I had a lot of questions last week in workshop about the submissions process.  It’s tough to talk about submissions in the last five minutes of a class, so I put together a little primer and emailed it to everyone. Now I’m reprinting it here.  I’m not the world’s authority on literary submissions; I’m just handing over some of my experience.  I think even if you’re not a writer — if you’re an actor, business professional, cook, musician, or drummer — you might be surprised to find some of this sounding strangely familiar.  After all, when are we not submitting some piece of ourselves to someone’s judgment?

Some notes on submissions:

1) There’s no harm in sending your work ANYWHERE. Remember the last line of Ralph Lombreglia’s story “Men Under Water”: “Why shouldn’t it be me?” So: Why shouldn’t the New Yorker or Esquire print your story? By the same token, you need to toughen yourself against rejection. You CANNOT TAKE IT PERSONALLY, and you cannot let it stop you from sending your work elsewhere.

2) Read the submission guidelines for EACH publication/website/contest. Every single one is different. Some like paper clips, some don’t — it sounds crazy, but you need to take them seriously. Why let such a careless mistake take you out of the running immediately? And yes, it will sometimes seem arbitrary, these guidelines, but that’s how it is. Consider their position: A literary magazine/website is often run by a tiny staff (sometimes just one or two people), and even the smallest one may get more submissions than they can reasonably handle. One of the ways they weed out the non-serious contenders is by establishing guidelines. Don’t be that careless person who is clearly just sending their stuff everywhere with no regard for who might be reading it.

3) Online publication is no longer second-best. Believe me, that used to be the case — no one wanted to be published online. Now, though, there are some really terrific online literary journals for mainstream fiction, sci-fi, crime, you name it. More and more traditional, print-based literary journals are now putting their work online, thus erasing that already-faint line between “online” and “legitimate.” And, frankly, I now wish ALL my stories had been published online. Print is terrific, and there’s nothing like the first time you see your name and your story in a real, live literary journal. But it’s also nice to be able to point your friends and family (and Facebook pals, and Twitter followers) to a website, where they can all actually read your story.

4) The matrix I’ve attached is relatively up-to-date, but not as good as it could be. If you see a journal there that you’d like to submit to, please double-check it online — the name of the journal (seriously, they do change sometimes), the contact person for fiction submissions, the open-submission periods (college-based publications tend not to accept submissions during summer and winter breaks), and (of course!) the submission guidelines. I encourage you to make your own matrix, in whatever format works best for you.

5) If a publication seems snippy about simultaneous submissions, consider it very carefully. If you submitted there and then had to tell them your story had been accepted elsewhere, would it crush you to have them blackball you? If yes, then go ahead and submit only there first, THEN go to places that have no such policy. If no, then go ahead and submit to as many places at once as you like. My rule, when I’m sending out stories, is to send to 10-20 places at a time. This is high for most people, but I’m a fairly aggressive submitter. In 14 years of submitting my work, it’s come back to bite me only once.

6) Did I mention there will be rejection? I said just now I’ve been submitting for 14 years. But know this: I have not sent out submissions every one of those 14 years. Why? Because in the early days, I would send something out, get 3 or 4 rejections back, and then sulk about it, refusing to send anywhere for a year. NO ONE WAS RECOGNIZING MY GENIUS!!! I’m telling you this, and making fun of myself, in the hopes that you will not take this approach. It really does not get you anything except more bitterness and self-loathing. And you’re writers, so you may already have plenty of those things in stock. I think it was maybe 10 years ago that I finally developed a good attitude about it. I just decided: One comes back, another goes out. In other words, for every rejection I get, I send that story out to a new place. It’s a business for them, it should be one for me as well. I still got down every now and then, but without that attitude adjustment, I’d have quit long before anything positive happened, and I was no longer willing to accept that outcome. I didn’t get my first acceptance until 5 years after that, by which time I’d amassed a nice manila envelope of 65 rejection slips.

7) Recognize there are degrees of rejection. If you get a form letter, that’s a straight rejection. Form letter with actual signature is maybe a little better. Form letter with handwritten message (“Came close here; try us again!”) is honest-to-God encouragement. Personalized note with details (“We felt the relationship between the woman and her sister was underdeveloped, and the resolution underwhelming”) is GOLD. For real. It sounds crazy, but these last two situations are a publication ASKING YOU TO SEND THEM MORE OF YOUR WORK. In other words, even though they’re passing on it this time, there’s something about your work that they liked enough to let you know. DO NOT PASS THESE OPPORTUNITIES BY. They are precious and rare.

We will talk about these things more on Monday, including the mechanics of submission, but I wanted to give you my basic thoughts in writing, so that you can refer back to them later.