How To Strategize and Track Submissions To Lit Mags (ft. Shannan Mann)
Lesson 9 of 12: Sorry For The Inconvenience — A Submitter's Guide To Lit Mags
I don’t think any course, from my perspective alone, is comprehensive enough. I’m male, white, and allergic to children. If I died, they could just print another one. Probably named Bryan.
Also, I didn’t just Blues Clues1 my way into figuring all of this out. I asked questions. I talked to smart people. I picked up pieces, held them in my pocket for a while, then put them together here and there — usually on the toilet.
So I am glad to have the opportunity to introduce today’s guest instructor, (one of the smart people) who has taught me so much about submitting in general and today’s lesson in particular. She is the editor of
and will be teaching a full course later this year for The Forever Workshop. So, if you decide to upgrade to a paid subscription today, please use this discount button so Shannan gets credit for the sign-up.
I used to write and submit to lit mags back when I was a teenager. The landscape, as many of you might already know, looked very different from today. Poetry forums abounded, but lit mags were not the biggest presence online, at least there weren’t widely available digital mags without paywalls. As a Canadian, I’d skim the Canadian Writer’s Market books and take pictures of lit mag listings that seemed interesting. Then I’d print my poems and mail them out in an S.A.S.E envelope (remember those!). And eagerly await my rejections. Almost-almosts, they were a little personalized (perhaps this was a unique benefit of mailed submissions?). Once in a very long while, I’d get published. This was over 10 years ago.
In mid-2021, I started writing again after escaping a cult, having a baby, resuming academic studies, and entering a divorce. Fun. Lots of material. Also, I had no idea what the lit mag scene looked like after a decade. Some preliminary research through Google, social media, and the Best American Poetry anthologies led me to the usual suspects (the biggies). So, of course, I started submitting left, right, and center whatever I was writing, not really considering batches or how much money I was wracking up subbing wildly like this.
Well, the poetry gods blessed me with one major acceptance that year. Rattle. I won the Ekphrastic challenge. Woohoo. $100 (I’d spent probably $300+ on Submittable). I got two other acceptances that didn’t pay and were email-based submissions.
Okay so:
2021 around 72 submissions with 40 poems randomly slapped together in disjointed documents, roughly $500 spent (way more if I count contests), and $100 made.
Ouch.
2022 was the Year of Mass Submitting Like a Madwoman. 362 submissions with around 70 poems still mostly randomly slapped together, but the documents were formatted properly this time. I spent less, though, because, by this time, I’d figured out I needed to be selective about paid submissions. Still, I spent around $150 on submissions (and I submitted to 3 contests, so that’s around $75). And guess what, 14 acceptances! And I made around $400.
Woohoo. And yet, I felt frazzled. I was living deadline to deadline and had no clear direction as to my submissions strategy. I had set up a basic tracking sheet for submissions but often forgot to update it and mostly spent time tweaking it because I didn’t feel it was quite right. I also wanted to understand better why stuff was being rejected. I mean, yes, maybe my writing sucked, but maybe I wasn’t targeting the right lit mags for it.
Plus, making 362 submissions takes time. And I was submitting for both myself and my partner. Throw in contests and email submissions, and that’s crawling towards 1000 subs a year. Each submission, even if you don’t include thinking about batching and formatting poems or prose, just to click through, copy-paste cover letters, upload (and pay if needed) on the platform takes at least 5 minutes (and that’s if you get really fast at shit and are feeling super alert. Otherwise you risk making stupid mistakes). Email submissions almost always take a little longer. Going from the ground up, then picking your poems, formatting them, reading guidelines, getting to the platform, and going through submitting steps takes around 7 minutes for me.
So I’d done this for K and I for well over 800 subs. 93 hours. And some submissions take longer because they want different formatting or other hijinks. Or I’m just feeling fucking slow. So let’s round that up to 100 hours of submitting or submitting-adjacent stuff.
I got 14 submissions out of 100 hours of work and made $400.
Not so woohoo-y anymore.
I’m going to take a pause here to make an important point.
Look, at the end of the day, writing is what sets our souls on fire, some of us at least, right? So it behooves us (fun word!) to not be so capitalistic and pedantic about the time and money stuff. At the very least, we must recognize that, at the end of the day, this is not truly what the whole process is about. One would hope that even the richest writers think this at heart because, without the wonder and joy of purely writing for the sake of writing, the writing itself becomes belabored and eventually dead.
HAVING SAID THIS →
Writing has value. Writing is valuable. We are not writing into echo chambers, whether at the personal, granular, or public levels. We are writing together. The work we put out matters and has the power to change someone’s life. And it probably has. The world is so vast and wonderful (despite its destructive nature) that I can bet my blood and tears that someone somewhere out there has read something you’ve written and wept like a baby or laughed out loud, snorting their drink out of their noses or just been deeply silently moved.
What I’m trying to say is, sometimes it pays (literally and figuratively), to consider the money and time you’re putting in. Just as we ought to write smarter, we should submit smarter too. And there are different ways to do that based on your goals. So, before I get into the steps to tracking submissions, I want you to take a minute and self-analyze. Here’s a little questionnaire you can do with yourself.
💚 → YES
🖤 → NOT SURE
💙 → NOT MY MAIN FOCUS
1) I want to publish a lot of pieces this year.
💚 YES
🖤 NOT SURE
💙 NOT MY FOCUS
2) I want to make money from my writing.
💚 YES
🖤 NOT SURE
💙 NOT MY FOCUS
3) I want to gain a bigger audience for my work.
💚 YES
🖤 NOT SURE
💙 NOT MY FOCUS
4) I want to write and submit more.
💚 YES
🖤 NOT SURE
💙 NOT MY FOCUS
5) I want to be present in more writing community spaces.
💚 YES
🖤 NOT SURE
💙 NOT MY FOCUS
6) I want to take more workshops and editorial feedbacks to improve my writing.
💚 YES
🖤 NOT SURE
💙 NOT MY FOCUS
7) I want to develop more writing connections.
💚 YES
🖤 NOT SURE
💙 NOT MY FOCUS
So if I did this little test for myself in 2021, my score would be 💚 x 3, 💙 x 3, 🖤 x 1
The green heart represents a more “PROFESSIONAL” focused attitude (of wanting to submit and publish and make money, for example).
The blue heart represents a more “HOBBY” focused attitude (I want to write more, improve my work, and be a part of the community).
The black heart represents an “EXPERIMENTAL” attitude. This is someone who is still searching for the direction they want their writing to go in.
Today, my green hearts would outweigh the blue. Now, this DOES NOT mean I don’t want to improve my writing or be a part of a community or even experiment (since publishing land is often in flux). This really is about figuring out your Submitter’s profile/style so you can save time, money, and get your words out there!
NOW
Curate your lit mag list
A good way to get started on this is the methods of reading outlined in lesson 8. But if you’re interested in also putting the little questionnaire above to use, here’s how I would go about things.
And I’ll take a snapshot of my actual current submitter’s profile.
I’ve got 40 poems I want to submit.
7 of these are ghazals.
11 of these can be categorized as love/sex poems
6 of these are what I’d categorize as juvenilia (these are older poems that I haven’t really edited recently because I think they’ve reached their best version in and of themselves. Do I think they will be placed in The Fancy Pants Review ever — no, because they’re not that good. But I do think they’re good enough for another mag out there, so I keep them in my to-submit-queue for bundling. Oh and yes Ben, I agree, I think “bundle” sounds cooler than “batch”).
2 are long narrative poems
4 are genre-adjacent poems
4 are prose poems
6 are really good poems I have the highest hopes for (it’s good to know, sans ego, what your own best work is, from as objective a standpoint as possible).
Ever since Chill Subs released their database, this next step has become infinitely easier. And as they refine things, I can almost guarantee you it will feel like clockwork.
So, if you go to the database navigation, first select “Poetry” and then click over to Vibes. As soon as you click “Very fancy very impressive very not fast” the amount of lit mags drops from 2525 to 31. Fun!
Now for those “6 really good poems” I mentioned above, this is where they’ll be going first. Before Chill Subs, I used to look at the back of major poetry collections for the best places they’d published or get a sense of the biggest names out there through “top/best” lists. Now, thankfully, there is no “before Chill Subs,” and I can just do this. I have made this process more tailored to my needs by making a spreadsheet that has handpicked 20 out of these 31 lit mags I’m actually interested in submitting to.
With this method, combined with Lesson #8, you can curate a lit mag list that is personalized to what you have ready for submission.
Prepare Bundles
So, 6 poems, 20 lit mags. All slow. What I do now is bundle them in groups of 3 and usually add another 2-3 poems (depending on guidelines) that fit the particular lit mag’s style (for example, ECOTONE is really into strict formal poetry, so I’ll throw in 2 ghazals with 3 of my “best” poems).
Yes, this means I’ll probably have to withdraw from several places if a piece is accepted. Yes, it can be annoying. Yes, it’s worth it. Especially because these lit mags generally have the slowest response times. You want to get your “best” poems out there and start writing even better poems to take their “best” spots because they’ve flown the nest (i.e., gotten published!).
Now, all this is centered around poetry, but the process is pretty similar for other forms. The only difference is that, most often, you’re submitting just one short story or nonfiction piece.
So what I do for my nonfiction pieces is what Erik has already laid out in Lesson #8. I’ll submit one to around 5 places that fit it. Since I started writing and submitting my CNF from 2023 onwards, I’ve made around 24 submissions for 4 individual pieces and had 3 accepted at wonderful, well-paying places!
From my submit-ready poems breakdown, I noted 4 genre-adjacent poems. Some of these can overlap with ecopoetry and also love poetry. So what I’ll do is first submit my top genre-loving lit mags: Fairy Tale Review, The Fairy Tale Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, and Dark.
Fun fact, I have poems in Strange Horizons and The Deadlands, and they both did not begin as nor did I ever see them as “genre” poems, and yet they fit those magazines’ aesthetics, and I had no qualms about submitting them there (and the editors never told me to put a fairy or a mad scientist in my poems either, what do you know!). I think it’s important to not let the idea of genre bind you to a box yourself. It almost always matters more that you’re submitting a poem aligning with the lit mag’s aesthetic as opposed to their genre. Genre is very rigid. Aesthetic is more fluid.
Submit your Bundles
If you think back to the heart questionnaire, remember how there were three types of Submitters? Let’s briefly break down how someone in each of those categories might go about submitting their bundles
The Professional Submitter
10+ Bundles of around 3-6 poems/flash each (remember, the same poem will usually crop up in 3 or 4 bundles, if not more!)
If it’s not poems, then 5+ short stories or longer prose pieces
Submit with hierarchy in mind. This relates to how much a lit mag will pay you if accepted and also their reputation or “street cred”. Virginia Quarterly Review, for example, pays $1000+ for 5 or more poems (good luck to us all if we’re trying them!). North American Review does not pay anything at the moment. I still think they both have a similar amount of street-cred when it comes to poetry, at least.
The Hobbyist Submitter
2-9 Bundles of 3-6 poems/flash each
and/or 1-3 short stories/CNF, etc.
Submit with aesthetic in mind. Here, when I say aesthetic, I mean how the lit mag looks, what they publish already, what the editors are like, and what the community around the mag is like.
The Experimental Submitter
Doesn’t really have too much of a focus/grasp on bundles but really just wants to start submitting more widely.
Submit with some awesome “trying-it-out” energy. Thankfully, courses like these and the Chill Subs database and community can really help direct The Experimental Submitter (if they so wish to be directed!).
Tracking your Submissions
This is perhaps most important if you’re a Professional Submitter, but not enough can be said about getting into the habit of tracking your bundles from the beginning (especially when you have fewer bundles to deal with).
Okay, so how does this tracker work? Well, here is a link to a template. Open it up and follow along. This tracker is exceptionally useful if you submit a lot of bundles.
→ Download Submission Tracker ←
(go to ‘file’ → ‘make a copy’)
At the top, I keep the sub-link, times subbed, fee, open, payment, and Lit Mag. Aside from ‘sub-link’ and ‘lit-mag,’ these might vary for you. It is where I keep essential information I’ll want to know as I sit down to submit. (If these become too many, you can click on a row and select “Hide Row.”)
After ‘lit mag,’ start listing out titles for all of the work you have that is ready to submit. If you link this sheet to the one created in Lesson 7, you should be able to easily copy-paste them over so the titles are exact for reference.
Then, you track. Updating the state of the submission in reference to the lit mag as you go. Here are the states I use →
SUBBED
WITHDRAWN
ACCEPTED
REJECTED
SPECIAL REJECTION
All of those tags are quite self-explanatory, except for maybe “special rejections.” I only just started tracking “special rejections,” and now I wish I’d done it from the beginning. If you don’t do this, please consider starting! Though we might doubt the truly “special” status of a literal rejection of your work, there’s most likely an earnest editor behind it. Editors get so many submissions (for even the smallest mags) that they really wouldn’t send you a special rejection unless they genuinely want you back in their submission queue. Unless an editor mentions specific pieces, you have no way of telling which poem(s) stood out for them. So I will just mark every poem in that bundle as a “special rejection” instead of a “rejection.” This way, the next time I prepare a bundle for that particular lit mag (and if the editor sent a special rejection with their name, then address the submission to them), I can refine the selection based on what I know the mag liked of my work already.
If you want to combine this with the spreadsheet you created to house your writing in Lesson 7, it’s a little trickier. Go to the tab at the bottom where it says ‘TRACKER.’ Right-click → hover over ‘copy to’ → click ‘Existing Spreadsheet.’
If you’re not into spreadsheets, the Chill Subs tracker is pretty freakin’ cool. But this style of tracking will give you a big-picture look at your submissions journey. At the same time, it is excellent for tracking bundled submissions since one or more may be accepted or rejected at any given time.
When to rest a piece
I have two pieces that have been rejected maybe 50 times. Sometimes, even I don’t get why I throw either of them in a bundle. But I have rarely rested a piece. And somehow or other, the most rejected of them have found their way into some space, usually a pretty cool lit mag! Still, I think it is best to take a look over your pieces and see which ones have been in the sub-cycle the longest. Maybe if you rested them for a few months, you’d be able to get another piece more attention. Or (and this one’s especially important) the piece needs editing or repurposing. In the recent past, I have submitted a long narrative prose poem as a flash, and it’s worked, finally an acceptance (and even payment!). I have also submitted several flash pieces as an essay, and that really did the trick. This way, you can avoid the literary graveyard and keep those submissions fresh and fun.
Download the tracking spreadsheet provided above. Even if you don’t use it, play with it a bit. Even though spreadsheets aren't for everyone, they are free for everyone.
Plug in five lit mags you’ve got your heart set on. Add the works you hope to submit there someday that you feel are ready.
And if they’re ready. Fuck it, submit!
What has your submission journey been like so far?
What mistakes have you made along the way? And what did you learn from them?
What mechanisms and tools do you use or have created to help you better organize the process?
Eh? Where are my fellow millennial trash friends who get this reference? Let’s get some avocado toast and follow each other on Venmo.
Great article. I do think it is important to be intentional and to match effort to goal. What do I want to achieve this year, this month? How much do I want to spend writing new material, submitting material, and organizing my writing/subs? I probably go overboard in tracking my subs, but I like it that way. I track in Duotrope and have an Excel workbook organized with a sheet per piece and each row a lit mag. Another master sheet where each row is a lit mag and I plan which piece to submit and record results (this is usually a ranked lit mag list, so I can start submitting to the top stuff first and work my way down.) I use colors to keep track of what's next, what's urgent, what's awaiting response. All of this is standard stuff that most people do, I think. The more unusual thing I do that I have never heard anyone else do is to use Scrivener to keep track of my submission materials, responses, etc. (I use Scrivener for residency/fellowship/etc. applications, too. And if I get accepted, for the workshops and whatever else, so in the end I have one file with a record of everything that happened.) And then I have a folder system that organizes all submissions, exactly what I submitted (which I do not recommend if you don't have space on your computer or cloud accounts...) Of course, Submittable keeps all of this for you, so it's another place things are sort of tracked. (Oh, and I have labeling system in my email to mark rejection emails, personalized rejection emails, etc.)
My mechanisms and tools are prehistoric. Definitely no spreadsheets have yet been harmed. Honestly, the way I’ve gone about it has been a little ridiculous. Like I only send to places that allow simultaneous subs, but then I sub a piece to only one place at a time? Also, I seem to have contracted a disease called “You accepted me once and now I don’t want to sub to you again, because if you reject me, it will feel even MORE personal, because you know me.” Or something like that. I got I think 6 rejections last year and wanted to crawl under a rock. But part of that I think is also being aware, more than ever, of how much good work is already out there. Like it’s trickier to put my head down and just do my thing. But I’m so glad to have found Write or Die! It strikes such a great mix of tone and in depth info that I haven’t found anywhere else.