Welcome to March Week Two, a week in which I am not working at my day job. I’m not going anywhere, because global pandemic, but I’m at least not working. Well, I’m working on this. But I’m not working on jobby job stuff.
I try to get some time away from that particular grind several times a year so I can check in where I am on all the stuff that I don’t get to during evenings and weekends and see how far behind I am on that (spoiler alert: very behind). The things I’m most behind on are reading and writing, so I’m trying to do a lot of both this week.
Another item I’m running behind on is submissions. I don’t mind telling you, if I haven’t already, that I have a goal in 2022 to make 52 fiction submissions by the end of the year. When I say it out loud I usually phrase this as “52 rejections” as I am paraphrasing the spirit of Ray Bradbury, who said:
“If you can write one short story a week—it doesn't matter what the quality is to start, but at least you're practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can't be done.”
I often see writers state their goals like this:
“I will get a literary agent this year.”
“I will sign a publishing contract in 2022.”
“I will place a short story or poem in a paying publication.”
There’s a big problem with these goals. None of those success conditions is under the writer’s control. I can query literary agents all year long and never get a full request. I can submit to every publisher in the business and never hear a peep back. I can make 52 submissions in 2022 but I cannot control whether any of them are accepted.
While I could set a goal to get a story accepted to a paying market in 2022, I have no control over what gets accepted. To some degree, I can work on improving my writing as much as possible, I can read the publications in which I’d like to be included to get a sense of what they’re looking for, I can strategically choose less-prestigious markets that may be more likely to accept a developing writer, and so on—but I’m not the person who makes the accept decision. That’s out of my control.
As I have discussed in Shelf Life before (in Understanding Rejections), “this is not good enough to publish” is only one of many reasons writing is rejected from publication. Other common reasons include “the market for this is saturated” or “I signed something just like this last week.” Also, sometimes something can be well-written and of publication-quality but the person reading it just doesn’t like it. For instance, I am not a big fan of Pierce Brown’s writing (he is author of the Red Rising series). If he had submitted to me as a literary agent, I probably would not have signed him. That said, his work is both well-written and eminently* publishable. It’s just not for me.
Even if I had on my hands a piece of fiction that was, indeed, well-written and eminently publishable, it’s still possible that I could submit it all around the publishing community and just not receive an accept or an offer of rep. It’s out of my hands. But what is in my hands is how many submissions I make or how many queries I send.
I was talking about this recently with a friend and writer who I admire very much and they said (I am paraphrasing here), that accepts are rare but submissions are as plentiful as one makes them, so why not measure your productivity as a writer in terms of what you write and how doggedly you put it out there instead of by whether someone else has chosen to pay you for a particular piece.
As always, when you set yourself a goal you get to determine your success condition. There are no preordained success conditions to which you must adhere.
That is how I came by the goal “make 52 short-fiction submissions in 2022.” Today’s Shelf Life is about the short-fiction submission trenches. I’m going to write a bit about that available tools that you can use to gather valuable information, keep your submissions organized, and propel yourself to any goal number of submissions without ever missing a beat. You may have noticed from the title that this is half of a two-parter: Thursday’s installment is themed similarly but for querying literary agents regarding longform manuscripts.
So: How many publication-ready short stories do I have on hand or expect to write in 2022 if I’m planning to make 52 submissions? Well, not really that many. But I anticipate a lot of rejects for each before the find a home, if they find a home, so I probably don’t need all that many. If something gets accepted and removed from play, I’ll soldier on but I might not mind failing my goal in that case. I’m always writing new ones anyway.
Let’s say you have a short story and you want to shop it. What do you need to begin?
A method of keeping track of where and to whom you’ve submitted;
A source for information on the markets you want to submit to; and
Nothing else that’s literally it.
I mean, okay: You need an internet connection, a web browser, and a word processor. But you probably already knew about those.
When I approach the end of working on a short story that I intend to submit for publication—when I’m revising it and asking my early readers to take a look—I start making notes on what outlets I think might be interested in publishing it. Then I put those outlets into some kind of priority order to form my submission strategy for that piece. How do you go about identifying who might want to publish your thing?
First, make sure you know what genre you’re writing in and what audience you’re writing for. Don’t submit middle grade fiction to a magazine that publishes for adults. Don’t submit horror to a science fiction-only magazine. If the magazine has specific items they ask you not to submit (eg, “no zombies”), do not submit a story with or about that. Your story will probably not be the one special story that is excepted from the rule. If you have a publication in mind, see if they have a sample issue you can read for free or some stories available outside their paywall. Read what they’re publishing. That can help guide your sense of whether what you’ve written would be a good fit.
Second: Make sure you know what kind of thing you have. Is it a microfic? A flash fic? A short story? Novelette? Novella? Not every publications accepts every type of short fiction. Clarkesworld doesn’t accept anything under 1,000 words but takes submissions all the way up to 22,000 words. Apex Magazine doesn’t have a minimum but has a firm upper limit of 7,500 words. Don’t waste time—yours or theirs—submitting to anyone whose submission requirements you don’t meet.
When you have a list of publications that might be a good fit for your piece, the next things to figure out are:
Which markets accept simultaneous submissions and which don’t, and
Which markets are open for subs, and when?
A market that accepts simultaneous submissions is one that will consider your piece even if you are submitting it to multiple markets at the same time. Meaning, I take my piece “Story Saga” and send it to StoryMag, Saga Tales, and Magazine of Sagas and Stories all at the same time because they all accept simultaneous subs. Whichever magazine sends me an accept notification first gets to publish the story, at which time I write to the other two magazines to let them know I am withdrawing “Story Saga” from submission because it has been accepted elsewhere.
Not all markets are open for submissions all the time. Some are always open, some open only when they have capacity to read subs, and some open and close on a regular schedule. If you’re preparing to submit, move closed markets to the bottom of the list—don’t delete them, they might be open again if you receive a reject and need to pick your next target.
A great resource to find all this information in one place is the Submission Grinder. Accounts are free to create and they are supported through PayPal donations, Patreon pledges, and book sales. The Grinder lets you create records for the pieces you’re shopping and then automatically search for markets that fit their specs. You enter your story type, genre, and word count, and then specify any criteria of the markets you’d like to see (like pay rate, response time, and so on), and the Grinder will return a list of markets.
As of this very moment, the Grinder has 2923 open markets in its database. But wait—there’s more. When you submit a piece to a market—which you do not do through the Grinder—you come back to the Grinder and log your submission. For instance, I log into the Grinder and update my piece “Story Saga” to say I submitted to StoryMag on March 8. When I hear back from StoryMag I’ll return to the Grinder again and record whether I got a reject (personal or form), or an accept, or an R&R (revise and resubmit), and whether I was shortlisted, and I’ll record the dates.
Other Submission Grinder users are doing the same thing so there’s a ton of aggregated data in there to give me information like:
What’s the accept rate for StoryMag? (That is, what percent of stories submitted do they accept?)
What percent of rejects are personal versus form?
What’s their average response time? Median? Range?
What’s the average response time for a reject versus an accept?
When did StoryMag most recently send a response and how long did they have that paper before they issued their decision?
This helps me manage my expectations but also helps guide my submission strategy. If two markets pay the same and neither accepts simultaneous subs, I’ll probably choose the one with the shorter response time to sub first because I’ll have my answer sooner and can use that answer to decide how to move forward to other subs.
Another item I look at when choosing magazines to submit to is whether they’ve won awards that are important to me or that I consider prestigious. Have they won a Nebula or a Hugo? A Pushcart? The Grinder will give you that information as well.
In the interest of full disclosure, I also use Duotrope, a service similar to the Submission Grinder but which charges a $5/month fee for the account. Duotrope and the Grinder do the same stuff but each has some markets the other doesn’t have. They offer largely overlapping but slightly different information. I like having both since the fee for Duotrope is inexpensive but The Grinder is my recommended place to start since the account is free.
When pulling together my plan for submitting a piece, I organize my list so the best-fitting target markets that do not take simultaneous submissions are first, in order of priority, since they need to be hit up one at a time; next are the high-priority simultaneous-accepting outlets; and then after hearing back from all those, on to the next tier of simultaneous-accepting outlets. That “next tier,” for me, includes markets that pay less than the SFWA pro rate but also markets that I don’t expect in a million years to get into—like The Sun—but they take simultaneous submissions so why not shoot my shot?
Submitting to a literary journal is a bit like sending out your resume. You have to tailor your submission for the outlet you’re submitting to. Most outlets require submissions to come in Shunn Manuscript Format or some specific variation thereof, and not every outlet accepts the same type of files. (I recently submitted to a journal that specifies .doc only and no .docx.) Before making a submission, read the magazine’s guidelines carefully and then read them again. Make sure you follow any guidance they offer on formatting and on what to put in your cover letter, if they request or allow a cover letter.
Hit send on your submission and then log it wherever you’re keeping track of your subs. Submission Grinder and Duotrope will both keep track of your subs for you, but I also keep an Evernote table with my submissions because I can color code it and attach correspondence. I’m an overachiever (which you already knew).
One last resource I’d like to share before I get back to enjoying my week off: If you’re submitting, you’re probably going to get some rejection emails. It can be hard to know what to make of them. Is this a personal reject? Or just a really polite form? Is this a high-tier form or a low-tier form? Some magazines have several form letters they choose from depending on how well they liked your work.
I absolutely adore the Rejection Wiki for practicing rejectomancy. Should you receive a rejection, check the magazine that sent you the reject and see if other users have posted their rejection letters. You can compare the letter you got to the ones in the wiki to see whether you received a standard or higher-tier rejection. A personal rejection will usually say something specific about your story (and not simply that they liked your work or that its merit was evident) and may even offer feedback on why they rejected (but will not entreat you to revise and resubmit, which is not the same as a reject).
Anyway, I wish you many happy submissions ahead—with high-tier forms, personal rejects, and accepts in abundance. Above all I wish you the fortitude to keep it going, because much of that is required. I’ll be back on Thursday with more of the same but on longform manuscripts, agents, and editors. Let’s all persevere in the meantime.
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Thanks to KC for reminding me of the difference between imminent and eminent.