In addition to conditioning you to the rebuffs coming down the pipeline, submissions start to get your name in front of editors whose support and advice will be so necessary when you have a project to promote. Even if these editors are rejecting you, they’re getting to know your work and your aesthetic, they recognize your name in their inbox. And eventually—as long as you aren’t writing offensive query letters or disparaging their form rejection emails—from sheer pity alone, they might start to offer you specific feedback. I have a long relationship with the editor of a popular humor magazine that has never published my work. As I kept on sending pieces, it was perversely gratifying to see the rejections move from the standard bouncer fare of “This just isn’t right for us” to the validating and/or specific: “This one is actually funny, but we ran a LinkedIn spoof two weeks ago. Glad to see something from you for the third time this week, though!”
Taking part in the submission game is good for your writing: if you’re submitting, chances are that you are generating new work and learning how to revise. I have a friend who puts seven dollars in a jar for every piece she submits to a magazine. Every two months, she buys herself something special with the money in the jar, effectively rewarding herself for keeping her skin in the game.
And finally, writing, revising, and trying to publish new work will help train you for the larger, longer process of putting a book out into the world. Regardless of whether you are receiving rejections or acceptances, if you are submitting, you are entering a world where editors and readers matter, you are thinking about the way your work is going to be received, you are considering how it will fit alongside the work of your contemporaries. Submissions are a signal to publishing professionals that you’re thinking like a writer.
The best thing you can do presubmission is get yourself into an independent bookstore and look through the literary magazines they have to see what they’re publishing. Purchase the ones that publish content similar to what you yourself are writing. (A PSA here: if you’re freaked out about the price of literary magazines, remember that successful writers put money into the organizations they hope will one day love them back, and also: book and magazine purchases qualify for many writers as a tax-deductible business expense.)
If you live somewhere without a quality bookstore, take to your computer. Duotrope is a solid resource for finding out which magazines are publishing what, when. They list pretty much every online and print magazine in the universe, and you can sort your target magazines by genre, pay, and submission deadlines. Duotrope is five dollars a month, or fifty dollars a year, and it is absolutely worth it. (Save the receipt for this subscription as a business expense, too.)
Almost every magazine asks that you “familiarize yourself with the work they publish” before submitting anything yourself. And guess what: they mean it. Submissions that are off-tone or don’t adhere to the magazine’s guidelines will earn your submission a hard pass, plus you will have wasted a potentially helpful editor’s time.
Every magazine has submission guidelines: do not disregard them. A lot of magazines these days don’t accept attachments, and your work won’t even be considered if you send it the wrong way. Use a standard twelve-point typeface, insert page numbers, spell-check. And do not include a copyright page with your submission. In the United States, the minute your work is written in a tangible form (i.e., a submitted manuscript), you and your submission are fully protected by copyright law, so submitting a copyright register is an amateur move that will make editors consider your work with less seriousness than they might have.
Most editors will ask for a cover letter, or a query. These statements should be short, respectful, and look more or less like this:
Dear [Insert name of editor. You know the name of the editor because you have taken the time to read through the magazine and acquaint yourself with its masthead. And you know you spelled this editor’s name right because you checked before you hit SEND.],
Three sentences max: [Insert a compliment about the magazine. Cite one or two of the pieces that you admired recently, and why this work made you feel like the editor might consider your piece about [insert ultrashort summary of what the piece is about]. If you have met the editor previously, and the interaction was a positive one, remind them of this illustrious time.]
One sentence: [Insert some biographical information: where you live, if you are in or have completed an MFA program, what you do for a living if the MFA bit isn’t applicable.]
One sentence: [Thank the editor for his/her/their time.]
[Insert salutation],
[Insert your name]
Can I send multiple submissions?
Can you hear the crickets? This is a tricky question because many journals will tell you that they don’t accept multiple submissions, but these same journals might sit on your piece for eight months before rejecting it with a hard pass. The multiple-submissions thing really comes down to careful, methodical submission tracking. Once you receive an acceptance from somewhere, you must quickly inform the other places where you submitted the piece that it’s no longer available for consideration because it’s being published somewhere else. Note that you don’t need to notify editors who have already rejected it, just the ones that haven’t yet replied. Note also that you shouldn’t get high-horsey in your communication. Sharing the news that a “superior” magazine woke up to your true worth is not the proper way to take your piece out of consideration, unless you don’t ever want to publish in any other magazine again.
The aforementioned Duotrope can help you track submissions, but many journals use Submittable, which starts tracking your submission the minute you press SEND. Some writers prefer to create their own spreadsheets to accommodate personalized criteria and miscellanea. The author and editor Matt Bell has created a free submission-tracker template on Google Docs for such writers, which can be found at his website, mattbell.com.
Most magazines will include an average response time in their submission guidelines. The window of response time varies, but prepare for cold air drafts. As a general rule, agented submissions are responded to faster than nonagented submissions, online magazines are quicker than print magazines, and nonfiction submissions—due to the potential timeliness of their content—are handled faster than fiction.
If you receive a rejection, do not contest it. Never. You may not. The only reason following up to a rejection is ever, ever acceptable (and even then, it isn’t), is if the editor is a friend, and you need more feedback than “It just doesn’t fit our needs right now” in order to survive.
In all other circumstances, the appropriate response to a rejection is to take the time it takes to write something new, to revise it a hundred times, to spell-check the hell out of it, and to submit this new and sparkling thing to the same magazine again. This is known as the “fail better” approach. Following up a rejection with a “You’re all a bunch of losers, anyway” email is subpar human behavior that will get you blacklisted from a lot of magazines.
Once you know what the outlet’s average response time is, you can politely follow up once that time period has passed. If it’s been a long time (like, the year you submitted it isn’t the same year that it is now), the answer is probably no, but there are parallel universes in which your submission was lost or erroneously deleted, so it’s worth a try.