I’ve been submitting to lit mags since I was seventeen. Earlier, even, if you count my high school’s literary journal.
But let me reiterate: I was seventeen. I didn’t know a whole lot about the publishing world. I made mistakes—simple ones that I could’ve avoided if I’d asked myself a few simple questions before submitting my short stories and flash fiction for publication to anyone and everyone found on The (Submission) Grinder. Luckily for you, I have learned from these experiences and have perfected my submission process. You can, too, and these four questions provide a neat shortcut!
Some of these questions will apply to some writerly situations more than others, but I’ve tried my best to give advice that any writer could follow.
Best of luck! Our fingers are crossed for you!
Question #1: Is this piece ready for submission?
This may sound obvious, but it pays to stop and think whether the piece is really ready to be sent out to the world. Of course, anthologies may work with you on edits, but you don’t want to send them anything less than publishable material if you can help it.
If you’re not interested in sending—or can’t send—your piece to an editor, you should still take a few quick steps to make sure your piece is as tight as you can get it.
- Ask a writer friend to read it over
- Run the story through a program like Hemingway App or Grammarly
- If nothing else, turn on your word processor’s spell check
Put yourself in the publisher or agent’s shoes: if it came down to accepting one piece that needs some work or another piece that is more or less ready to go, which one would you choose?
Question #2: Have they accepted work like mine before?
Regardless of whether you’re sending your work to a lit mag, an anthology, a small press, or an agent, you should investigate whether your piece would actually fit what they’re looking for. It pays to do the legwork and research their back catalog to see if they accept work like yours. That way, you’re not wasting your time or their time—and you’ll be more likely to get accepted if you confirm you wrote what they’re looking for!
If you’re indie publishing, you’re not exempt from asking yourself this question! Have you worked out what the best way to categorize the piece would be to maximize the chances of readers finding it in searches? Do you know the sub-sub-sub-genre and the tropes at play? When or if you submit your books to BookTokkers, Bookstagrammers, and bloggers, would you know which of them would be more likely to devour your book?
Question #3: Can I submit simultaneously?
If you’ve never submitted anywhere before, you may not think to look for this in the submission guidelines, or it may sound a little strange. Simultaneous submissions just mean submitting the same piece to different lit mags or anthologies at the same time. The benefit to this is that you can send out the story several times in one day and learn within a month or two whether you’ve been accepted to any of them instead of waiting for an email, getting rejected, then sending it out again, then waiting…
Now, if it’s been a dream of yours to submit to a particular agent, lit mag, or anthology and they don’t allow simultaneous submissions, then you may decide it’s worth the wait. But that’s a decision you’ve got to actively make!
Question #4: What am I allowed to do with my work after it’s published?
It’s a great feeling to be extended a contract. You might imagine yourself digitally signing that PDF almost as soon as you open up the submission guidelines. But—and this should go without saying—read those submission guidelines very carefully to see what kinds of rights you’ll be asked to give up when/if you’re accepted.
Why? I don’t plan to use this piece for anything after it’s accepted!
Oh, you don’t have any plans now, but trust me when I say that can change.
Let’s say you have a short story about a woman visiting her husband on Mars. It gets accepted for publication in a literary magazine, and you blithely sign the contract as soon as it hits your inbox. A few months later, the Muse whispers in your ear, and suddenly you’ve got a full-fledged sci-fi novel on your hands with your heroine busting her husband out of the penal colony Mars, and your short story would make the perfect first chapter. You’re thrilled, but a quick look at your contract tells you that they have basically all the rights to the story. You can’t reuse your own story without the possibility of running into legal trouble, and you’ll have to do a total rewrite.
The Muse is not always so generous, though. So let’s instead imagine that, after submitting that same short story to a lit mag, you stumble upon a call for submissions. An anthology is looking for stories taking place on any other planet but ours, and they’re willing to pay you a couple hundred bucks. Woo-hoo! But if that first contract forbids you from publishing it elsewhere, your hands are tied.
Moral of both of those hypotheticals? Read your submission guidelines!
