Rejection hurts. If it doesn’t hurt for you, you’re not only a writer unicorn, but a unicorn horned with melted coins from ancient Rome. Almost all of us, faced with rejection, react on a spectrum somewhere between spooning pints of ice cream over the sink to howling on a deserted beach to deciding you should just learn to do something practical, like cut hair.
We’re talking literary journals today, so let’s get perspective. Common acceptance rates for literary journals—of which I’ve edited three—tend to hover between one and three percent. That means it takes 97 rejections just to be normal. That much rejection likely won’t happen to you. Keep in mind, though, that with this level of sifting, most rejections have nothing to do with you but with that journal’s needs, backlog, and other inscrutables. One year my journal published back-to-back stories about animals. When we realized that, we promised ourselves no animals for two years. Your dog poem may be wonderful, but we can’t accept it.
What you need isn’t one finished piece and one or two submission ideas. You need a submission plan. That means at least five or six finished pieces, more if you have them, and an equal number of venues to send them to. More is better here too. It’s rare these days for journals not to accept multiple submissions, so get the numbers on your side. You will drastically increase your odds, and any one rejection won’t kill your soul. The ice cream can go back into the freezer.
An effective submission plan uses targeting--finding the right venues for you. The fact is that you want to be published and somebody out there wants to publish you. But you have to find each other. This can take time, but time that can be seriously reduced.
One of the smartest means to success is always, always, looking at calls for submission. These are public announcements by publishers and editors that they are looking for a particular kind of work, on specific topics or in specific forms.
Some of the best sources for calls are Poets & Writers online Classifieds, New Pages, and Entropy.
A quick look at Poets & Writers’ call page finds calls for literary works on subjects as diverse as hindsight; 21st century cities and their transformations; and the changing nature of today’s environment. You can see that these are very specific. Checking regularly, finding the right fit, gives you a big advantage. Note the genre they’re looking for. Give yourself time once a week to look at calls for submissions. It will take you maybe half an hour.
A related practice is to define to yourself carefully what your work is doing, both in content and style. Many journals are specialized. For instance, Alimentum focuses on food “as a muse.” Slag Glass City focuses on urban environments. These are very different journals, that may or may not fit your approach. Finding journals with a specific focus is something Mr. Google will be happy to do for you.
Finally, my blog is called “Live, Write, Publish, Live More” because publishing should always be bracketed within your life, whatever your life may look like. Remember: you are taking that brave step of doing the writing. For every writer out there, there are a hundred people regretting that they never pursued this dream.
Use my contact form to send me questions, successes, or horror stories. They’re all part of the landscape.