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Fiction & the Real World - Publication
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 13
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There are a number of strategies for submitting work. As a beginning writer, it is sometimes worthwhile to find one or two relatively modest publications to pursue in order to build a publication history. Often, your school or program will have a publication of this sort. The Division of Continuing Education publishes Midnight Oil, an arts journal specifically for adult and continuing education students. Emerson's undergraduate Writing Literature and Publishing program publishes The Emerson Review and Gangsters in Concrete, and the graduate program publishes The Beacon Street Review. All of these provide excellent opportunities to build modest publication histories that might get your stories second looks at other magazines.
Ideally, you should submit work to magazines one at a time. In practice, for a writer who is relatively unknown, it could take forever to get published this way. I'd estimate that I have to send a story or poem to between ten and twenty magazines before it gets accepted, and the average response time is about three months. If I submitted serially, it would take up to five years to get a piece published. If I have a work that I think is really well written, I might start out submitting it one by one to top-tier magazines to start with, just in case I can place it somewhere great. After that, then I generally send it out to three or four places at the same time, starting with more well respected magazines and working down to smaller, less well-known journals. I get a sense of how good the writing is by the level at which it gets taken.
Multiple submissions can be a touchy subject with editors. Some places do not accept them, and you should respect these policies. In any case, you should clearly state in your cover letter that the work has been submitted to other magazines. Keep careful track of where you send multiple submissions, also, so that when a piece is accepted, you can contact the other magazines and withdraw the story from consideration. Often with the withdrawal notices, I will send along another piece if I have it available, asking that the new story be considered instead.
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