration!!!
I see no need to let a lit journal know if a piece is a novel excerpt or not, if the piece truly stands alone. That approach definitely opens the field of journals to submit the work to.
I agree with you. I don't tell them the stores are part of a novel, but that also means that the stories must work as stand alone. If anything, when people read the story, you want readers to say they loved it so much, they want to know more about the characters and what happens to them.
Wow. What a great article you have here. Well done and congratulations. You give me hope. A while back I wrote a story about a girl being detained by ICE in a restaurant raid. The story got published in the Lit Mag of California State University. It also unleashed a journey that I did not know it would become my novel. Some of the stories got published in Carve, Litro, Tulane, Broad River. So I began to query agents and publishers. They have praised the material but they all decide not to take the work. So I continued to send out the stories, and got the first chapter published in River Styx and the namesake of the novel as a novel in the Write Launch (which you mentioned here). By now, all the stories but one have been published. Three have won some type of award or recognition, so this year, the big push is to find a publisher.
So thank you for telling us your story. Your novel found a home in the end. You're proof that this approach works.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m hip-deep in the muck of writing a novel-in-progress and in the back of my ind have been thinking of how a couple of sections could, with some judicious editing, stand alone as short stories. Your post today is very timely and encouraging to me. Thank you.
Something else I’ve been thinking about is serialization — i.e., publishing a chapter or two at a time in a literary magazine over several issues, the way Charles Dickens and other writers of previous ages did. I haven’t researched this, so I don’t know if any lit mags even publish serials these days.
I mention one in the post - Azure accepts excerpts, and intriguingly write in their guidelines: “If your submission is part of a novel-length work or feature-length screenplay, there exists the possibility of publishing it in installments in future issues. In this case, please indicate your intentions in your cover letter.”
If there’s one lit mag who would consider it, there’s certainly more.
We accept novel excerpts at The Apostrophe and welcome them. But we don't get many! Please send us your incomplete novel pieces, your excepts, your first chapters, etc.
Good to know!
Also we are now open for submissions (deadline January 31)
This is great. I actually published four(!) excerpts from my Korean War novel as short stories in journals. It was a way of tricking myself into finishing a novel — I'd write chapters as stories and send them out. Now I'm querying agents and small presses and the rejections are trickling in. What's interesting and weird is that an anthology editor first accepted and then rejected one story because it was an excerpt.
Congrats on the lit mag publications! If all those editors loved the pieces, the whole will find a home in time. It's just a long process. Don't overlook academic presses.
This was informative and inspiring, thank you!
You’re welcome!
Wonderful advice for novel excerpting and your positive experience with it is so encouraging. Also, thanks for the shout out!
Thank you for sharing so much useful information in your own post: What Makes a Great Novel excerpt: https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/what-makes-a-great-novel-excerpt?utm_source=publication-search&utm_medium=email
This is such a good thought. I have been working on a couple of novels and was just thinking I don't have many short stories or poems left to submit. It's hard to take a break from the longer pieces when they are moving along. But it would be so good to extract some excerpts and see if they're publishable!!! So, thanks for this. You are an inspiration!!!
I'm so glad this was helpful! Good luck!
Wonderful information! You have inspired me to send the first chapter of my novel to one or more of these folks. Thanks!
Wonderful!
I see no need to let a lit journal know if a piece is a novel excerpt or not, if the piece truly stands alone. That approach definitely opens the field of journals to submit the work to.
I agree with you. I don't tell them the stores are part of a novel, but that also means that the stories must work as stand alone. If anything, when people read the story, you want readers to say they loved it so much, they want to know more about the characters and what happens to them.
Wow. What a great article you have here. Well done and congratulations. You give me hope. A while back I wrote a story about a girl being detained by ICE in a restaurant raid. The story got published in the Lit Mag of California State University. It also unleashed a journey that I did not know it would become my novel. Some of the stories got published in Carve, Litro, Tulane, Broad River. So I began to query agents and publishers. They have praised the material but they all decide not to take the work. So I continued to send out the stories, and got the first chapter published in River Styx and the namesake of the novel as a novel in the Write Launch (which you mentioned here). By now, all the stories but one have been published. Three have won some type of award or recognition, so this year, the big push is to find a publisher.
So thank you for telling us your story. Your novel found a home in the end. You're proof that this approach works.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m hip-deep in the muck of writing a novel-in-progress and in the back of my ind have been thinking of how a couple of sections could, with some judicious editing, stand alone as short stories. Your post today is very timely and encouraging to me. Thank you.
Something else I’ve been thinking about is serialization — i.e., publishing a chapter or two at a time in a literary magazine over several issues, the way Charles Dickens and other writers of previous ages did. I haven’t researched this, so I don’t know if any lit mags even publish serials these days.
I mention one in the post - Azure accepts excerpts, and intriguingly write in their guidelines: “If your submission is part of a novel-length work or feature-length screenplay, there exists the possibility of publishing it in installments in future issues. In this case, please indicate your intentions in your cover letter.”
If there’s one lit mag who would consider it, there’s certainly more.
I must have overlooked that! Thanks for letting me know.