Why Submissions Matter (Even if You Get Rejected)
Every time you send out work, you are building a relationship with editors and gaining new readers.
If you want to publish, you need to send your work out and, unless you are an extreme outlier, you have to send your work out a LOT, and collect a lot of rejections. When I was just starting be published, I saw this as a huge time suck, a lot of wasted effort for a small gain.
But, now that I have over a decade of submissions behind me, this is what I think: submissions grow your audience, even when you are getting rejected. They help you build relationships with writers and editors, and show your colleagues that you are a professional. Here’s a few examples:
When I was in college, I bought a copy of the journal Pleaides, and read it cover to cover. I loved the poems in it, and, five years later (!), when I had finally built up enough nerve, I sent them a submission. I got a positive rejection from the editors, Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller, and almost fainted from delight. Over the years, I sent three more submissions to Pleaides. When the positive rejections turned to form rejections, I checked the masthead. Wayne Miller had left and was now at Copper Nickel. I started reading and sending work to Copper Nickel. I got two more positive rejections, and finally an acceptance in 2019. This means that by the time he published my work, Wayne Miller had been reading my poems for eight years.
I just had my first short story accepted for publication. I aimed high with that story so I sent it to all my dream journals right off the bat, including One Story, who sent me a positive rejection. I finally got an acceptance note this year from Manuel Gonzales, the fiction editor of the Bennington Review. When I looked at his bio, I saw that he is also on the editorial board at One Story–so for all I know, he saw this story years ago, liked it, and then chose to publish it when I sent it to a journal that had room for it. Of course, I can’t prove any of this. But do you see how, even though I was getting rejected, I was placing myself in an ecosystem of writers and editors? This matters.
Early on in the publication process for The Animal at Your Side, I got a nice rejection from JP Dancing Bear, the editor of Dream Horse Press. Bear also runs Verse Daily and, seven years later, when my book was finally published, he published two of the poems in it on Verse Daily, without my submitting them. This meant that my poems were sent to the inboxes of a thousand people right when my book was coming out. That relationship mattered, even though it didn’t result in book publication.
Sometimes your success is invisible to you. Sometimes it is revealed years later. Don’t talk with disdain of the volunteers and undergrads who read through a magazine’s slush pile. These are people who are truly dedicated to writing and publishing. Every time they read your work, you are developing a professional relationship with them and growing your audience. It is hard to not be able to see the fruits of your labor immediately, but by continuing to send out work, and by racking up rejections along with acceptances, you are treating yourself as a professional writer.
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