submitting to literary journals

hello friends, some people who read this blog have told me they are interested in submitting poetry or fiction to literary journals and would be interested in my advice

here is my history with submitting to literary journals: since 2006, i have sent 91 submissions to literary journals. i have been accepted 30 times by 21 journals, rejected over 50 times, currently pending on a few. the first places i got accepted were my school’s literary journals and a really low press-run place that i think accepted everybody. in late 2007 i got accepted at moria, in 2008 i got accepted at blazevox and barnwood, and then in late 2009 i got published in around 10 places, and around 10 more so far in 2010

reasons to submit or not submit to literary journals

my primary goal with publishing is to share my writing with other people. other writers may have different goals like getting credentials for their teaching career, having an impressive byline, making money, or something else. if your goals are different from mine, probably not all of my conclusions will apply to you

some people say no one actually reads literary journals and they only exist to give people publishing credits in academia. i think that is half true. most people do not read journals all the way through unless they really love and trust the specific journal. but i have found some of my favorite contemporary writers in literary journals (tao lin, andrew topel, brandon downing, sam pink), so i have a little belief in them

one thing about submitting to literary journals is that you have to wait before sharing your writing with people. if i write a poem and want to share it, i could blog it immediately. but publishing through a literary journal takes months, sometimes a year. (if you’ve posted a poem on your blog, a lot of literary journals will consider it previously published and won’t accept it)

i submit to literary journals because i think it will help me share my writing with more people who are interested in my kind of writing, but i am not fiercely confident about it. i do not rely only on literary journals to share my writing with people. below, i will explain a reason why i don’t submit all my poems to literary journals anymore

finding literary journals you like

there are a lot of literary journals. newpages has a very big list of them. there are print journals and online journals, and journals that are both. one of my friends suggested submitting to online journals because more people can access it for free; they don’t need to subscribe to a print journal. other people think print journals are more credible (if you want credentials). i do feel more satisfied when i see/hold my writing in a print journal. one time i got to see my poem in barnes and noble, via columbia poetry review (a print journal), and that felt cool also

i have used a variety of tactics to find literary journals. in 2007-08, i visited every literary journal on a newpages list of online journals and wrote down my opinion of them. i don’t recommend this method because it takes a long time and it’s very scattered. also, i don’t even consult that list of opinions anymore because my taste has changed multiple times since then

in december 2008 and january 2009, i went through all of poet’s market, a huge book, with a pen and highlighter. because i was writing political poetry and nature poetry at the time, i marked all the journals that asked for those themes, also marking payment and names i recognized. i don’t recommend this approach. it takes a long time, and when i looked up most of these journals online, i usually didn’t actually like what they published. also, as with the huge list from newpages, i haven’t even consulted that copy of poet’s market because my writing has changed since then. so it’s a lot of time invested in something that may not last you very long

in mid-late 2009 when i was writing very fragmented poems and cut-up visual poems, i found a number of journals i liked from the ‘links’ page at word for/ word, an experimental poetry journal. some other journals have ‘links’ pages, too. i recommend this approach if you can find a journal you like with a ‘links’ page. a lot of contemporary poets also have sidebars on their blogs with links to literary journals they like

in 2010 my tactic for finding literary journals has been looking where my favorite contemporary writers have published. if you look in the front or back of most poetry collections, for example, there is a list of where the poems were first published. you can also search the writer’s name online. recently, because i have been reading a lot of contemporary poetry, i recognize a lot more names and i can more quickly assess a journal’s general styles from the contributor list. i recommend this approach. it seems practical and quicker than other methods

in 2010 i’ve tried to submit to some ‘bigger’ journals, relatively speaking... for a while i only submitted to journals that have published some of my favorite writers. but lately i have also been submitting to ‘smaller’ journals if i like them. i think i have been taking literary journal submitting less seriously in general. the most important ‘principle’ for selecting journals is probably to find places you like

here are some journals i’ve been accepted by alba, blazevox, columbia poetry review, cricket online review, drupe fruits, elimae, hot metal bridge, moria, nthposition, prick of the spindle, the red ceilings, right hand pointing, sawbuck, word for/ word, and others

here are some journals i want to be accepted by action yes, alice blue, coconut, court green, eleven eleven, fence, filling station, harp & altar, h_ngm_n, the hat, isreads, jubilat, konundrum engine lit review, la petite zine, lit magazine, no tell motel, notnostrums, octopus, past simple, poetry, saltgrass, the scrambler, shampoo, verse magazine, we are champion, west wind review, and others

blog hits from getting in literary journals

some journals may provide blog hits, but none of the places i’ve been published have given me a lot of traffic. occasionally people google my name to arrive at my blog, and i wonder if they read my poems in a literary journal. other than that, most of my publications only result in 5-20 blog visitors each. twittering, facebooking, and getting linked for my reviews have given me more hits

simultaneous submissions

one of the tactics that resulted in my increased acceptance rate in late 2009 was that i started submitting batches of poems to 4-5 different journals at once. usually, out of 5 places, my poems get taken somewhere. this is in contrast to sending a group of poems to one place, waiting a few months, getting rejected, sending them to another place, waiting a few months, and so on

i recommend simultaneously submitting if the journals allow it. the only reason i can think of to not simultaneously submit is if you really want to publish a specific thing in a specific journal. then you’d want to only send to them, and maybe try others if you get rejected

keeping track of submissions

if you submit things to multiple journals at once, you may want a record of it so you can tell the other journals if you get accepted. my system for this is not very good. i have three documents; in one, i mark the individual submissions; in another, i sort by poem and write what has happened with each poem; and in a third, i sort by each literary journal and mark my history with each one. this is like doing the work of microsoft access manually, i think... you don't really need to sort all three ways. it might be better to make one list and use the 'find' command to look up specific poems/journals/submissions

cover letters

for my cover letters/emails, i use standard capitalization and punctuation, address the editors by their names, briefly compliment the journal (usually if i am submitting, i like the journal), mention the number of poems attached or ‘pasted below’ and if they’ve been submitted elsewhere, then a short bio in case they need it, then say ‘thank you’ and sign off with my name and email. i haven’t copied this down into a template, but it is essentially a template. the submission can speak for itself, so i don’t say much about it unless they ask

cash money

i have made $150 from publishing poetry in literary journals. when i got published in barnwood, i got $25 for each poem. i also got $100 for winning 'best poetry' in an issue of my school's literary journal. there are a lot of journals that pay at least a little bit ($10-50), but most of them don't seem to publish the styles of writing that i like

publishing the same thing at multiple literary journals

almost all literary journals want to be the first place to publish something, but some places accept ‘previously published’ writing. usually these journals aren’t very ‘respected.' if they seem like a cool journal, it seems ok to submit to them anyway. i haven’t done this much because almost all the journals i like want unpublished writing

blogging vs publishing in literary journals

something i realized recently is that posting some of my poems on my blog may actually be more effective for my goals compared to submitting them all to literary journals and then linking to them. i want to have a blog that is worth revisiting regularly. my image poems seem very liked on my blog, resulting in more comments and excitement than most other posts. so i don’t think it is a ‘waste’ to publish some of them for the first time on my blog. (another idea is to publish poems in a literary journal and later post them on your blog. almost always, you have the rights to republish your poem anywhere as long as the journal gets to be the first place)

ok, if you have other questions about my experiences with submitting to literary journals, i will try to answer them in the comments or another blog post

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