The Submission Process
02.04.2009So, like all things, submissions have a process. I’ve mentioned that I have one in prior posts but I don’t think I’ve ever gone into detail about it before. For those who are interested in reading about how the sausage is made, this is a post for you. For those who don’t give a shit… well… why the fuck are you reading this anyway, yeah?
The first step is identifying the publications at which you already have submissions out at. Most don’t accept simultaneous submissions so make sure you don’t submit until you receive the most often piece of correspondence you ever will from the professional publishing world: the rejection letter.
But assuming you have been keeping track (I, myself, keep a very nice little spread sheet), then all you need to do is figure out what stories are not currently out and then what magazines aren’t sitting on a submission of yours.
The obvious assumption of this post is that you’ve written more than one story that you hope to have published. If you’ve only got one, then prepare yourself for a long and tedious process that will undoubtedly end in much pain. My oldest story as part of this project has six rejections over a three-and-a-half year period while my most rejected piece has eleven rejections in the three years its been on the submission circuit.
Why?
Well, most publications won’t consider anything while they’ve already got something of yours in hand. And they won’t consider anything that’s already out at another magazine. The latter is called a “simultaneous submission.” And lastly, they generally don’t consider rewrites. So if you have more than one story circulating, you hopefully have a story at every publication at any one time. Given this, you need to wait until a story at one place is returned before you send another out. With this rotation, I find I prioritize the stories I like most at the moment over the older ones that don’t necessarily reflect my style anymore. Or at least the one’s that haven’t been through a recent revision.
That said, all of my stories are in some part of a revision process. It’s either a rewrite because I can’t stand the language it was originally written in (and I write all of mine in English but man… does it take on different forms as you become more experienced) or it needs a line edit.
Anyway… each story should hopefully be out at a publication but because of (my) revision process, sometimes some get delayed while others are sent ahead of them. There is also an experimental thing where some publications react better to one story you wrote over another and so a story that you think they might like takes priority over a story that you do.
It’s all very complicated. Like learning craps for the first time. But you see why I’m saying it’s easier to deal with when more than one story is being sent out. With one story, you’re left with one thing to obsess about and only one publication to send to at any one time.
But… Once I’ve decided on the publications, I sort them into ones that can be submitted to electronically and those that have to be mailed. It’s sad, but the highest paying sci-fi markets need to be mailed. This is because of economics.
Again, why?
I’ve been asked this by my non-writer friends more than anything.
It’s because most editors are above the age of twenty and still prefer to read things in hard copy. Now, they can either take the three hundred stories they’ve had submitted that month at, say, a maximum word count of 5,000 words and print it out themselves or have the submitters do it instead. When you consider that 5,000 word equals about twenty pages, this means they’re saving their own printing costs by about 6,000 pages. And that’s conservative. Some of the bigger magazines allow for submissions of up to 15,000 words.
But that same twenty pages is relatively inexpensive for the individual authors.
You think that’s unfair? Well… check out the state of genre print publications these days and you’ll understand that saving the thirty reams of paper and the seven laser printer cartridges a month adds up. And adds up to a hefty sum when you consider it as a monthly expenditure. On the other hand, I’ve mailed I don’t know how many stories, have gone through almost four reams of paper and still haven’t burnt out my first cartridge for my printer.
Even when you add the buck-fifty for domestic postage, it still makes sense of the larger publications to operate as such.
Okay. So you’ve done the division between email and mail. Most likely, the mailed stories are the ones being sent to the publication with the highest pay rates. That means that they’re being printed out along with a short cover letter, a fresh copy of the manuscript, and a self-addressed stamped envelope. All of which needs to go into another envelope large enough that the story won’t be folded.
I find that it’s best to print out each one at a time. Print the story. Print the cover letter to go with it. Print the envelope. Set it aside. Move onto the next.
Once all the printing is done, address the outer envelopes and insert the proper packages. Then truck yourself off to the nearest post office because, believe-you-me, with the paranoia of the current postal system, even if you have one of those neat stamp systems that will give you the proper postage, you can’t put that shit into your average post box if you expect it to make it to it’s destination with any relative speed or… you know, ever.
On the plus side, the post office does have automated kiosks these days. Depending upon the length of your manuscript, it’ll cost you between a buck-twenty-five and a buck-seventy-five (yet another reason to keep that word count down). Print the postage, drop it in the box, and you’re done.
Of course, that leaves the emailed submissions. In a strange way, these are the hardest. They take two forms. First are the ones that you attach to an email in the proper format (DOC, RTF, etc), the second are the ones that are submitted via an online form. Both suffer from the same problem: author insecurity. Is the attached manuscript the one you meant to attach? Is it ready to go? It is, after all, still on your computer. Why not one more look before sending it out?
Shit….
I’m not saying that taking one more look before it goes out is a bad idea but there does reach a point. The upside of hard copy submissions is that you can’t tweak them endlessly before you hit send. Digital submissions you can. And I have. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But it will get in the way of submitting.
Look… If you’re prepared to attach it to an email, just fucking send the god damned thing. Seriously. You could tweak it forever but that’s no guarantee. In fact, there are no guarantees. So just go for it already, yeah?
The biggest trick I’ve found with email submissions is just making sure that when I send the cover letter – always in the body of the email – that I update the appropriate fields.
Most places say they don’t read the cover letters and this may not be true but I take them at their word. This being the case, the only thing they want to know is the name of the story, the number of words, any relevant biographical information, and how to get a hold of you to send the correct rejection or acceptance notice should your manuscript lose this information. That being the case, you just have to remember to change the story title and word count in most cases. It’s not rocket science.
Anyway… once I’ve finally stopped my paranoia about attaching the wrong file, I finally hit send and then that’s that. Same as dropping a letter in the mail. You can try and get it out again but… well… while not a Federal crime as in the case of mail, it’s just as impossible to take back.
And then that’s it. You sit back and wait for the rejections to roll in.
I forget where I read it – and I wish I were clever enough to come up with it myself – but it’s been written that writers have two hobbies, writing and submitting. And while I change the latter part to being rejected, I still feel as though it holds true. Really, at the end of the day, one has nothing to do with the other. But you also cannot allow one to interfere with the other. A day spent thinking about submissions isn’t getting your latest story done, nor is writing in lieu of submitting going to get your stories out there any more than telling your friends about the neat new yarn you just wove.
And that’s submitting, kids. At the very least, that’s my submission process. It could be bullshit or it could be gold. I’ll let you know after I’ve been at it for ten years, yeah?