5 Steps to Submitting Your Fiction to Magazines

Photo By Andy Castro
Photo By Andy Castro

You’ve spent months writing drafts of a short story.  You’ve spent even more time fine tuning your work.  Now your tale is ready to be submitted to magazines, but you’re not sure where to send it or how to go about sending it.  Part of you wants to hand it over to your friend Dave who has an online journal, but another part of you dreams of seeing your words in The New Yorker.  What do you do?

For over ten years I wrote every day.  I would revise a short story until I felt it was perfect and then it would sit in a file on the back of my hard drive.   The only people who would ever read my stories were friends and grad-school workshop peers.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to publish my work.  I just didn’t know how to go about submitting.

Then, about two years ago, my friend Mittie Roger and I worked out a submission system.  Every Sunday we’d meet and submit our work together.  We’d review literary magazines, help each other with cover letters, and offer each other moral support.  Writing is a lonely profession and I think it’s good to work with someone else whenever the task allows it.  Plus, we’ve been editing each other’s work and submitting for long enough that I feel a sense of accomplishment when she gets published and I think she feels the same way when I have success.

Submitting a piece of fiction can be a daunting task.  There are over 1,700 places online and offline that boast publishing fiction.  Figuring out the best place for your short story requires research, good organization skills, and a positive attitude.  The following is our list of five steps for submitting:

Research:  You can find lists of magazines on websites like Poets & Writers or Newpages.com.  After a quick browse you’ll notice every literary magazine has a different slant on what they publish.  Some specialize in genre stories.  Others publish experimental fiction.  Most are looking for straight literary fiction, or what I like to think of as the ‘Iowa Workshop Story.’  How do you find out which type of writing the magazine likes?  First, you can check their submission guidelines.  Almost every literary magazine I’ve ever looked up has guidelines on their website clearly marked.  Second, you can read the magazine.  I know Zoetrope is a great place for me to submit my work because I read the magazine and see similarities between the published stories and my work.

Once you’ve found a few magazines that seem to be likely candidates you need to find out whether publishing your work with them is worth your while.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  You can look up their circulation online.  You can also look up their ranking according to the Pushcart Prize Ranking.  According to circulation and quality ranking I divide literary magazines into three categories.   Tier one include magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Paris Review.  The second tier includes high quality magazines that don’t have the same name recognition as the first, but are still the best national literary magazines.  These include publishers like Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, and many others.  My third tier includes all literary magazines with good circulation online or offline who don’t have the same prestige as the first two categories.

Photo By Andy Castro
Photo By Andy Castro

Guidelines:  When I have a story ready for publication I try to find five literary magazines to submit it to.  I choose one from the top tier, two from the second tier, and two from the third tier.  Once I’ve got it in my mind which one’s I’m pursing I go over each of their submission guidelines.  I check their maximum word count, line spacing, cover letter specifications, simultaneous submission specifications, reading periods, etc.  With most magazines receiving more than a thousand submissions per month you don’t want to give an editor an excuse to toss your story aside before they’ve read the first line.

If they list 2,000 words as their maximum word count, I don’t try to send them a 2,001 word piece.  If they say they don’t except simultaneous submission, I usually mark them off my list.  It can take a literary magazine anywhere from three months to over a year to get back to you and I don’t like tying up a story for that long with one publisher.  Most importantly I check their reading period.  If you mail in your work or submit it online outside their specific reading period, they will never read your story.

If any of my chosen literary magazines don’t work for a particular story, I go back to step one and start researching again.

Database:  It’s a good idea to set up a database where you can save all your submission information.  While more and more magazines are using Submittable.com there are still many who require you to submit by mail or through a different service.  In my database I store the name of the magazine, the name of submitted story, date of submission, ULR of the magazine’s online submission manager and password, and I have a box where I write “Rejected” or “Accepted.”  I have this database saved on Google Drive so I can easily access the information from any computer where ever I am in the world.

Cover Letter:  Most websites will tell you to write your cover letter so it includes the name of the story, the word count, why it is right for the magazine, and your credentials / bio information.  For a long time I followed this very closely and made sure my cover letters where concise and only included prevalent information.  (Cover letters differ from query letters.)  Then one Sunday Mittie and I were sitting in my kitchen drinking beer (well I was) and submitting our work when I decided to try something different.  Instead of the classic cover letter I sent a personal letter to the editor which included some humor.  Less than a month later the magazine contacted me about publication. So, my new way of submitting now includes a personal letter to the editor written on the spot directly to them.  It’s more time consuming, but I figure if they are going to spend the time to read my submission the least I can do is write to them personally.

Photo By Andy Castro
Photo By Andy Castro

Rejection:  In Steven King’s book On Writing he talks about having this big nail above this desk.  Every time he would receive a rejection letter in the mail he’d shove it onto the nail with the other ones.  The letters would sit there, starring him in the face, while he typed up his next story.  I don’t think I could ever do it like Mr. King.  I deal so badly with rejection that when I receive a rejection letter in my inbox I don’t add it to my database for weeks because I can’t handle typing it in there.  (There’s one from Arcadia Magazine sitting in my inbox right now.)   Sometimes I spend five or more years revising a story before I think of it as complete and ready to submit. So, getting a form letter rejecting my work is never easy.  Still, we all know it’s going to happen and it’s going to happen hundreds of times.  It doesn’t mean our work isn’t good.  It just means it wasn’t right for that particular magazine or editor.

Since Mittie and I have started using this system she has been published in several literary magazines and she took second place in the 2012 Richard Bausch Contest.  One of her short stories will soon be published in the anthology, The Best of Our Stories: Volume 4.  And recently a publisher approached her about putting out some of her work in a short story collection.  I’ve found some success as well.  One of my short stories was published in the 2012 anthology, Sol English Writing in Mexico.  Another will soon be published in an anthology, Spirits of St. Louis: Missouri Ghost Stories.  I also found three literary magazines interested in publishing my work and one audio magazine that published an audio version of a story that was picked up by Ether Books.  I still haven’t found the elusive book deal for my short story collection, but I’m hoping that once I publish half the stories in my collection  in known magazines that I will be able to find a publisher or literary agent interested in my work.

Submitting stories to magazines is a long process that doesn’t present results very quickly.  My best advice is that you do it with a friend.

Photo by Debra Biggie Holloran
Photo by Debra Biggie Holloran

Nathan Feuerberg writes short stories, novels, and plays. He received a BA from The American University of Rome, an MSc in Creative Writing from The University of Edinburgh, and an MFA from The University of New Orleans. His fiction has appeared in a variety of literary journals such as Rio Grande Review, SOL Literary Magazine, and 34th Parallel.  His plays have been preformed in England, France, and Italy. Currently, he is working on a short story collection entitled Snap. He resides in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

www.sanmiguelwritersconference.org

 

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