Tag: Submission Bonanza!

Racking up More than Rejections: Shards in Exegesis

Jaclyn12 Comments

So, the ripples of goodness from July’s Submission Bonanza! are still rolling in.  (Rejections are still rolling in too, so it is true that I am racking up rejections, but these small victories overshadow the rejections by so much.)  It’s amazing what happens when you just decide to put yourself out there.  I wasn’t expecting much back except for some experience and some notches on my writing bedpost.

But I’m in the latest issue of Exegesis, an academic journal at Royal Holloway, University of London.  They published Shards, a short short of mine, in their third issue: Landscapes:Digital, Real, Imagined.

Woohoo!

Submission Bonanza!: Second Time Around

Jaclyn13 Comments

So, you might have noticed that it’s October 19th.  You might have also noticed that it’s not September any more.  In fact, it’s nearly three-weeks-not-September already.

Way back in July, I set myself a challenge to do a Submission Bonanza!  It was incredible and successful.  I learned so much, and I’ve been published in three magazines so far (more on that to come later!).  It was so successful that I resolved to do it again in September.

Some of my cohorts looked at me like I was insane — and with good reason.  In September, I started an M.F.A. program, began lecturing on writing at university, and moved to the frontier (Why, hello, Alaska!) all in the same month.

It’s true that I didn’t finish my 30 litmags in 30 days.  It’s an ambitious challenge amidst so much transition.  I have, however, finally finished!  It took me much longer than I had hoped, but I still got work out to 30 litmags and ok, it took me 50 days, but better late than never, right?

So, in true Submission Bonanza! fashion, I’ve pasted below links to all the literary magazines that I submitted to.  They’re all magazines that accept submissions online and accept submissions for free, because those are some of the restrictions that I’ve currently set for myself.  You’ll notice that some of the magazines here are quite ambitious for such a fledgling like me to be submitting to (cough, cough, New Yorker, cough, cough, The Atlantic).  One of the things I learned during my first Submission Bonanza! was that I needed to be more choosy.  Once a piece gets published, those First Time North American Rights that all the magazines are asking for are gone, gone forever.  Because of this, I figured I’d start with the big boys and get real about racking up the rejections.

So, here it is, ladies and gents:  an incredibly ambitious September Submission Bonanza! 30 litmags in 50 days.

1. Glimmer Train
2. Subtropics
3. American Scholar
4. Podcastle
5. Writing Tomorrow
6. New Haven Review
7. AGNI
8. Nashville Review
9. A River & Sound
10. Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
11. The Pedestal
12. Poetry Magazine
13. Kenyon Review
14. Shenandoah
15. Devil’s Lake
16. The New Yorker
17. The Atlantic
18. Tin House
19. Cincinatti Review
20. TriQuarterly
21. A Public Space
22. Bomb
23. Chicago Review
24. One Story
25. West Branch
26. New Ohio Review
27. Willow Springs
28. Third Coast
29. Southeast Review

30. Pleiades

Racking up More than Just Rejections

JaclynLeave a comment

Inspired by a list of 100 Best Ways to Becoming a Better Writer on thecopybot.com, I decided in July that I was going to follow Number 66: Rack up Rejections.  I set off on a crazy adventure in which I submitted work to 30 literary magazines in 30 days.  At the time, I was really just expecting to get some practice in the litmag scene and also start steeling myself to the idea that if I wanted to write, I’d have to come to terms with being rejected.

It turns out, I learned more than I could have ever expected.  It was such a powerful learning experience that I am doing it again this month.

I have been racking up the rejections.  They are trickling in slowly due to slow response times.  This is kind of nice so that I don’t have to hear 30 No!s all at one time.  But I haven’t been getting only negative responses, either.

Flash Frontier, a purveyor of fine flash fiction, accepted a piece I wrote long ago about Alaska for their August 2013 Issue: Snow.

And that’s not the only positive response I’ve gotten.  More news on that front as the publications come out!

Call for Submissions: The Round

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The Round is a journal of literary and visual arts based at Brown University in Providence, RI.

Published biannually, The Round accepts submissions in all mediums and from all sources, inside and outside the Brown community.

The Round is happy to accept submissions of both literary and visual art. In the past we have published prose, poetry, plays, and translations as well as paintings, drawings, prints, and photography.

Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis. Typically, for the fall issue, we read through October, and for the spring issue, through March. Issues are published at the end of each semester in December and May.

To submit, please send us a brief bio and your mailing address, if not on Brown’s campus, along with your work. Written submissions should be sent in .rtf, .doc, or .docx format. Please send visual art as high quality .jpg images and include a piece’s title, medium, and dimensions.

 

Please email all work to theroundmagazine@gmail.com .

 

September Submission Bonanza Challenge!

Jaclyn13 Comments

September is here, folks and that means it’s time to celebrate Labor Day by expending a bit of my labor on my writing career.  All this month, I will be working on my second Submission Bonanza!

In my first Submission Bonanza! I racked up a few rejections, got some things published (more info to come on some of those things as the publications come out!), and learned a whole lot.  It was incredibly successful in more than just my initial idea that I would start racking up the rejections to get my work out there.  I am reading more critically and closely.  I found lots of new magazines.  I feel part of a larger literary conversation.  I am inspired to write more.  Also, I am inspired to keep up with submitting and submit more.

Like last time, I will be working on submitting to 30 magazines in a month.  I have my pieces picked out and edited.  I have a list of magazines that I want to submit to. And I have a cover letter and bio template ready to go.

Feel free to join me in this journey.  I loved doing this in July and I am excited about all the magazines opening their doors to submissions this month.  I would highly recommend that anyone who is wanting to grow and develop as a writer think about doing this in some form.  Maybe you don’t want to do one magazine every day.  Maybe you want to do one every other day, one a week, or even just one.  Maybe you want to do three a week or three a day.  Whatever the case may be, set a reasonable goal or yourself and get going.  Your work isn’t going to read itself.  If you do decide to join, please let me know.  I would love to be able to support and encourage each other as the months go on.  Good luck!

Featured Author: Reaping the Rewards of a Submission Bonanza!

Jaclyn11 Comments

After an incredibly intense month of submitting writing to 30 literary magazines in 30 days, following my Submission Bonanza! Challenge, I am beginning to reap the rewards.

This month Flash Frontier included me in their featured authors section.  Check it out!

Also, if you want to do your own Submission Bonanza! you can check out my tips for editing and choosing pieces to submit, finding magazines, and writing your cover letter and bio.

Or check out the unexpected lessons that I learned while doing this challenge.

6 Tips for Perfect (Professional) Cover Letters for Literary Magazines

Jaclyn21 Comments

By now, if you’ve been following my Submission Bonanza! series, you should have picked the pieces you want to send to magazines and compiled a list of magazines that you want to submit to.  It’s time now to write a cover letter to send along with your submissions.  As Michael Nye, Editor of the Missouri Review says, sending a cover letter with your submission is “like wearing a suit to an interview.”  Don’t let your submissions to literary magazines show up naked!

It’s easy to feel stressed about this part of the process of submitting to literary magazines: the cover letter  (duh-duh dun….).  It’s understandable because this can be the first impression that you are giving to the editors of the magazine.  We definitely want to put our best foot forward and present ourselves as professional, competent writers.

But also, keep in mind that you are not being judged on your cover letter.  Editors want solid writing.  So make a nice, neat little cover letter and spend the majority of your time stressing about whether you should put that extra comma in your new creative nonfiction piece.

So here are some things to think about when writing a cover letter:

1.  Follow the guidelines of the literary magazine.

This seems self-explanatory, but a lot of literary magazines ask for different kinds of information in the cover letter.  Some of them want word counts or genre.  Others want a short bio about you.  Some even ask for no cover letter at all.  If you are submitting simultaneously, you’ll also need to note that.  Make sure you follow their specific guidelines.

 

2. Address the letter to a person.

This is not a “To Whom It May Concern” letter.  It’s pretty easy to find most of the staff at a literary magazine under their masthead.  Some magazines even tell you in the submission guidelines who to address it to.  Be as specific as possible.  If you’re submitting poetry, address it directly to Ms. Sally B. Poetryeditor.  If you can’t pinpoint a specific name, you can address it to the editor.

 

3. Keep it short and simple. 

Don’t forget, a lot of editors are reading hundreds or thousands of these.  This is not a query letter, so you don’t need to describe your piece to them.  You don’t need to tell them how you came up with the idea or list the twenty-seven other literary magazines you’ve been in.  For example, the Colorado Review suggests this cover letter:

Dear Editor,

Enclosed is my [fiction/nonfiction/poetry] submission “Title of Manuscript.” Thank you for considering it for publication in Colorado Review.

[*If submitting via mail] I’ve included an SASE for [response only/the return of my manuscript].

Your Name

Full Contact Info

 

 4. Keep it professional.

Naturally, you want to make sure that the grammar and punctuation are flawless and that it is in a professional format.  But also, you don’t need to be cute or catchy to get the editor’s attention.  Let your writing do that.  That’s what they are looking for.

 

5. Add a short bio (Optional).

Some magazines ask for a short bio or you may feel that it’s in your best interest to include one.  This should only be a line or two of relevant information. Don’t tell your life story, just one or two tidbits that are interesting or pertinent.  Don’t include a whole list of the hundreds of places you’ve been published.  Just pick 3-5.  Also, if you haven’t been published, don’t be ashamed to include that too.  As Nye suggests:

If you’ve never been published before? Say so. “If accepted, this would be my first published story.” All literary magazines love being the one to publish a writer for the first time, so acknowledging this possibility can only help.

 

 6. Add a note about what you read in the magazine or how you know the magazine (Also optional).

If you want to personalize it a bit for the magazine, some editors might like to know that you did actually take the time to read past issues or that you have had past correspondences with them.  But again, this step could be optional.

 

In the end, I really like this bit Nye’s advice really calmed me down:

A professional cover letter is all we ask, and even minus that, if the work is excellent, we don’t really care. We want to publish the best work we read, regardless of whether or not you’re an emerging writer or an established one.

So don’t stress too much about your cover letter.  Get it done, and make it professional, so you can get back to your craft.

 

So, the goal for this week:

Make a template of your cover letter and bio.  Have them ready and at hand when you want to submit.  I personally made a template that had all the information I could possibly want to send to and editor (word counts, genres, bio, etc) and then cut or edited from that for each literary magazine.  Once this work is out of the way, you’ll be nearly set to start submitting!

 

Need more help?

You can read Michael Nye’s article on The Art of the Literary Magazine Cover Letter.

You could also look at advice about what not to do by Michael Kardos at Writer’s Digest. 

Or take a look at this sample cover letter from The Review Review.

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 2: Finding Literary Magazines

Jaclyn17 Comments

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 2: Finding LitMags

One of the lessons that really hit home during my Submission Bonanza! was that I need to be more choosy about the literary magazines that I submit to.    Now that I have a few acceptances under my belt, I realize that I may have sold myself short in my submission process.  Before starting this challenge, I was just excited to have my work ‘out there.’  And in some ways I still am.  But after my first acceptance, when I had to contact all the other magazines I had submitted to and ask them to withdraw the submission that was accepted, well… I was kind of sad to be withdrawing some of those.

Don’t get me wrong, it was great to get acceptances and I’m looking forward to seeing the publications, but next time around, I will be a little more thoughtful in choosing which literary magazines I submit to.  Many magazines are looking for unpublished pieces so that they can have first time rights and once you give those away, it’s much more difficult to find places that will want to publish a piece.

Here are some general things to think about when looking for magazines:*

Do you want to get paid?

My own Submission Bonanza! challenge started as a labor of love and I wasn’t at all thinking about getting paid.  But now that I have racked up some acceptances, I’m a little more keen to be compensated for my work.  A lot of magazines offer contributors copies as payment.  Others offer a small, token payment of $5-20 USD.  Still others pay by word, line, or page.  One of my favorite payment systems is automatic consideration in a contest, which means the chance of a bigger monetary prize and a contest to put on your CV, in addition to publication.

 Are you willing to pay to submit to magazines?

A lot of magazines that I found asked for a small ($2-3 USD) reading fee if you submitted online.  This means that you don’t have to spend the time/money to print your pieces, get envelopes, and pay for postage for your submission and your SASE for the response.  This could be a reasonable trade-off, especially if you are looking to get paid, or if you are submitting to magazines abroad.  If you do a month-long Submission Bonanza!  at the end of the month you will have spent about $90 USD and have 30 chances to get paid and published.  On the other hand, there are plenty of magazines out there that don’t charge a reading fee, even some that compensate writers, so you just need to decide what you are comfortable with.

 Do you want to be in print or online?

There’s something really satisfying about seeing your work and your name in print.  A lot of print magazines have years of prestige and awards behind them.  But, as brightonsauce said, there are very few people reading print literary magazines these days.  Perhaps you could reach a bigger audience with a small online magazine than you could with a small print magazine.  There are also a lot of litmags out there that have both print and online editions.  This is just something to give some thought to as you look for magazines.

What kind of rights are you willing to give up?

I am not a copyright lawyer, so I am not going to try to explain the legalities of the different kinds of publications rights.  But, I will direct you to this article and this article, both of which I found useful when I started thinking about publication rights.  What’s on your blog seems to be a little bit of a gray area.  I found magazines that specifically said personal blogs counted as being previously published and also found magazines that said that this kind of publication was not considered by them to be previously published.  Just to be safe, I took down the pieces I was submitting from my blog, but it was something I had to wrestle with a bit.

Are you submitting online or by mail?

I was fortunate enough to do my Submission Bonanza! from a tiny island in the Caribbean that did not have a post office.  So, this made this particular decision quite easy for me.  A lot of literary magazines that I found charged a fee for electronic submissions but not snail mail submissions.  I also found quite a few that no longer accepted submissions by post.  Just something to consider as you search.

Do you want to submit this piece to other magazines?

Luckily for us writers, most of the literary magazines that I looked at accepted simultaneous submissions, which means you can submit that piece to other magazines as you wait to hear back from them.  If you plan on submitting your work to more than one magazine at a time (which I highly recommend!) make sure that they all accept simultaneous submissions.

There are a lot of tools out there to help writers find magazines that they can submit to.  One of the most popular is Duotrope.  You can currently use their free trial to give it a go, but they have recently gone to a paid subscription service.  It’s $50 USD per year and helps you keep track of deadlines and submissions, so a lot of writers find it invaluable.

If you don’t have the funds to invest in Duotrope, never fear!  There are lots of resources out there for writers who are looking for markets to be published in.  The one I’ve personally used the most is Poets & Writers, which has a free search function where you can search by payment type, genre, or format of the magazine.  (This one is also recommended by Mary MacAvoy.)

You can also take a look at The Submission Grinder, which is another one of my favorites.  The platform is still in Beta mode, but their database is growing rapidly and they are quickly becoming a good, free alternative to Duotrope.  This one is easily searchable using lots of different criteria, so it’s incredibly useful.  One drawback is that it only looks at magazines that accept fiction, so if you’re looking to submit nonfiction or poetry, you could still use it (since a lot of literary magazines accept multiple genres) but you’ll have to do a little more research to weed out the magazines that accept your genre.  (And Rachel K. Jones finds this one useful, too.)

There are also lots of lists of magazines.  For example, I personally was interested in magazines that were affiliated with Writing M.F.A. Programs, so I used this list.  Maybe you want to be in a Top 50 magazine, so you could use this list.  Perhaps you know you want to submit electronically, so you could use this list.  If you’re looking for magazines that are particularly edgy, you could look here.  Maybe you just want a giant resource of lots of magazines, so you could look here or here.  I personally was looking for magazines that accepted online submissions, did not charge a reading fee, accepted simultaneous submissions, and were reading in the summer months, sothis is the list I came up with.

Goal for this week:

Compile a list of magazines (I would recommend double the number you are planning to submit to) as possible candidates to submit your work to.

*More info on how to match your specific pieces to magazines will be coming in a future post.  For now, keep your eye out for magazines that publish the genre of pieces you have, match your criteria from the questions above, and that you like the feel of.

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 1: Choosing and Editing Submittable Pieces

Jaclyn15 Comments

Submission Bonanza!

How-To Step 1: Choosing and Editing Submittable Pieces

It feels like a big decision:  when is a piece done?  We all want our work to be ‘perfect.’  Naturally, we want to put our best foot forward and make sure that anything we submit is the very best it can be.  But don’t forget, this challenge started with one of The Copybot’s 100 Ways to Become a Better Writer: #66 Rack up Rejections.  You can’t wait until you know that a piece will be accepted to submit it.  You need to submit it first to find out.  Even the very act of submitting, whether they are accepted or not, will make you grow and learn and develop as a writer.

Of course, you want to send out solid, professional pieces.  Make sure you are submitting work that you are proud to attach your name to.  Ask yourself, if this comes out in print, would you share it with people?  Would you be proud to have your name in the byline?  To me, this is the most important criteria.

I personally am a big believer in the idea that if you wait for perfection, nothing you write is ever going to make it out the door.  No piece is ever really finished.  Your ideas about each piece of writing that you create will grow and change, just as you do.  You can always look at your work from new, fresh, different perspectives.  Some pieces will look good to you one year and like garbage the next.  And it’s really a doozy to try to predict what will appeal to different readers or editors at different magazines.  So pick pieces that you like, right now.  Chances are that if you like them, others out there will too.

Your work doesn’t need to be perfect to be out in the world.  Obviously, it’s important when polishing work to think about details.  But there is a difference between meaningful details and minutiae.  I personally spent days wondering if I should put one space or two between lines in a particular poem I was sending out.  Finally, I had to admit to myself that if an editor liked it, they liked it and if they didn’t, an extra space wasn’t going to change their mind.  No editor was going to pour over this poem for days the way I was.  They just don’t have time for that.

So I think of it as a process of polishing.  Your bits of creativity are diamonds.  Maybe they start as diamonds in the rough, so of course they need to be polished.  You want them to shine and shimmer and be as clear and beautiful as possible.  But if you sit there polishing them for years, they will wear away until there is no diamond left.  It will become just a pile of dust that you can’t sell or use or share with other people.  Or worse, you’ll have a nice little diamond sitting in your desk drawer collecting dust instead of sparkling.  Diamonds need to reflect light in order to shine, and so does your writing.  It’s not going to shimmer in the darkness of your desk drawer/computer hard drive/recesses of your brain.  It needs to be out in the sunlight. So, by all means, polish your diamonds.  It’s necessary.  But don’t chip away at them until there’s nothing left and don’t let them sit in darkness unable to sparkle.

To me, the easiest way to think about these decisions is to realize that in the end, it’s not my decision if something is ready to be published in a particular literary magazine.  I only have to decide if I would be proud to see this piece, with my name on it, in print.  If I would, I’m sending it out and the readers and editors at the various literary magazines that I’m submitting it to can decide if it’s ‘perfect’ enough to print in their publication.  Do you want this piece published?  If you do, then send it out.

Perhaps the most practical reason to submit something that might not be quite ‘perfect’ in your eyes is that you might get feedback on it.  Last year I submitted to Flash Frontier and got a lovely letter back saying they liked the piece, but suggesting ways that I could make it more solid and clearer.   (You can see the before and after pieces.) It was invaluable advice.  I took the advice and it did polish that tiny diamond I had.  And, they ended up publishing it.  I found that many of the literary magazines I looked at offered to give writers feedback, if you asked for it and were willing to wait a little longer for a response.  Some venues (like Hoot Review) even have scheduled workshops and are willing to work with you on a piece before you even submit it.

One more thing I’ve had a lot of comments about from people out there is that they don’t have enough pieces or work finished to do this challenge.  Many literary magazines are happy to accept simultaneous submissions, which means you can send your piece to more than one litmag at a time.  You could send just your favorite piece to 30 different magazines all at the same time.  So, if you have just one poem or one book review or one flash fiction piece, you have enough to do the 30 day challenge.

Organizing:

I personally chose about 15 of my strongest pieces, gave them a little polish-up and made sure they were ready to go out into the world.  Once I knew which pieces I was ready to submit, I made a handy little spreadsheet so that I could keep track of what I submitted to where and when (see below).  This is incredibly important because when your pieces get accepted (yes, when, not if) you may need to withdraw them from other magazines.  One of the pieces of info that I knew I needed was word count because I planned to submit some flash fiction, and I listed that below the title of each piece.  This spreadsheet  is also how I kept track of my responses.  You can see in this image that Camroc Review sent me my first rejection (in pink), so then I knew that those pieces could be sent out to even more places or maybe that they needed more polishing.  At the bottom of this spreadsheet, which you can’t see, is a total of how many times I submitted each piece, just a sum of all the 1’s I input to show that something had been submitted.  It’s a really good idea to make this spreadsheet now so that you don’t have to do it while you are doing the work of submitting later on.  You don’t need to know the litmags just yet, we’ll take care of those next week.

 

 

So, this is the goal for this week: collect one, a few, twenty pieces of writing that you like.  Polish them (gently!) until you would be proud to see them published.  Get yourself organized so that you keep track of your little diamonds, whether you are using Duotrope, a notebook, a dry erase scoreboard, or a little spreadsheet like mine.  And get ready to rack up rejections – and probably some acceptances too!

 

 

 

P.S. Thank you to everyone for the comments and suggestions.  Definitely keep the questions coming and feel free to suggest issues that you want to see addressed.  I’ll do my best to respond to all of these.  Keep in mind also that I’m learning as I go too, so your knowledge and experience is appreciated as well!

 

30 Litmags in 30 Days: Create Your Own Submission Bonanza!

Jaclyn72 Comments

I did it! I completed my self-imposed challenge, Submission Bonanza!  During the month of July, I submitted poetry, creative nonfiction, short stories, and flash fiction to 30 litmags.  I’m not going to lie, it took work and it took time.  After so many years not submitting any work and not focusing on my writing, this was definitely a challenge for me.  But I can certainly say it was well worth it.  I would highly recommend that anyone looking to grow as a writer think about setting their own Submission Bonanza!   I’ve grown and learned so many things over the past month and I am excited to share them all with you.

You can see my halfway post, Notches on the Bedpost, to see some of the benefits I’ve gained and ways I’ve been developing by doing this exercise.  There are so many ways in which I have grown.  I’ve become a better reader. I’ve started editing more seriously.  I’ve learned so much more about contemporary writers and writing.  I feel like I am getting familiar with literary magazines in way I wasn’t before.  Most importantly, I’ve been motivated to write more than I ever have before.

Also (spoiler alert!) I have received a few replies already and it’s not just rejections I am racking up.

Because I felt like this exercise was so successful in my growth and motivation as a writer, I am planning on doing it again for the month of September and I would love for anyone who is interested to join me.

All this month, I will be posting a practical guide on how to create your own Submission Bonanza! Once you lay the groundwork (finding magazines, choosing your pieces, writing your cover letter) this month, you will be ready by September 1st to start submitting to the many, many litmags which will be opening their mailboxes for submissions.

After I did the prep work of looking for magazines, editing my work, and writing a template of my cover letter and bio, it took me about an hour to submit to each magazine.  Decide for yourself a reasonable goal for your Submission Bonanza!  I am fortunate to have an hour a day to submit to magazines and also still have time for my writing.  What kind of time can you make for it?  Can you do an hour a week?  Three hours a week?  An hour a day? Three hours a day?  You want to challenge yourself, sure.  But you also want to make a Submission Bonanza!  that you can stick to.

I am really excited about doing this again and getting into gear for another flurry of submissions.  If you’re excited too, let me know!  I would love to share lessons learned, tricks and things to consider, and just general motivation and support with anyone who’s game!