Tag: Publication

So you’ve just entered a competition. For weeks now you’ve been lovingly tweaking and sculpting your short story, poem, screenplay, or whatever until it’s the best version of itself you can possibly manage. You’ve checked and rechecked your cover letter, made absolutely totally sure that you’re sending in the right version of your baby, and now it’s winging its way into the big wide world of literature.

So now what?

I said “competition” up there, but this applies whether you’re sending a poem to a competition, a story to a magazine or a submission package to an agent or publisher. Whichever way, it’s the same thing; for better or worse, you’ve done everything you can, your part in events is over and all you can do is wait until the judges get back to you (or, more often, until enough time has elapsed that you can assume you haven’t won). Whatever you’ve submitted to, you now have a long, agonising wait until you know if your entry has made it through. So how do you cope with the weeks of suspense?

Simple. Forget it and do the next thing.

Write another story. Find another competition. Dig out an unfinished project and see if you can revive it. Do the next thing. What you did yesterday doesn’t matter. What are you doing today?

I’m not saying forget it entirely. You’ll probably want to record somewhere what you’ve submitted, where to, and when you expect a reply. I have a spreadsheet and a separate folder for anything currently under submission. It’s good to check these things once in a while, to avoid missing the opportunity to submit that story elsewhere. I like to have a few submissions out in the world at any given time, so it’s nice to have that information available.

(Plus, I would definitely forget what’s gone to where and do something stupid, like send the same story into the same competition three years in a row, if I didn’t.)

Focusing on other projects will also distract you from the uncomfortable truth that the odds are sadly not in your favour. Fun as it is to fantasise about the respect and validation you’ll get from winning, and what you’ll do with the prize money (not that you care about such things, for you are an artist, amirite?), writing is a harsh business. The rejection rate is something like 97%. That’s not encouraging, but the alternative is never to submit anything.

The more stuff you have out there, the less each individual rejection will sting. So keep submitting, enjoy your fantasies of winning (but don’t get too invested), and above all, keep writing. The next thing ain’t happening by itself.

This time I’d like to get into some of the practical, nuts-and-bolts aspects of the writing business. Because, sad to say, writing is a business, and that means you have to deal with other people. Whenever you submit a story to a magazine or a competition, remember that you’re also sending it to a human being. A human being who probably has hundreds of submissions to go through.

Get on their good side early by making it suuuuuuper easy for them.

Start with your manuscript’s presentation. Tempting as it is to make your entry stand out with a weird font or something, at best that’s going to be annoying. At worst, your entry may be unreadable because whatever you’ve done is incompatible with their software. Avoid this by saving your creativity for the story itself and use the Schunn layout. Many submissions guidelines ask for Schunn anyway, but even if they don’t specify, you can’t go far wrong with this.

(Obviously, if a deviation from Schunn is necessary for your story, say if you’re using the text layout to create a shape and it won’t make sense otherwise, then go ahead and do that. Yes, I know, but artistic license. Otherwise…)

The only reason to deviate from Schunn is if the submission guidelines specify a different method. You DID check the submission guidelines, right? If not, go back and reread the title of this post. You’re trying to make things easy for whoever reads your entry, and the submission guidelines are where they’ve helpfully told you how to do that. If they want a particular font, use that font. If they want your entry double-spaced, double-space it. If they want your text embossed in flashing violet with sparkle effects… you get the idea. It’s their publication; they know what they want.

Competitions are often judged anonymously, so they’ll ask you to remove any identifying information from your document. If you’ve used Schunn, that means removing the name and address from the title page, as well as your name from the page headers. You’ll also want to remove your name from the document title (more on that later). The competition guidelines will often state that any entries that aren’t anonymous will be deleted. Assume they’re not kidding, and leave all your identifying information in the cover letter, which usually needs to be in the body text of an email.

Now, document titles. I think we can imagine how annoying it would be to try and find that one story you really liked out of a hundred documents all titled “Submission.” To avoid this, the guidelines will sometimes give you a specific format to follow, e.g. “[Your Name] [Story Title]” or “[Publication Title] [Story Title]”. If they specify a format, follow it. Otherwise, I usually use one of the two listed above, depending on whether judging is anonymous or not. Either way, your story title should be in the file name somewhere, just because it’s a lot easier to find that one story with dragons if you can tell, at a glance, which stories are likely to feature dragons. What are we trying to do here, folks? That’s right; make it easy for them!