[This article was originally published in the 2017 anthology Jot That Down: Encouraging Essays for New Writers, edited by Andy Rogers of Andy Rogers Books, and published by Caffeinated Press. Caffeinated Press has since gone out of business and all rights reverted to the creators, so I am republishing the essay here.]
One In A Thousand, One Of A Thousand: Finding A Place in Literary Journals
By John Winkelman
Back in 1993 I landed my dream job at a big independent bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After six years of college I had finally graduated and was working as a prep cook, and feeling somewhat at loose ends. The bookstore job felt like a return home. I was surrounded by creative readers who themselves were not ready to make the transition to the real world—whatever that was. This was back in the days before Amazon, when books were discovered by reading other books, and rare works by favorite authors were hard to come by, and sometimes existed as little more than rumor.
On the rare occasion when a new collection of short fiction or poetry by Jim Harrison or Denise Levertov or Michael Swanwick hit the shelves, I would become a hermit for a weekend and devour the work cover to cover. But at the end I was always left with the feeling I was standing just outside the door of a club full of the most interesting people in the world. These collections were glimpses, and sometimes years out of date, with years to wait until the next one.
After some time I began to notice the notes accompanying the works in the collections; lists of the venues where the stories, essays and poems had originally been printed. These were publications with powerful and compelling titles like Salmagundi and The Paris Review, Omni and Zyzzyva, Glimmer Train and Azimov’s.
These weren’t magazines—these were journals! These were publications with gravitas, worthy of respect. These were places a feckless young twenty-something might make his bones as a writer. And they were right there, on the other side of that door.
So I did what anyone would do when facing a closed door: I began shoving things through the mail slot. In hindsight, I wasn’t very professional about it. I would have an idea on Friday, spend Saturday and Sunday banging out a two thousand word lump of Lovecraftian horror, and send it off in the mail on the way to work on Monday. This was back in the days when few magazines had an online presence, and almost nobody accepted work by email. A standard submission was the work, printed double-spaced and stapled, in a large envelope which also contained a self-addressed, stamped envelope in which would be returned the publisher’s response. For me, 100% of the time it was a rejection letter. Most of them were form letters containing variations on “try again.” I think I received exactly one personalized rejection, and that magazine went out of business the next year.
Working at the bookstore, I was surrounded by people who had similar stories, though they generally had better luck than I did, mostly because they edited their work and ran it by other people before sending it out into the wild. I didn’t have time for all that. I was too busy trying to get published!
This pattern of writing and receiving rejections continued for a few years, and eventually life took me in other directions.
Fast forward to early 2015. Caffeinated Press had been in business for a few months and we were looking for a way to expand our offering. To paraphrase Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, I wanted a literary journal, and for my sins, they gave me one.
The 3288 Review started slow, as all new ventures do, but quickly ramped up as we gained presence in large online resources like Poets & Writers, Duotrope and NewPages. A handful of submissions a month quickly became a handful of submissions a day, finally leveling off at an average of 900 submissions a year—quite remarkable for a brand-new quarterly literary journal with a small regional focus. We found ourselves spending hours every day reading, voting, editing, designing, writing acceptance and rejection letters, cutting checks, and driving to the post office. Running a literary journal, it turns out, is a lot of work.
Many of our submissions came from writers who owned or worked for other literary journals. I talked to several of them and they all agreed that yes, publishing is a lot of work. The budgets are miniscule, the pay even smaller, and the time commitment crowds out all but the most important of other daily consideration. They also agreed that there are never enough people available for the work that needs to be done. Editing is mentally and emotionally demanding work, and with so little money available it can be difficult to find people to fill the necessary roles. It was only through the strict time management and sleep deprivation that they had been able to create the work they had submitted to us.
So of course I had to ask: “Is it worth it?” The answer was a unanimous “ABSOLUTELY!” Literary magazines are at the leading edge of the publishing world. Thousands of editors at thousands of venues read thousands of submissions a month, polishing and curating the work and showcasing it to the world at large. The work that crosses our desks could be the first poem a young writer has ever submitted for consideration, or the finely-tuned masterpiece of a world-class wordsmith. A volunteer editor or college intern might be the first person to read an essay which goes on to win the Pushcart Prize or a Pulitzer.
Those numbers are not an exaggeration. There are well over a thousand literary and genre magazines in the United States, and many times that number worldwide. And for each venue there are often more than a thousand submissions a year waiting to be read, out of which at most one percent will see publication. For every work by Ocean Vuong, there are a hundred worthy poems which must be turned down because of space or scheduling constraints or because they don’t quite fit the venue. For every story by James Salter, there are innumerable others which will be rejected for simple line editing errors or misspellings.
So there it is: a thousand venues per writer, and a thousand writers per venue. It is no exaggeration to say more than a million submissions are vetted in a given year. The biggest challenge to getting published is not a lack of outlets, but finding the right one, and distinguishing yourself from the crowd.
The following list contains suggestions to help writers (and artists!) fine-tune their submissions to journals and magazines. The suggestions apply to literary and genre publications, in both print and online venues.
These suggestions assume that you have already thoroughly edited your work, had someone else read it, made edits based on feedback from these beta readers, and so on. If this has not yet happened, then you are not ready to submit your work for publication.
Research before you submit.
With over a thousand literary journals out there, it is a good idea to spend some time making lists of the venues which best match your creative work. Journals come in all shapes and sizes, and conform to myriad design and editorial standards. More importantly, and more difficult to define, each journal has its own “feel”, which is the standard by which the readers and editors judge fitness of a piece for publication. Spend some time in the stacks at a library or bookstore. If you have a favorite writer, one whose writing you feel is similar to your own, find out where that person has been published. It may not be a perfect fit, but it is a good place to start. Compare what you have written to what the journals publish, and ask yourself: Is my work a good example of this sort of thing?
Read the submission guidelines.
Just as every journal has its own voice, every journal has its own list of submission guidelines. Some are quite simple, like “Please include your email address.” Some are lengthy, with a score or more of rules by which a submission must abide. While those guidelines may all look alike at first glance, it is the little differences which can direct your submission into the reject pile. For example: many journals require that your submission be in the form of a Word document or PDF which has been anonymized. This means the document should not have any personal information on it, anywhere. Not in the body of the text, not in the document header or footer, and not in the filename of the document. This is a standard enough practice that it seldom requires a second glance. On the other end, there could be a format requirement so specific that it only appears in one journal in a hundred. If the journal says “minimum 1,000 words”, and your story is 990 words, then that journal is not the right venue for your work. If you find yourself compelled to add a note saying “I know you normally don’t publish things like this, but…” then this is not the right venue for your work.
Have someone else read your work before you submit it.
Craft is one thing, but the more nebulous qualities which make a good story a great story are harder to judge. A good reader can tell you if your dialogue sounds realistic; if the narrative voice is internally consistent; if the events depicted could fit inside the timeline of the story. For poetry, workshopping can strengthen language and allow exploration of metaphors and wordplay which might not be apparent to the poet.
Read (and preferably purchase) a recent copy of any journal to which you are submitting.
The best way to determine if your work is a good fit for a magazine is to read that magazine. And the best way to support a magazine—and help ensure it remains in business to publish your work—is to give them a little money in return for some excellent writing. This may sound counter-intuitive if you place a lot of importance on being compensated for your work, but consider: a single issue likely costs less than the compensation you will receive from a paying market, and reading that magazine will help determine if it is a good fit for you. And if it isn’t a good fit for a piece you have ready to submit, then it might open doors and pathways to a future work which you can then send on, having already done your research.
Be persistent.
Rejection is inevitable and unavoidable. It is also part of the process of being published. When you receive a rejection letter, mark it off on your spreadsheet and send your work to another journal. Or wait a year and send it to the same journal again. There may be new readers and editors, and perhaps this time your poem will resonate with someone where it didn’t before. The most successful writers and artists are the ones who work at it, day in and day out. We have had poets send their work to us half a dozen times before we published them. They kept at it through a year and a half of rejection slips before the right pair of eyes saw the right poems at the right time.
Be patient.
Remember the part about journals being understaffed? Scale your expectations to months and years, not days and weeks. If a venue says they will respond within 90 days, do not expect a response until the 90th day. A good rule of thumb is to expect a response in about 150% of the time suggested in the editorial guidelines. Life happens. People have children. Interns get sick. Servers crash. For instance, in autumn 2016 we discovered that our email server had been added to a list of known sources of spam. By the time the situation was resolved, ninety days had come and gone on many of our submissions.
Also be patient with yourself. If a publication deadline looms and your piece is not yet ready to release into the wild, keep working on it. Better to wait three or six months for the next submission window than to let something go before you have polished it to perfection.
Be professional.
Don’t take rejection personally. Don’t take editorial suggestions personally. Keep careful track of your submissions, your acceptances and rejections. Realize that while writing is an art, being published is as much a business as being a publisher. I have talked to poets who keep large spreadsheets of their poetry submissions, sometimes going back fifteen or twenty years. They keep records of every interaction with every publisher who has ever read their work. At the beginning this may seem like a lot of extra effort for very little gain, but the value of being able to easily review the status and history of your collected work cannot be overstated. And in the event you are successful enough at your trade that the IRS takes notice, you will be glad for the extra time spent.
And finally:
Never, ever stop creating.