There are all kind of contests: contests for an individual piece of work, for manuscripts in progress, for chapbooks, for collections, for book-length manuscripts. Lots of contests come with publication in the literary magazine in question and prize money: some contests, like the Dzanc Books Prize, award the winner a ten-thousand-dollar advance and book publication.
If you start to win or place in contests (which means you are a finalist or a runner-up), you can mention these achievements in your query letters. Duotrope, Poets & Writers, The Writer magazine, and The Writer’s Chronicle are all great places to keep on top of contests, and if you don’t place, make sure to read the winning entries to see what made them shine. Turn your letdown into a learning opportunity.
Applying for awards and fellowships as an emerging writer
So many writers are focused on graduating from their MFA programs and securing a book deal that it becomes easy to overlook the awards that support you before you have an agent, before you have a book deal, before you even know what your potential first book’s about. While the United States is certainly not known for its zealous support of writers, research grants, prizes, residencies, and fellowships do exist to help you through the various stages of your career—including the beginning. So how do you find out about these newbie grants?
If you attended an undergraduate or MFA program, these institutions can provide you with fellowship information, both in and outside of the university or college itself. Websites such as ProFellow and GoGrad can help you customize a database of grants and prizes, the Alliance of Artists Communities has a great selection of residencies, Poets & Writers has a solid list of first-book awards, and the magazine The Writer’s Chronicle has a rotating list of fellowships, awards, and residencies at the back of every issue. For assistance keeping track of deadlines and submissions, Submittable is great—plus they have a customizable database of opportunities in everything from screenwriting to film.
It’s worth noting that most fellowship, grant, and residency applications require a nonrefundable application fee of some kind. Sometimes, the organization will throw in a free subscription to a magazine or newsletter if they have one, but usually it’s a straight-up payment with no fun swag attached. The more prestigious the opportunity, the higher the price tag can get for the application. The common range is twenty-five dollars to something conspicuously shy of fifty dollars, such as forty-seven dollars.
Most literary magazines have at least two tiers of form rejection letters: “hard” and “soft.” You’ll know if you received a hard pass because it leaves no room for hope. You’ll hear, most likely, that your submission “didn’t fit the magazine’s needs” or that they “have to pass,” which has always sounded vaguely gastroenterological to me. Soft rejections include encouraging sentences like, “We really liked your writing,” or, “We’d like to see something else from you in the future.” There’s a third tier, of course, in which you get a personalized note from one of the editors that says how much they liked your work, with an opaque explanation of why they couldn’t use it.
If you are starting to receive soft or personalized rejections, this is cause for celebration: your work is attracting attention, and you are getting close. “Rejection is not only a rite of passage, it’s an active, enthusiastic component of your relationship with writing,” says author Wayétu Moore, who now sees rejection as a healthy part of her writing process. “Making friends with the word ‘no’ will diminish the chances that you eventually become resentful of writing and of the literary industry in which it exists. When I became okay with rejection, and stopped taking ‘no’ so seriously, my writing suddenly felt like it belonged to me again.”
Book reviewing and author interviews
If you’re chomping at the bit to get some bylines and your magazine pitches aren’t landing, reviewing books and conducting author interviews is a nice way to get your foot in the publishing world’s door. Magazines, newspapers, and literary journals (both online and in print) have more books that need reviewing than they do reviewers, and publicists are always desperate to have their authors interviewed. The problem is, they need the interviewer to have read their client’s book. Reading takes time, and nobody has time, hence the dearth of book reviewers and interviewers doing this good work.
The perks of book reviewing and author interviews are many: there are the free books, of course, and the opportunity to engage with accomplished authors, forge relationships with editors, and see your name in print. The writer Yvonne Conza even credits book reviewing with helping her surmount insecurities around not having an MFA. “Book reviewing teaches you how to read a book,” Yvonne says. “Eyeing language more closely, examining structure, seeing what works or doesn’t . . . in doing all this my writing has improved.”
Unfortunately, most writers can’t survive on the pay for these assignments. Especially when you are just starting out, it’s going to be difficult to pull in anything over fifty dollars for an interview or a book review, and that’s actually a best-case scenario: you’re more likely to see a thank-you email with a smiley face than a check. Even when you start playing in the big leagues (glossy magazines, international newspapers), you’ll probably experience what a friend of mine calls a “behind-the-curtain-at-Oz moment” when you hear what you’re going to be paid. This friend, who I’m not going to name because she would like to write for this particular outlet again, was offered eight hundred dollars to review four books in a thousand-word review for a major newspaper. On paper, that might seem like a good deal: it’s eighty cents a word. But what isn’t reflected in this writing rate is the fact that the writer had to read four entire books quickly with care and consideration, and then find a way to pack each of their themes, strengths, and weaknesses into a pithy and accessible thousand-word review. And this had to be done while the writer was working on her own book, providing blurbs for others, mothering her child, advocating for political causes, and teaching undergrads, plus it meant that she had to put down whatever else she had been reading for actual pleasure. Once you cut off the percentage that goes to taxes and factor in the amount of time such an assignment takes, the per-word rate is more like fifteen cents. Book reviewing can net you bylines in prestigious outlets and it’s a good deed for the community, but it’s a lot of work.
If you do decide to book review and the pay is paltry, don’t agree to review any old thing just because you were asked. In a Facebook group dedicated to questions about writing and money, the author and book reviewer Charles Finch suggested that newbies should be proactive about their preferences, especially if they’re writing the review for free. “Ask to write about something relevant to your career interests,” Charles says. “Not the first thing that they ask you to review.”
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines pitch as “a black or dark viscous substance obtained as a residue in the distillation of organic materials,” which is pretty much what happens when you ready your personal thoughts and experiences for an editor’s inbox.
A pitch is you trying to convince an editor to let you write something for their outlet on a specific topic with a specific angle, and in time, as you start to build up your portfolio, they will become easier, and real, live humans will respond. These pitches usually take place in a succinct and professionally written email—they should never involve you cold-calling an editor unless you enjoy making people incredibly uncomfortable and not getting what you want.
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