Factors You Can (and Can’t) Control When Submitting

Acceptances are often a combination of hard work, consistency, and a little luck.

Submitting your work can feel like shooting the precious inner workings of your tender heart into a cold, unfeeling, galaxy-sized black hole, never to return. This is largely due to the fact that as a writer, you have little to no visibility of what happens to your work after you hit that submit button. So, when a standard form rejection comes back weeks or months later, it’s easy to assume the worst — that you or your work just isn’t good enough.

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

However, it’s important to keep in mind that literary journals turn down good work all the time for many different reasons. Some of the factors that influence these editorial decisions are in your control and some aren’t.

Factors in Your Control

• The quality of your work

  Only you can make sure you’re sending your best work out — pieces that you’ve spent a lot of time writing, rewriting, getting feedback on, thinking about, setting aside, and returning to until every word says exactly what you want.
  

• The presentation of your work

  Follow best practices for formatting your submission (William Shunn’s formatting guidelines are the standard for prose) and keep your cover letter short and simple — don’t explain your work, don’t share your life story, and don’t name-drop writers you’ve taken class with.
  

• Following submission guidelines

  If you don’t want to waste your time or the magazine’s time, make sure you’re reading and following their submission guidelines, especially word count. Don’t submit an 80,000-word novel to a contest that has a word limit of 8,000 (that actually happened this month).
  

• Where you submit

  Confirm the places you’re submitting to actually publish the type of work you’re submitting. Don’t submit poetry to lit mags that don’t publish poetry. Don’t submit a sci-fi story to a magazine that says it doesn’t accept genre fiction.

Factors You Can’t Control

• The pieces they’ve already accepted

  Some literary magazines don’t select pieces in a vacuum. They are also thinking about how the pieces in their next issue work together as a whole. Maybe you have a great story about a messy divorce, but they’ve already accepted a story about divorce for their next issue. Maybe they’re seeing a common thread among all the poems they’ve accepted so far for their spring issue, and your poem doesn’t align as well as another poem they’re considering.
  

• The pieces your submission comes in with

  At The Masters Review, I get assigned batches of 10-15 submissions a week, and I’m often reading multiple pieces in one sitting. Some weeks, I don’t vote ‘yes’ on anything; other weeks, I consider voting ‘yes’ on 3 or 4 pieces. When there’s a strong piece in a weak batch, it’s easier to say ‘yes’. Conversely, if the batch of submissions your piece comes in with is a really competitive one, it becomes harder to get a ‘yes’.

• Personal preferences/pet peeves

  As complicated, messy, imperfect human beings, we all have different things that irritate us when it comes to what we’re reading. Here are a few examples:

  • One publisher I worked with disliked stories that took place in an office setting (I don’t know why).

  • If you read The Summerset Review’s submitting advice, they specifically state that “...we believe there is too much material already out there having death or serious illness as a notable element, and so we are not likely to run prose heavily carrying such themes.”

  • At a recent Chill Subs event, two lit mag editors shared some of the tropes they’re tired of seeing, which included “older man meets quirky nubile woman; romance ensues” and “sad man sad-sacking in general (usually a professor or writer).”

  • Personally, I cringe when writers refer to people struggling with addiction using words like “junkie” or “crackhead.” I also despise when female characters are introduced solely for/through their physical attributes. Both are examples of writing stereotypical, one-dimensional characters.

• Bias

  I would be remiss not to mention bias. It is, unfortunately, part of being human. While many literary journals take steps to bring more awareness to bias among reading staff (for example, we undergo Implicit Bias Guided Reading and Study at The Masters Review), it is not something that can be fully eliminated. Being aware of and questioning where our definitions of “good writing” come from and how they are shaped is really important.

At the end of the day, I always remind my students that submitting is ultimately a numbers game. If you’re doing the right things (focusing on the factors you can control) and submitting your work consistently and often, it’s usually only a matter of time before you get an acceptance. Often, it’s because you happened to send the right piece to the right person at the right journal on the right day. So, focus on what you can control to help increase your odds of an acceptance, and then submit widely and often. Although rejections may sting, it can help to think of each one as bringing you one step closer to your next acceptance.

👋 Hi there, and thanks for reading! I’m Janelle Drumwright, a writer, teacher at The Writers Studio, instructor at Chill Subs, and reader at The Masters Review. I help writers strengthen their work and submit to literary journals. Find me at janellewrites.com.