The literary journal submission strategy that doubled my acceptance rate. A numbers based approach can make submitting more practical and less painful.
I have a rule for myself to always have *something* in the hopper of outgoing submissions. I find it takes some of the sting out of an individual rejection if I have many more irons in the fire.
I also find that it's helpful to volunteer as a reader for a journal, because then you can see how the decisions aren't (usually) personal... they're about timing, fit, number of poems already accepted (maybe in the same theme even), etc etc. Once you see for yourself how the decisions are made, it's slightly easier not to feel personally rejected when the poems aren't placed.
Thank you so much for this Radha! Extremely pertinent and timely advice for someone like me who has been "thinking of submitting" for the past 4 months but hasn't yet taken the plunge! :)
Radha, it's always an uplift to find one of your posts in my inbox. This one is particularly inspiring. I don't have any short pieces - prose or poetry - out on submission right now, as I work on a book-length project. However, when that project is with my next reader, I'll be looking at sending out a number of pieces. Thanks, also, for the link to Kelli Russell Agodon's piece - great food for thought.
Not only do I appreciate the direction given in this post, I so appreciate the honest tone. I don't write poetry but am currently piling up rejections for a short creative nonfiction piece and this gives me insight and inspiration. Thank you for your wisdom.
I have hit that low. I stopped actively sending work out for years. Are the results worth the trouble? the hassle! the angst! the reading fees! About five years ago I started sending work out seriously again. It was because I put together a manuscript of poems. The nucleus of the manuscript was published poems. I imagined that would be enough for a manuscript. It wasn't. About 2/3 of the book I put together was unpublished. Most of the unpublished poems I had sent out at one time or another. I still liked them. So I started sending the poems out again.
The strategies I developed are very similar to yours. You can't control a lot of things. You can't control what other people do. You can control what you do (not how you feel, but what do). Thus I have adopted this slogan: #keepyournumbersup
I can set a goal for how many places I send to. Rejection, acceptance, any kind of response at all -- these aren't things I have control over. Like you, Radha, I make sure a batch of poems is out to more than one place at all times. I send out poems I like. What happens after that is not up to me. Worrying and wondering are not good uses of energy. If I have energy for wondering why Super Big Review (imaginary magazine) is taking eleven months, I have energy to send that batch of poems somewhere else.
But the main thing that got me back into regular "submitting" (a word I avoid using) is the poems themselves. See last paragraph: I like them. I liked writing them, but I also like reading them. I read a lot of other people's poems -- and when I turn to my own poems I don't feel I have to forgive anything. My poems work for this frequent reader of poetry. I could just leave them in the notebooks. I could just post them on my (seldom visited) blog. But I send them out because I want them to be among their fellows, their kin, other poems of the world.
In the five years since I put the manuscript together almost all of the poems have now appeared in some zine or other. No publisher as yet has been interested in the whole collection. I will continue to send it out until I run out places to send it. Then maybe I'll upload the file to Lulu or some other print on demand service and go back to bed.
Very helpful and timely for me. I was just confronting these exact issues yesterday as I perused several different journals’ submission call, journals that an experienced poet who knows my work very well suggested I submit too! And yet, I felt that old quandary and the “over thinking” you describe so well. I especially like your Power of Threes approach and intend to implement it this week. Thank you!
I have a rule for myself to always have *something* in the hopper of outgoing submissions. I find it takes some of the sting out of an individual rejection if I have many more irons in the fire.
I also find that it's helpful to volunteer as a reader for a journal, because then you can see how the decisions aren't (usually) personal... they're about timing, fit, number of poems already accepted (maybe in the same theme even), etc etc. Once you see for yourself how the decisions are made, it's slightly easier not to feel personally rejected when the poems aren't placed.
Interesting. I also appreciate Erica Minton Reid's comments about being a reader—I've always wondered about the timing of submissions.
Thank you so much for this Radha! Extremely pertinent and timely advice for someone like me who has been "thinking of submitting" for the past 4 months but hasn't yet taken the plunge! :)
Thank you for sharing this. I found your article through Becky's Lit Mag News Roundup, btw.
Radha, it's always an uplift to find one of your posts in my inbox. This one is particularly inspiring. I don't have any short pieces - prose or poetry - out on submission right now, as I work on a book-length project. However, when that project is with my next reader, I'll be looking at sending out a number of pieces. Thanks, also, for the link to Kelli Russell Agodon's piece - great food for thought.
Not only do I appreciate the direction given in this post, I so appreciate the honest tone. I don't write poetry but am currently piling up rejections for a short creative nonfiction piece and this gives me insight and inspiration. Thank you for your wisdom.
I have hit that low. I stopped actively sending work out for years. Are the results worth the trouble? the hassle! the angst! the reading fees! About five years ago I started sending work out seriously again. It was because I put together a manuscript of poems. The nucleus of the manuscript was published poems. I imagined that would be enough for a manuscript. It wasn't. About 2/3 of the book I put together was unpublished. Most of the unpublished poems I had sent out at one time or another. I still liked them. So I started sending the poems out again.
The strategies I developed are very similar to yours. You can't control a lot of things. You can't control what other people do. You can control what you do (not how you feel, but what do). Thus I have adopted this slogan: #keepyournumbersup
I can set a goal for how many places I send to. Rejection, acceptance, any kind of response at all -- these aren't things I have control over. Like you, Radha, I make sure a batch of poems is out to more than one place at all times. I send out poems I like. What happens after that is not up to me. Worrying and wondering are not good uses of energy. If I have energy for wondering why Super Big Review (imaginary magazine) is taking eleven months, I have energy to send that batch of poems somewhere else.
But the main thing that got me back into regular "submitting" (a word I avoid using) is the poems themselves. See last paragraph: I like them. I liked writing them, but I also like reading them. I read a lot of other people's poems -- and when I turn to my own poems I don't feel I have to forgive anything. My poems work for this frequent reader of poetry. I could just leave them in the notebooks. I could just post them on my (seldom visited) blog. But I send them out because I want them to be among their fellows, their kin, other poems of the world.
In the five years since I put the manuscript together almost all of the poems have now appeared in some zine or other. No publisher as yet has been interested in the whole collection. I will continue to send it out until I run out places to send it. Then maybe I'll upload the file to Lulu or some other print on demand service and go back to bed.
Very helpful and timely for me. I was just confronting these exact issues yesterday as I perused several different journals’ submission call, journals that an experienced poet who knows my work very well suggested I submit too! And yet, I felt that old quandary and the “over thinking” you describe so well. I especially like your Power of Threes approach and intend to implement it this week. Thank you!