So much has changed since I first started sending my work out two decades ago. Publishers are more open to simultaneous submissions, and I seek out (rather than avoid) online publications. But the biggest shift has been the number of pieces I get accepted each year. Take a look.
| Total Acceptances | Years |
| 0-2 | 2001-2006, 2009-2012, 2017-2018 |
| 3-5 | 2015, 2016 |
| 10 | 2007 |
| 16 | 2019 (12%) |
| 38 | 2020 (20%) |
There are three turns I attribute this change to: 1) I suspect I’m a better writer than I was 20 years ago; 2) submitting work is no longer a heavy emotional load; 3) I have a system for submissions that I can maintain even as a working parent.
First, I’ll briefly say that it’s worth it to continually invest in our craft. To read deeply and broadly. To study form and contemporary ruptures of form. May we all grow in our work. It’s the other two turns that I’m going to unpack a bit here, in hopes that maybe there’s something that I’ve managed to sort out that might be useful to you.
In order for me to let go of the emotional load of sending out work, I asked myself a series of questions (and answered them):
What do I believe?
- I believe my writing is worth reading. I’m a craftful poet who seeks and incorporates feedback into her writing. I strive to grow as a writer, and I’m proud of the work I produce.
- Rejection is about the work, not about me. For me, getting rejected by publishers is akin to getting rejected by grad programs. When my work is declined, I take it to mean that that particular submission isn’t a fit for the cohort of work the editors were building at that time.
What do I want?
- Dissemination. Like Jose Marti, I ultimately want to echar mis versos del alma. It is more important to me that my poems get read widely than it is that they get read by folks who pay for a subscription to the New Yorker.
- Online access. I used to seek out print-only publications, but once I figured out that I wanted my poems read, this changed. Seeking out digital publications is also my way of supporting venues with a great vision but perhaps a smaller budget or shorter reach.
- Publication credits. I’ve chosen not to self-publish my work because I want to be able to use my publications to increase my access to the professional field of writing. I don’t have a terminal degree in creative writing, which means that when it comes to getting fellowships, teaching gigs, and qualifying for book publication, I need those credits to speak as a form of peer-review.
What will I invest in order to get my work published? A reasonable amount of well-spent time. Very little money.
Where are my boundaries?
- No guilt, no pressure. I know that if I feel coerced or pressured or guilted into submitting my work, I absolutely will not do it. This means I don’t follow a submission schedule or use alarms. I submit in a rhythm that matches me as a writer. When I am generating a bunch of new material, I rarely send out anything. When I’m in a fallow period, I revise, read, rest–and submit. The beginning of this year was prolific for me–I drafted about 9 new poems in six weeks. Then life happened. My husband had surgery, my daughter broke her arm, I pulled a muscle in my back. Hello tinkering and resting. Yesterday, I started submitting again. This is a way of being a writer that works for me.
- Gather venues passively. Facebook groups and newsletters have replaced scouring Poets & Writers for calls. When I see calls that I think I might have work for, I save them. I drop links in one of four places (Facebook’s “saved” area, Submittable’s saved drafts, my email drafts folder, my calendar), and leave them. I don’t think deeply about this. A call gets an “absolutely” and a calendar item, a “maybe” and a save, or a “nope” and a skip.
- Determine criteria for submission. The more of these a journal has, the more likely I am to submit. I seek out journals run by women or other underrepresented folk and journals whose editors have previously responded to me warmly (with rejection or acceptance).
- No/low fee
- A clean aesthetic
- Simple guidelines
- Resonant writing by other writers
- Simultaneous submissions
- Submittable or email for submissions
- A themed call
- Determine the no-go list. In general, it’s the opposite of the list above. If I wouldn’t be delighted to have my work in a publication, I don’t submit there. I rarely pay submission fees or use unfamiliar submissions managers. I can’t stand pedantic guidelines that require me to reformat my work (I use a common font and standard margins) and I think refusing to consider simultaneous submissions is elitist. However, I will break my own rules for something I’m excited about (e.g., paying $25 to submit to a contest with a judge whose work I love).
Even with this paradigm shift, I still needed a specific, automated submission process. Here’s what I worked out.
Submit in (BIG) batches. While I will submit a targeted piece based on a deadline or the emotive pull, the majority of my submissions happen when I have set aside several hours to follow this process.
- Move all calls to draft on submittable or in email. I open all the Facebook links and trace them down to the “save draft” form in Submittable or copy and paste submission guidelines into the body of an email draft (for calls that require email responses). This is all I do on some days.
- Say no or send. I love the “say no” part of this step. I go into my drafts folder on Submittable, and, starting from the most pressing deadline, open a set of calls in various tabs on the same browser. And then, one by one, I evaluate both the submission guidelines and the journal making the call. If it doesn’t suit, I delete it. If it does, I submit the poem set immediately. Either way, it’s out of my drafts folder and off of my mind. Once I’ve cleared submittable for the present month or so, I go to my email drafts and repeat. In all cases, I read the submission guidelines carefully follow them if I decide to submit.
- Address exceptions & manuscript submissions. The submissions I put on my calendar usually need a little more attention. They are contest, fellowship or grant entries, manuscript submissions or themed calls that I may want to write toward (instead of sending already written work). They take targeted attention and I treat them as projects in my workday. If I decide that I don’t have it in me for a specific call, I push the calendar item out a year to try again.
Keep submission sets organized. I can “say no or send” quickly because my folders look something like this:
- Archive. Published poems (saved with publisher in parentheses). Poems I don’t intend to publish, and those I will mine for lines later.
- Drafts. I will occasionally peek here for a themed call and revise accordingly.
- Active poems. I have two folders of active poems: one for poems written in the current year, and one for older poems that I still want in circulation. In each of these folders I have subfolders for micro-poems, 1-page, 2-page, and 3+ page poems. This helps me pull work that meets submission criteria without opening every single file.
- Poem sets. I build generic poem sets to have on hand. To do this, I consider the length of the poems, the page count of the set, and the content of the poems. I start by building a large, themed set such as “poems about place” with a file name like this: 6 poems about place (10 pages). 6 poems/10 pages tend to be the biggest sets requested by a journal. 5 poems and 3 poems are common. Many places want only one-page poems. So let’s take my sample set. I duplicate and reduce it to create variations like this: 5 poems about place (8 pages), 3 poems about place (6 pages), 3 one-page poems about place (3 pages). This is relatively easy to set up and only gets messy once the acceptances come (see below). Whenever I want a clean start, I create a new folder for my submission packets and dump the old one in an archive.
- Cover letter. I keep an updated bio of 100 words or less on my website for easy cut and paste into cover letters. I also set up the cover letter template in Submittable that prepopulates and requires only a little tailoring for most submissions.
Track submissions. When I hear back from journals, I do five things:
- Withdraw accepted poems from simultaneous submissions (acceptances only)
- Update my packets by removing accepted poems from them and renaming the files (acceptances only)
- Update my website list of my publications (acceptances only)
- Update the universal submissions in Submittable (email acceptances and rejections)
- Update my spreadsheet with notes (acceptances and rejections)
Of course, you will find your own method for submitting work. Hopefully something in here makes the lift a little lighter for you.
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