You Don’t (Always) Have to Wait for Acceptance

Submitting to literary journals doesn’t have to mean burying your work until acceptance.

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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Raymond Carver’s book of selected stories, Where I’m Calling From, begins with a section of Acknowledgements.

The author wishes to thank the following publications for permission to reprint stories in this volume:

Antaeus, The Antioch Review, The Atlantic, Carolina Quarterly, Colorado State Review, December, Discourse, Esquire, Fiction, Grand Street, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, the Iowa Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Missouri Review, New England Review, The North American Review, Northwest Review, The Paris Review, Perspective, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, Seneca Review, Sou’wester, Tri-Quarterly, Western Humanities Review.

Having originally published many of the book’s stories in these journals, they became the partial property of the publications that first put them into the world. To publish his book, Carver had to ask permission to re-publish and re-print.

The publications obliged. Do you want to be the one to tell Raymond Carver he can’t publish his newest literary project? And by mandate or act of good faith, Carver gave the journals a mention at the beginning of his book.

This little administrative checkpoint may seem like an annoying bit of bureaucracy, but if it’s not too much to ask, can I have this problem? You mean, my only obstacle to publishing a critically-acclaimed book of short stories is asking for permission from a handful of doting editors?

Please. No. Anything but that.

Which is why it’s worth noting that a lot of up-and-coming writers face a publishing problem similar to Carver’s.

At least, they think they do.

Most people submitting stories, poems, and essays to literary journals believe their writing needs to go into hiding, gathering dust in some long-forgotten Google Docs folder until a letter of acceptance or rejection is received. But this isn’t always the case.

Just as Raymond Carver published stories in literary journals before re-publishing them in a book, writers can publish work on their own publications before re-publishing in literary journals.

But before you go any further on that death threat you’re drafting—yes, there is a caveat.

Most journals explicitly prohibit submissions that have been previously published, usually with a line in their submission guidelines that reads something like, Previously published work cannot be considered.

But if that line is absent? Publish away, friends. There are even websites to help you find journals that accept previously published work. Chill Subs, a lit mag submission platform with a nifty Previously published OK filter, lets you search only for republish-friendly journals. Which is pretty chill, if you ask me.

So that heartfelt story you’re keeping locked in a gilded cage? Set that bird free. Just make sure the habitat where your bird will be released offers the best odds for survival, because not all publishing platforms are created equal.

One very accommodating habitat is Substack, a company with the tagline The home for great writing and a publishing platform that gives writers permission to re-publish wherever they want, whenever they want. All work posted on Substack is the automatic copyright and intellectual property of the author. The same is true of WordPress.

On the other hand, Medium is a platform where your bird may die a sad a prolonged death. The platform does not offer an automatic copyright, so if someone decides to plagiarize your work, you’re going to have a very unfun time trying to prove it’s yours. (RIP Medium—and bird.)

Using these platforms, more writers than ever are taking matters into their own hands, which is kind of what Substack and Wordpress are all about. Today, waiting for the greenlight from traditional gatekeepers to let your artwork fly is a choice, not a requirement.

But none of this is to say that literary journals should be abandoned.

Let’s make that super clear.

Rather, this is a message-slash-invite for all those who are only using literary journals to get their work out there to consider trying something new. It can’t hurt to think about the ways beyond literary journals that you might get your work out into the world, not instead of. And if it’s possible to establish a more free-flowing and publicly accessible place for your writing and your readers, a supplement to all the literary journal stuff you will continue to pursue, why not?

But also, why?

One reason is feedback. If you’re looking for it, publishing on your own platform is a great way to get comments a little more substantive than, We liked this, but we don’t feel it’s quite right for our magazine at this time. On her Substack publication FRESH MEAT, Maegan Heil puts early drafts of her stories on the chopping block. Readers tell her where they fell off and point to areas that might need a little extra love. Recently, she held a contest, asking people to read a story and suggest a title. She chose a winner then sent the piece off to a fantasy writing challenge.

The whole thing just seems smart and fun. And there are reasons beyond just feedback. By creating FRESH MEAT, Meagan has 1) a place to publish and share whatever she wants 2) a way to get feedback on her work before submitting to journals where Previously published OK applies 3) a way to actively build a community of readers.

And that last one is important—especially if the writer cares about their work being read, which I think most of us sort of kind of do?

Would we be just as content to write our stuff, tear it up, and throw it in the trash? Probably. Writing is a kind of soul expansion. In itself, that’s enough.

But still. Readers are always nice. And on top of literary mags, having an online platform gives writers place to reach new eyeballs. They might even find that building an audience this way is more creatively fulfilling, more enjoyable, and more effective than publishing in literary journals ever was. It all depends on what one’s goal is with their writing. 

If—big if!—a writer’s goal is to publish a book, the annoying truth is that marketing is a large part of authorship. For obvious reasons, this is a huge challenge for the writer, which usually leaves the publishing company to do the marketing for them or, worse, the writer paying out of pocket to do the marketing themselves.

But if the writer already has an audience? The game hath been changed.

This is something that has never really been possible in the past. Actually, it’s a tragedy to think about all the superb writers that got lost among towering figures like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. They lived and wrote in a world where their only chance of being widely read was getting published by someone else. But that’s no longer the case.

Writers today have more power than ever before, a phenomenon that has extended to other mediums, too. Musician TikTokkers land record deals with major labels based only their talent and the audience they’ve built online—this instead of waiting around to be “discovered.” Why can’t we?

But all this might be getting a little ahead of ourselves. If we want them to be, the reasons for considering publishing on your own publication are really pretty simple.

Because it’s fun.

Because it adds a creative outlet to those that already exist.

Because it builds community.

Because it’s constructive.

And because, selfishly, I’d like to see you around, in journals and elsewhere.

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