Submitting: How I Learned to Love My List
From paid platforms to a truly tailored resource
In my last post I discussed platforms for writers: Submittable, Duotrope, and Chill Subs. (Again, I’ve never used the last one, yet, but am not theoretically opposed.) On the first two I think it is safe to say I have spent a few hundred euros since 2018. Not tons, but not nothing, either.
Those platforms are well-known name brand to anyone in the writing, submitting, editing, or publishing game. Or in the case of Submittable, anyone providing related services, like classes, courses, workshops, retreats, editing, and so on. (I just realized I need to add a fourth platform to my short list - Reedsy - which I might talk about in a later post, since I am only aware of its classified ads for editorial service providers, having used it more for its typesetting and manuscript functionality.) If you’re new to the submitting game, it seems like these sites are an inescapable must. And in the case of Submittable, it is fairly ubiquitous, so you might as well get used to it and familiarize yourself with it it, if you’re getting in the global conversation as a writer. And there’s many submission calls on Submittable that are free. But you won’t find them on Submittable itself, again, because it’s basically a sales floor. They don’t put the free stuff in front.
Disclosure: I like lists in general. Ok, we continue.
I mentioned that I started my submitting list in autumn 2021 with a short list of publications that were namechecked in author bios in the back pages of Rust+Moth, a literary magazine that I adore and which is devoted to poetry. (Seriously, go check them out. I have friends who’ve published there, but I have not yet! It’s like Louise Gluck and Emily Dickinson were still alive and writing insightful verse about the world right now.) Kandala, a poet from India in one of my international writing groups, pointed me to Rust+Moth and I’ll always be grateful.
As I headed to each site as mentioned in author bios to check out other publications, an amazing thing happened. As with Rust+Moth, sometimes, but not always, but enough to make me want more (and this is a great feeling), I found writing - fresh, new writing - that resonated for me and made me feel not just seen, but also heard. My people! My tribe in the global conversation. My global conversation was not in fact necessarily found within in the pages of top-flight literary periodicals, but in smaller niches with new perspectives.
This opened up a new world. Because now, rather than slogging through some gigantic reference list of publications and wondering if my writing was “good enough” for a top 100 publication according to Duotrope (yawn - exhausting), I was now finding and reading work that made me feel like engaging. Not competing. Reading. Responding. Highlighting and bookmark for the next time. Writing by writers who are writing right now, in the living world, like me.
The chain-reaction list accumulation was working well enough. Still, it felt like my net wasn’t getting cast wide enough. In time I came across a few nonprofit newsletters - Authors Publish (Canada - they also offer fantastic free seminars), Winning Writers (Boston), and Trish Hopkinson. When they mention publications, I always go to check them out, and if I like them, I add them to my list. This is also the case for friends of mine who are active writers - Nora, Kandala, and Sandra, I am looking at you - because of course I always read what anyone I know has written. (And if it’s a book, you bet I’ll buy it and read it and probably review it on GoodReads.) If I like the journal my friends are publishing in, I add that to my list too.
This brought me to another important realization. Publications could choose me by accepting my writing? Well, in the name of civil and creative discourse, I could choose them too. It’s not like each publication sits on the top of the Mount Olympus of literature or something, staffed by the nine muses themselves. No. They each have a temperament that may or may not be suited to my creative bent. And the more publications I read and reviewed for myself, the more I came to see the truth in this. There is truly a publication for every kind of writer.
I’ll explain my method a bit now.
I use a single Google document to track all my skating around online, submissions, and more in 14 tabs (I just counted the tabs for this piece, but in general I don’t care about this number.) As you might imagine, the list started getting a little unwieldy. I just checked and I have made note of more than 300 publications since I began all this fun in 2021. I keep all the International Journals on one tab (journals to which always consider submitting), and the US Journals on another tab (won’t rule outright, but I take that particular publishing culture with a grain of salt). Each of my US and International tabs maintain columns A-Z, and importantly, if the publication has ever given me a tiered rejection, meaning they said they like my style, but that the piece I offered was not right for their conversation at this time. These notes are important because I’ll certainly return to the publication again in the future with some more nice, sparkly writing. I also make note of where they’re based, does it cost to submit, when did I last submit, and so on.
I call a third tab called Defunct or Disinteresting, which now lists about 125 publications that either folded, went on hiatus, disappeared, or are clearly not a fit for my writing, either because they traffic in a specific genre or told me no thank you enough times to make me understand they probably wouldn’t have a home for my work. I cannot tell you how great it feels for me to move a publication to the D or D list. We as writers can choose too. I wish them no ill, but I’ll never submit again. Probably. I might. I have been known to pull publications off that list and back onto my active list if I feel it’s warranted.
I track all the usual information on my list. Most importantly, when did I last check on them, and what’s the website. Here’s where I found so much unexpected fun. Clicking those links to pop in and say hi, read what they’ve been publishing, see if there is a new call for submissions or a deadline, usually makes for a very pleasant and inspiring hour or two of online reading. Way better than scrolling the NYT again, or some social media account which I tend to stay off of anyway since they’re basically a drainage ditch of global thinking. I want to read good thinking that someone carefully put into words, not sloppy thinking rendered as selfie stories.
I also keep a list of the publications that have declined my submissions, at present about 150, but dating back almost three years. I understand better now to focus my submission targets in increase my chances of joining a conversation, and especially to prioritize publications that have repeatedly accepted my work. Because the list is organized alphabetically by publication name, I can also do a quick sort to see how many times a specific publication has told me non, merci. (The Paris Review, ironically based not in Paris but in New York, has declined four times, but I keep them on my list because I love their literary focus and their superb podcast.) I know there are people who say to save all the rejections and wear them like badges of honor. Eh, not so much. I will also never keep a rejection wall of all the rejections I’ve ever gotten because I think sad energy just attracts and accumulates more sad energy. I am more an onward, reframe, next kind of writer.
A tab with my Pending Submissions helps me stay on top of my submission and specifically my simultaneous submissions. (I dismiss out of hand now as a matter of course any publication that specifies no simultaneous submissions - they obviously cannot manage their workload - or the Luddite editors who insist on paper submissions only, perhaps as a way to control their submission volume.) It also feels very good to know that right now I have 35 pending submissions. I am on track in the global discourse.
This list originally began as a list of possible agents I might approach to represent me, as suggested to me in the publishing event I attended five years ago. O the optimism of 2019! I returned to the list almost three years later to build it out in a way that worked for me. I kept the Agents tab. Another tab loosely tracks Workshops and Writing Groups that I have either done or would ike to do, and another tab tracks Fellowships. I keep a list of Contests too, and I’ll talk about that in a later post. (I realize that the whole idea of a writing contest sounds rather arcane, like Sylvia Plath or Joyce Maynard winning a summer fellowship at the editorial office of a women’s magazine in New York City.)
In a pique of inspiration a couple of years ago, I also added some qualitative tabs that I am no longer maintaining but which I still find charming: Pending Poems, Good Poems, and Content Themes, which were ways for me to get a bigger picture of where my poetry publishing was headed. Themes that I found to regularly recur in my poetry (I find this so amusing), after a survey of more than 200 poems I’ve written in the past decade:
alienation, après Dickinson, après Lydia Davis, bourgeois complaints, climate change, death, death and lies, faith, family life, feminism, Holocaust, Italy, Keats, lost love, marital discord, Mediterranean musings, on color, Oklahoma cri de cœur, pandemic, parenting, psyche, recollections, relationships, sensual, the English, the human spirit, travel, Zen musings
So now I have a sprawling and friendly list, created and managed by me for me, tailored to my desires and goals. A publications vision board that guides my current reading as well as my writing submissions. Free and easy to use. It didn’t make itself overnight, and it took a couple of years to evolve into the rich resource that it is today for me. But I am so glad I got my hands dirty to own my own process. It’s made all the difference in my happiness in joining conversations, rather than struggling with disappointment in a perceived competition.
Next topics: reaching goals and making new goals, submitting to contests, and sharing my experience with other writers.