A Corner-Cutter’s Guide to Magazine Submission:

Devising a Sustainable and Empowering System for Ongoing Submission

by Katherine P.F. Holmes

It’s not hard. It’s just hard work.

So you’re looking to get your work published! Perhaps you’re eager to have it read by others in a more finished, formal capacity than a workshop or an exchange of work between friends. Maybe you’d like the satisfaction of seeing your work in print. You might like to expand your readership and increase your publishing credits while you work toward a larger project, such as the compilation of an anthology or the querying process of a novel. Whatever your goals, you’re going to need to submit your work more than once. You’re going to need a system for submission.

But who am I to tell you what you need? And what if my submission goals are different from yours? I’d like to briefly introduce myself so that you understand why I’m suggesting the following tips and tactics for magazine submission and can intentionally adapt them to suit your personal goals: I’m a Fiction MFA student at Emerson College, a writing instructor, and a short story writer/aspiring novelist with fourteen stories published or forthcoming in literary magazines such as CALYX, Page Turner, and Eternal Haunted Summer. I’ve had a few longlistings for fiction contests, no wins (yet), and many, many rejections through the submissions process. This year alone, I’ve submitted upwards of fifty times and received six acceptances and thirty rejections. 

If you’re wondering why anyone would go through the hassle, you’re not alone. I catch myself having the same doubts. My end-goal isn’t even magazine publication–I want to be a novelist! But I write and submit short stories as a means of sharpening my craft skills and building my writerly resume of publishing credits in order to catch the attention of agents and editors that I hope to someday court during the querying process. Only last summer did I begin to serially submit to magazines with the intention of living the ‘writerly lifestyle’ and begin to yield results. Yes, the submissions process can feel daunting and frustrating. If an editor’s taste is subjective, isn’t submitting for their arbitrary rejection pointless?

But… that resume isn’t going to build itself. 

What I’ve found, and what I recommend, is that adopting the submissions process as an actual, personalized process will allow you to get in on the numbers game and dismantle your own reservations against it. The more you submit, the more submission feels like a natural extension of the writing process. You write for you, revise for others, and avail your work to the world. A practical routine, based on responsible corner-cutting and systematization (we’ll get into these shortly), will not only demystify the submissions process but expedite it, making it something to enjoy rather than dread. I promise!

Without further ado, let’s break down the magazine submission process to the following components: your frame of mind; your internal tracking system; your standard submissions portals and processes; and your pre- and post-submission moves. You’ll also find a bank of resources at the end of this article, including my presentation slides on magazine submission, a sample and template submission tracker, a guide to using Submittable, and a guide for formatting short stories.

How to Mindset (Yes, Mindset as a Verb):

It’s hard to write something–harder, still, to surrender that something to others’ judgment. This prospect alone is what keeps so many brilliant writers from allowing their work the recognition it deserves. The prospect of rejection, the uncertainty of success, and the effort of writing that stupid cover letter conspire to shut us down. As you psych yourself up to submit, then, it’s worthwhile to set your mind. This is not to say that you should have a mindset; you already have one (I should think). Instead, you can deliberately and consciously frame the task at hand by the goal you’ve set. 

I like to think of magazine submission as the enablement of my authorial career, proof that I’m actively producing work and contributing to the writerly community. Whether or not the work is accepted, I’m already accomplishing my dream of being a writer. This mindset–which I like to think of as a sort of ruthless optimism–allows me to process long silences and rejections from editors as developments, not setbacks.

Depending on your submission goal, setting your mind will allow you to approach submission with greater discernment, confidence, and likelihood of follow-through (both short-term and ongoing). Some ways you can set your mind are to:

• manifest. Start with your submission goal and, like a vision board, use your vision of achieving that goal to motivate you. 

• reprogram. Focus on your goal not by its outcome but by how you would feel if you were to accomplish it. Meditate on this feeling and let it override your anxiety, dread, and self-doubt. Once you’ve submitted even a few times, you’ll have emotionally tagged the submissions process as hopeful and gratifying rather than odious and thorny.

What matters most to beginning and sustaining a submissions process is to empower yourself. You may be powerless as far as the editors’ verdict, but you can certainly control whether you decide to pursue your goals or not. To that end, as you feel the many feelings that can arise during the submission processes–insecurity, exhaustion, fight or flight, impatience, disappointment, nihilism–use your future success and nagging desire to carry you onward.  

Reframing Submissions:

As you set your mind for the ongoing practice of submission, it may help to redefine what magazine submission is. It’s easy to think of ‘submission’ as the most odious intersection of connotations: relinquishing your work and humbling yourself. How could this double-subjection possibly empower? The answer lies in your awareness of yourself, your work, and your literary field. Take a moment to consider:

• Know your brand. What kind of work are you writing? How would your genre, medium, style, voice, etc. characterize you as a writer? How compatible are you with the brand of the magazine(s) that you’d like to publish your work?

• Adjust expectations. Based on your brand, think critically about what magazines are likely to accept your piece. You can and should reach for the stars, as they say, but know that the likelihood of your acceptance isn’t just a matter of the quality of your piece or the competitiveness of your piece against others within the same submission period. Magazine editors are curating and protecting their brand. So, does your brand compliment theirs?

• Deadlines. If you benefit from deadlines, use reading periods and contest deadlines to motivate your writing and submission. Getting into rhythm with the literary world will also reinforce your literary citizenship, your authority and belonging within the writerly community. You can even add those deadlines to your calendar as a reminder and/or…

• Schedule your submissions. Determine a regular submission window that you can rely on and consistently honor. Maybe at the end of the month, or after you’ve revised a given work, clear out an afternoon to find magazines, draft cover letters, and submit in a flurry.

• Reward yourself. By celebrating the double accomplishment of writing something and releasing it to the world, you’ll not only give yourself a moment for closure and pride, but also incentivize your next submission. 

• Aspire for rejections. Of course you don’t really want your work rejected, but if you’re looking to increase your publication credits, counting the rejections instead of the acceptances will drain much of the negative influence out of rejections. Treat each rejection as proof that you’ve had your work read and evaluated by professionals, that you’re pushing yourself closer to your goal, and that you’re not giving up no matter what others say. If you count only the acceptances, then any rejections or long periods of waiting may feel like stagnation; but if you make a morbid game out of racking up the rejections, you’ve removed the fear and hurt that intimidates so many writers from submitting. You’ve disarmed the process and made it reaffirm rather than rattle you.

By reframing magazine submission as a matter of brand-matching, an ordinary routine, and an occasion to reward and reaffirm yourself, you’ll find the process easier and–dare I say it–kind of fun. Think of submission as the performance of your craft, culminating all your practice and passion in a public display. If we reframe magazine submission from this dreadful experience of putting yourself out there and getting shot down to simply the practice of making your accomplishments visible, we can approach submission with more grit and follow-through–and, since it’s a numbers game, more results.

Before You Submit:

It’s worthwhile to consider, as a final round of revision before you submit, how your story will be read by your target magazines. This section offers evergreen story skills that can help you make an immediate, bold impression and convey your brand-appropriateness to an editor, no matter your genre or aesthetic.

The first thing to consider is whether you wrote your story with a given readership in mind. Use this ideal readership to determine which magazines you’re submitting to and what last-minute craft decisions will more clearly and easily signal that your story belongs. The key to getting your work accepted isn’t having the best story in the world or even the best version of your story (although it helps). The key is to make your story on-brand. 

Magazines are most concerned with upholding their brand and appealing to their specific, existing readership, which means that a more strategic and acceptable submission is one in which your story matches the magazine’s aesthetic–and matches it clearly. The most powerful places to emphasize your brand-compatibility are the first paragraph and resolution.

Your first paragraph situations the reader in the story; it also situates the editor in your aesthetic. While introducing the narrative components of the story (character, desire, conflict, setting, etc.), the opening should also contain the artistic signature, the voice, rules of the story-world, and rules of reading the piece itself. For literary fiction and more ambiguous storytelling, you have to teach readers how to read your story. If you recall your favorite stories, or poke around the internet for ‘Best Short Stories,’ you’ll notice that these heavy-hitters have heavy-hitting openers. Here are just a few examples, where the story logistics and story ‘rules’ are immediate and plain to an editor:

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez

“The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado

Opposite your compressed, situating opener, you have your ending. Your ending should meet the expectations you’ve set (tying up loose ends, providing some sort of closure) while also subverting expectations. This is not to suggest that every story needs a plot twist(!), shocking reveal, or exploding kitten, but your ending shouldn’t be totally predictable. If you’re not sure whether you’ve successfully balanced resolution and subversion, think about academic essays. You don’t announce the conclusion with a cliché tag, ‘In conclusion…’ and a redundant summary of what the reader has just read. You offer a new perspective on the subject; pose a followup question; ‘zoom out’ by exploring broader implications; critique the limitations and nuances of the study; call the reader to action. In fiction, then, you can lace closure with a sense of relief, troubling, or ambiguity (if you choose ambiguity, though, make sure it’s a productive and thought-provoking culmination rather than a confusing, opaque cipher that will discourage readers–and editors).

What gets accepted to a literary magazine is a subjective call, but you can increase the objective appeal of your work by having a striking opener and productive ending, both reinforcing brand-compatibility and making the editor’s call easier.

Setting up the system:

With your positive mindset and marketable story, you may want to immediately start submitting. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re looking to make submission a habit, though, you might first create a system for finding magazines you want to submit to and tracking your submissions. The goal here isn’t to add another step to the process but to smoothen the process into an efficient, sustainable system so that your submission isn’t a one-and-done trial or a sporadic and dreadful mess. Here’s how you might get organized:

1.  Track your submissions through an online spreadsheet where you can note, link, and tally things. The tracker can also house your templates (see below) and author bio for easy access. It can serve as a calendar and a personal database of goal publishers. Feel free to make a copy of this tracker sample and modify it to your taste.

2. Make a calendar of reading periods and submission deadlines. You could add these to your tracker, keeping it open and readily accessible, or you could use your personal calendar.

3. Create templates. Once you’ve submitted a few times and gotten a feel for cover letters, queries, and pitches, create templates that you can copy and tweak for subsequent submissions so that you’re not always starting from scratch.

4. Create email folders by submission round or response types. You’ll receive lots of emails throughout the process, from Submittable confirmations to editorial updates to the actual verdict for your story and any follow-up correspondences. Sorting this communication into folders ensures that no communication gets lost in the event that you submit to the same magazine again. These folders can also be motivational; opening one and seeing all your hard work and growth over your submission process is gratifying.

5. Use your network, including the PopFic Collective! If you benefit from asking peers and friends to hold you accountable to your writing goals, do the same with magazine submission. While magazine submission can feel competitive and solitary, it’s not a weakness to ask for support or find empowerment in each other. It just means that you work best when you’re part of the world–so let how you work best work for you.

Getting Ready to Submit:

There are good tactics, bad tactics, and corner-cutting tactics for magazine submission. Since my goal is to make a sustainable process, I’m going to emphasize the corner-cutting tactics as a way to optimize your informedness and efficiency. Submitting can be time-consuming and, depending on your desired publications, expensive. So how do you spend your time and money most effectively?

• Find magazines that fit your work. Try matching your submission by genre, aesthetic, theme, or comparable writers. You can simply Google ‘magical realist literary magazines’ or ‘Kelly Link short stories’ to get a sense of the places that are already interested in your kind of work. For a more literary-pertinent search engine, try the “Discover” tab on Submittable, which allows you to find open calls for submission and contest entries. Poets & Writers (check out their Literary Magazines page and Writing Contests, Grants & Awards page) and DuoTrope can also help you find opportunities and filter for genres, deadlines, free submissions, etc. Lastly, sign up for Chill Subs, which sends filtered opportunities directly to your inbox.

• Read the magazines. Asterisk. The best way to ensure that your story is brand-compatible is to familiarize yourself with the publications by reading them; but, once again, we run into the problem of time and money. It’s unrealistic to expect you to read everything because, even if you have the opportunity and access, your time is better spent writing. Your best bet is to Google for literary magazines that publish your genre, aesthetic, and intended brand, or that have published your favorite writers and comparable works. Then, read those magazines’ “About Us” and “Submission Guidelines” pages. You’ll get a sense of what they want and, by the voice and attitude behind the writing, the personality and taste of the editors.

• Format your manuscript by (1) standard formatting and (2) any special requests built into the submission guidelines. Some editors ask for specific formatting for readability; others ask that no identifying information appear on the manuscript in order to ensure an anonymous and fair editorial review; and a sticklerish few have unique rules in order to ensure that you’ve carefully read through their guidelines. They want to know that, since they’re reading and evaluating your work, you’ve done the same with their publication. 

• Submit simultaneously, meaning, submit the same story to multiple publications. You’ll notice that some magazines explicitly prohibit simultaneous submission. They’re trying to protect their time and interests; if they fall in love with your work, when they finally get around to reading it, they want to make sure it’s available for the taking. While this exclusivity suits their purposes, it doesn’t help you in the numbers game of submission. They might adore your story but find it ultimately incompatible with their brand–and then what? You submit to another place, wait up to six months, and risk another rejection? When faced with a “No simultaneous submissions” rule, you have two choices: if this magazine is your first choice for publication, you can submit your work there, wait a while, then submit elsewhere; or you can blithely ignore the rule and submit simultaneously. A magazine that asks you to wait on them and only them doesn’t have your best interests at heart. Frankly, you should be submitting to at least five places at a time. The only risk you run is that your work is accepted elsewhere, in which case you can:

  • Notify the exclusive magazine of the acceptance and ask if they’re still interested in your submission. You don’t even have to acknowledge the no-simultaneous rule; you’re alerting the magazine that your submission has been deemed desirable.

  • Withdraw from the exclusive magazine. You don’t need to give a reason.

Of course, you run the risk of burning a bridge with that magazine. But I don’t think you’d be the first to do so.

• Submit in batches. If your work continues to languish in ‘Received’ or ‘In-Progress,’ or you haven’t heard back yet, consider another round of revision and submit to more places. As you cast a wider net, though, make sure that you’re still selecting magazines based on compatibility. 

• Consider the legacy of your work. Are you contributing to a themed issue or anthology? Are you entering a contest, where you might place or be short-/longlisted? Are you looking for a small magazine with a more personal reviewing and editing process, or are you looking for a bigger magazine with perhaps less care? Do you want the satisfaction of seeing your work in a printed issue or do you want the easy and eternal accessibility of online publication?

• Try flash fiction. If you’re interested in submitting but have no idea what to submit, consider shorter works like flash fiction, which take a fraction of the time for editors to consider and which you can usually submit in multiples instead of one at a time. Flash can be a great way to quickly increase your submission numbers and, as a rule, shorter stories are more marketable. The likelihood of publication slims as soon as you push and exceed the maximum word count.

Actually Submitting:

There are several possible submission formats you may encounter: email submission, Google Form submission, online via portal, online via Submittable, and snail mail. Below are some examples of each kind of submission format. 

Email submission - Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Google form - Page Turner Magazine

Internal portal - CALYX Journal

Submittable - The Kenyon Review

You’ll have to be flexible with the variety of submission formats. You might like to keep a list of portal usernames and passwords on your submissions tracker, or save your log-in information whenever you can. To simplify the process, you might like to start with just Submittable and use this commonly used portal as your search engine for finding publishing opportunities through the “Discover” tab. For pointers on how to create an account or navigate Submittable, check out this how-to guide.

Cover Letters and Author Bios:

You often have to include a cover letter and author bio in your submission. Although you’re marketing yourself and hoping to make a good impression, the goal here is concision and a weirdly specific “this or that” characterization of yourself.

1. Unless otherwise directed by the submission guidelines*, include in your cover letter your name, genre, title, word count, author bio, and thanks, in addition to formal salutation and signoff. It may be nice to convey your admiration of the publication, but only if concise to the point of brusqueness. Editors don’t want to spend their precious reading time on cover leaders, where you have nothing to prove except the fact that you’re a person. Submission cover letters are not job application cover letters, where you painstakingly and exhaustively marry your experience to the particulars of the position in question. The rule of thumb on magazine cover letters is Less is More. Here’s an example of a cover letter:
   

   Dear Mr. Granata and Editors of American Literary Review,

   I am pleased to submit my creative essay, “Small Furnishings” (3723 words) for your consideration. This piece is a simultaneous submission.

   I am an MFA student in Fiction at Emerson College and have completed two graduate fiction workshops at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I have taught high school English in New York City and had eight short stories published in literary magazines such as Eternal Haunted Summer and Litbreak Magazine. My metafictive retelling of Scylla/Sin from The Odyssey and Paradise Lost was longlisted for The Masters Review’s 2023 Summer Short Story Award.

   Thank you in advance for your time, and I wish you a wonderful spring.

   Sincerely,

   Katherine P. F. Holmes
   

   Notice the almost cursory appeal to the magazine. If this were a cover letter for a job, I could never in my right mind expect to earn an interview; as a magazine cover letter, however, I’ve honored the editors’ time.

   *Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, offers his personal preferences for cover letters here. You’ll notice some perhaps surprising advice regarding salutation, details, and brevity. Unless one of his particular questions applies to you or your submission, he writes, “a simple ‘Thank you for considering my story’ is more than enough.” 
   

2. Author bio: You probably have a ready-made author bio that lists all your publishing credits and accomplishments–as it should–but the one you send to magazine editors should characterize you as either an old pro or a diamond in the rough. 

1. Old Pro: If you have one or a few major publications under your belt, mention them. These credits will make you marketable as an ‘already approved’ writer. 

2. Diamond in the Rough: On the other hand, if you have one, a few, or a whole slew of publications at small magazines with minimal visibility, editors will recoil. While you should be proud of any and all publications, editors want someone with demonstrated readership (old pro) or someone whom they can ‘discover,’ a hot, new voice that they can usher onto the literary scene (diamond in the rough). If you name a series of obscure publications in your author bio, you’re implying that that’s where your work belongs. Editors of more established magazines will shy from that association and may exercise an unfortunate snobbery by rejecting your piece. To avoid this petty rejection, remove any small-fry publications from your author bio; then, when your piece is accepted and you’re able to supply a revised bio, you can sneak them back in.

3. Pitching: If you’re pitching an article, essay, or long-form piece, you may not have explicit guidelines from the magazine’s website. You may find yourself sending an email with a kind of cover letter and author bio folded into a sales pitch of your idea. When pitching, your message should specify and describe the project in question, focusing on the brand-compatible angle(s) you want to explore. A pitch must be more thorough and tantalizing than a cover letter because the pitch–not the work you’re pitching–is what gets your foot in the door. Below are some helpful resources for magazine pitching.

   1. How (and Where!) to Pitch Your Writing

   2. How To Pitch an Article (With Tips and Example)

   3. How to Pitch a Journal or Magazine (Harvard Kennedy School Communications Program)

I have only pitched one article, a travel essay, which was initially deferred due to the magazine’s publishing schedule and then accepted during the next quarter. Because my author bio and publication history clearly mark me as a fiction writer, my goal was to sound capable yet coachable–a “diamond in the rough” as far as travel writing. I proposed a few angles for the piece, demonstrated its relevance, and tried to convey enough thought and excitement to pique the editor’s interest:

Dear Ms. Nilsen,

I hope this email finds you well. I would like to pitch to Wellesley Weston Magazine a travel piece on my recent trip to Cuba through a writers' residency. I have a few possible angles: traveling as a former Wellesley resident to a developing country; traveling as an educator; traveling to Cuba despite my mother's upbringing in the Cold War and childhood terror of Castro; or traveling with just enough privilege and shelteredness to have the time of my life despite the surrounding poverty.

I am an MFA student in Fiction at Emerson College. I've taught high school English at charter schools in New York City and completed two summer graduate workshops at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. My short stories have been published or are forthcoming in CALYX, PageTurner Magazine, Bombfire Lit, and others. I grew up in Dover and Wellesley and currently live in Brighton.

Fluent in Spanish, I've conversed with Cubans about the revolution, the strengths and gaps in Cuban education, the skyrocketing inflation, and further concerns that speak to the suffering and artistic perseverance in Cuba, as well as the seemingly willful misunderstanding of Cuba by the United States. My goal for this piece is not to push a political stance, but to explore what it means to travel to developing countries--what contradictions, blind spots, and fears linger.

This piece would capitalize on current interest in Cuba due to the worsening protests over food and electricity shortages, as well as on overarching questions of ethical tourism and connecting through differences. Would you be interested in publishing? 

Thank you for your consideration, and have a wonderful day.

Best,

Katherine

After Submitting:

After submitting, make a note on your tracker, celebrate, and write! Don’t twiddle your thumbs for a response, as it can take up to six months to hear back from magazines. Most places will stipulate in their submission guidelines how long you can expect to wait, after which point you may send a polite followup email in case your submission got lost in the digital slurry.

If you’re waiting one month, two months, etc., you may want to send another batch of submissions. Who knows what those first-round magazines are doing (or, apparently, not)? Between batches of submissions, you could revise your story once more. You’ll be able to evaluate your piece with more objectivity than before, making more meaningful and insightful changes. In terms of revising, you can never go wrong with prioritizing the story (the narrative drive, the high stakes, the endangerment of the protagonist, the escalation of conflict) over aesthetics, the digestibility of the piece over ambiguity, and the overall compression of the writing. Cut clichés and cut, cut, cut.

Once you’ve submitted again, keep writing. If you need a breather, take one. The goal is the long-game, the cycle of submissions rather than the one-and-done.

When You Hear Back:

Whether your piece is accepted or rejected, let yourself feel your emotions. You’re a human being with personal work on the line. Celebrate, cry, phone a friend, or brood as allows you to recover and continue submitting–and pursuing your writerly goals.

If rejected:

In the spirit of ruthless optimism, I literally forgot to include a slide about rejections in my presentation (linked below). This oversight may also reflect the calluses that develop in response to serial rejection, which, in the mind-game of tallying rejections instead of acceptances, are much easier to handle.

You may encounter a few different kinds of rejection, from a seemingly cold “No” to an acceptance in disguise. The variation allows editors to encourage future submissions if they see something admirable in your writing even though it’s not brand-compatible. Here are some kinds of rejection letters you may receive, from the most cursory to the most encouraging: 

1. Unfortunately, your work was not selected for publication. The magazine wasn’t a good fit for your work, and now might be a good time to revise and send another round of submissions. This kind of rejection is not a condemnation of your potential as a writer; it’s cold, but it’s common. Hang in there!

2. Unfortunately, your work was not selected for publication. We encourage you to submit a different work in the future. Think of this rejection as an invitation in the guise of rejection. The editors want you on call because, even though the story didn’t quite satisfy their vision, they like your writing and can imagine you in some other way fitting their brand. Here’s one example:

Thanks very much for sending this story to _Beneath Ceaseless Skies_.

Unfortunately, it's not quite right for me.  I admire the conceit, but

it felt to me more mythic and less grounded or tangible than we're

looking for.

We appreciate your interest in our magazine.  Please feel free to submit

other work in the future. 

This kind of rejection really is flattering. Even though it’s not the acceptance you want, it’s a sign that you’ve intrigued a reader–a very choosy and experienced reader.

3. We’re interested in publishing this piece if you’re open to the following revisions. This kind of rejection is basically a conditional acceptance. Depending on the type and extensiveness of the feedback, you may have to make a difficult choice: change your story to fit the editors’ standards or decline to revise and take the rejection. If you know you would regret making and publishing the alteration, it may be in your best interest to decline the revisions and see if there’s a chance that the editors will take the piece anyway. If not, submit elsewhere. 

The good news is, the proposed revisions shouldn’t be too invasive. The draft you submitted has made the editors interested enough to give you free feedback; by their standards, you’re almost on-brand. If you choose to revise, the editors will likely accept the revision–but be prepared for a possible rejection. Your revision may not totally satisfy their taste, or it may raise new qualms and questions. I’ve had revisions based on conditional acceptances both accepted and declined, as you’ll see below. Whatever happens, you get free feedback from sharp-eyed professionals who care deeply about your work, enough to work with it.

Thank you for your recent submission to CALYX. We're happy to let you know that "St. Elmo's Fire" was among the small group of submissions held for final consideration by our editorial collective. While our editors ultimately concluded that your submission was not right for us at this time, we are interested in seeing this piece again in the future. If you are amenable to the suggested changes below, please feel free to revise and resubmit to us for further consideration.

-

The following piece has been conditionally accepted for publication in the Vol. 34, no. 3 or Vol. 35, no. 1 issue of CALYX Journal: "St. Elmo's Fire". While we really appreciated your revision of "Alcoves," some of the new elements raised more questions for us, and we found ourselves more drawn to "St. Elmo's Fire."

(After receiving the above rejection of my revision, I simply submitted the new and improved piece elsewhere and got it published.)

Whether you’re facing a cold rejection (A) or an almost-acceptance (C), know that this status is not a reflection of your potential. If you receive feedback, take some time to process and reconsider the piece. If you’re stumped as to why an editor would reject your darling, consider browsing through past issues to see what kind of work made it through the same process. You can always circle back to your unpublished gem; with time, you’ll gain the objectivity needed to see what editors may have misunderstood or disliked. Then you’ll be able to make less sentimental, more effective revisions and/or produce new work to more marketable quality.

When accepted:

See what I did there? ‘If rejected’ and ‘When accepted’? While rejection is part of the submissions process no matter the objective quality of your submission, it’s important to keep in mind that there is a place for your work. An acceptance means that you’ve not only crafted something attention-grabbing and desirable; you’ve combed through the endless outlets of the literary world and found a perfect fit for your piece. When you find that perfect fit:

1. Accept the acceptance. Reply to the editor with whatever followup information they ask, or simply to confirm that you grant them permission to publish. You may need to sign a contract, confirm your author bio (if you tweaked your author bio to fit the “old pro/diamond in the rough” rule during submission, feel free to send your actual author bio now), and/or send a headshot. Once the magazine’s production team makes a proof of the issue, the editors may ask you to review and confirm that there are no mistakes. If there are typos or formatting errors, let them know. They want a proper, clean issue, same as you. What you shouldn’t do, however, is critique the aesthetic or request to make last-minute revisions.

If by the time of your acceptance from Magazine A you’re still waiting to hear back from your goal publication, Magazine B, you can send a polite notice to Magazine B that your work has been accepted elsewhere and that you’d like to know if Magazine B is still interested. Magazine B may not respond at all, or they may move your submission to the top of the queue because it’s been marked by another publisher as desirable. 

2. Once you have written confirmation from the magazine that they’re going to publish your work, you can withdraw your submission from other places. If you submitted via an online portal or Submittable, you can easily select ‘Withdraw,’ troubleshoot for withdrawal, or send a message to the editorial team. If you submitted via email, you can reply to your original query with the news (maintaining a tracker and email folders will come in handy as you revisit past correspondences).

3. Upon publication, spread the word! Add a citation and a link to the magazine on your writerly resume. Post on your socials. If you have a website, begin a list of publications on your “About” page, which could become your homepage so that visitors can immediately see and find your work (here’s what that might look like).

4. If you have the time, review the other pieces that are getting published alongside yours. This bit of research will help you better understand the editors’ taste and your personal brand.

5. It goes without saying, so I’ll type it: keep writing and submitting!

Takeaways:

Hopefully you’re feeling a little more capable and confident in your submission process. By using a positive and intentional mindset; a doable system of submitting and tracking; and a social network for workshopping, accountability, and inspiration, you can turn magazine submission from a dreadful chore to a sustainable and empowering part of your writing practice that allows you to meet your artistic goals. Magazine submission is a numbers game, but it’s also a matter of taking a chance–not the editors taking a chance on you, but rather you ponying up the willpower and courage to take a chance on yourself.

Magazine submission isn’t hard. It’s just hard work. Sending your work is not impossible or beyond your reach. It’s not even that bad once you set your mind to it. But it does require that initial effort; it does behoove you to organize yourself; and it does–I promise–pay off.

Resources

Magazine Submission slides

Submissions Tracker

Sample Tracker 

Submittable how-to

Formatting short stories