Sorry For The Inconvenience: A Submitter's Guide To Lit Mags

This course is free for everyone, forever.

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This course has everything you need to decide whether lit mags are for you. It ran from February 1st-29th and can be taken in full through these 12 self-paced lessons developed by

Benjamin Davis

. Plus!

• A complete breakdown of each step in the submissions process.

• Loads of customizable tools, spreadsheets, trackers, hopes, and dreams.

• Dozens of vetted submission opportunities with active lit mags.

• Resources and further readings to better hone your submission game.

Try them out; they’re all free! If you enjoy them, consider subscribing to get monthly workshops delivered to your inbox.

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Curriculum

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Lesson 1 | What The Hell Did You Just Write?

Lesson 2 | Why Are You Submitting to Lit Mags In the First Place?

Lesson 3 | Five Ways to Find Lit Mags (with all the tips, tricks, and bullshit)

Lesson 4 | Everything You Wanted To Know (and Plenty You Didn't) About Lit Mag Submission Guidelines

Lesson 5 | How To Write the Perfect Cover Letter Even Tho Nobody Cares (+ formatting and submission methods)

Lesson 6 | What Happens After You Submit to a Lit Mag?

Lesson 7 | Best Method for Organizing Your Writing According to Some Guy (Me)

Lesson 8 | How to Match Your Writing to the Right Lit Mag (without your head exploding)

Lesson 9 | How To Strategize and Track Submissions To Lit Mags (ft. Shannan Mann)

Lesson 10 | What Makes a "High Quality" Lit Mag Anyway?

Lesson 11 | How to Beat 20% of the Competition Every Time You Submit to a Lit Mag

Lesson 12 | So Long, And Thanks for All The Raccoons

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Introductions: Who are you, who am I, and what are we all doing here?

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So you wrote something. I'm sorry, and welcome. 

What did you write? A poem? A story? A screenplay space opera? Doesn't matter now. Is it good? I don't know. You don't know. Nobody knows. Fifty Shades of Gray sold 15 million copies, and Virginia Woolf once called Ulysses the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. Do you like it? Does your mom like it? Sweet, moving on. 

This course is not about writing advice. I am here because you have three choices ahead of you, blog it, bury it, or submit it. Since you're here, I'm going to assume you've chosen option three, so let's talk about how you do that. Let's talk about Literary Magazines.

Literary magazines are publications of (primarily) creative works curated by one or more editors. Publishing in them can help writers gain readers and reputation and alleviate imposter syndrome¹. Also, they're cool. For everything I go over in this course, I will use examples from active literary magazines. Whatever magazines I mention in a lesson, I will include a spreadsheet link at the bottom where you can find all of their submission information.

I'd like to get one thing out of the way first. There is a lot of talk about genre magazines versus literary magazines. For this course, I won't differentiate. Here is why.

The term "literary" became widely adopted in the ‘80s as a way to differentiate works focused on craft and technique from those written for mass consumption (i.e., genre fiction)². The New Yorker writes,

"...they created a different kind of literature: one centered on inwardness, privacy, and incommunicability.”

Ah, incommunicability — what every reader wants. The irony is that readers did want this, so it became its own mass-consumed genre. So, if you see "literary" as a genre, they want craft-focused writing³. This is why you'll often see a magazine ask for literary works within a call for subgenre, science fiction, for example. They mean craft-focused science fiction (I will talk more about craft in lesson 1).

Since submitting is the same across genres (and to avoid bickering over a reactionary term coined by pretentious white folks in the '60s), I'll refer to Literary Magazines as Lit Mags from here on out. Lit Mags publish stories, poems, essays, videos, games, comics, and so much more. Call it curated creativity.⁴ 

Anybody can submit to Lit Mags. Anybody can start a Lit Mag. Universities or foundations back some. Others are independent. For example, here is a random sample of prize-winning poetry magazines:

• The American Poetry Review (founded by two dudes in Philly in the 70s.)

• Kenyon Review (backed by Kenyon College)

• Threepenny Review (founded by a 27-year-old with no editorial experience).

• Smartish Pace (founded by a law student in Maryland)

• Rattle (founded by a guy in LA).

So what makes a Lit Mag worth publishing in? Well, that depends on you. You are a writer. (If you are not a writer, you are lost. The rest of the internet is that way.)⁵ So, since you're a writer, welcome. This course will have everything you need to decide whether lit mags are for you. It will run for one month and encompass all aspects of submitting to lit mags. I have developed several templates and tools that will be yours to play with. Copy them, adapt them, and email me mean things about how they’re not good enough. The usual. I will also share links to all my research with further readings and industry resources you can take advantage of. 

I have been submitting to magazines for over a decade with 40+ stories, poems, and essays in a variety of lit mags. I have founded and managed magazines, judged writing contests, and co-founded Chill Subs, one of the largest databases of lit mags on the web. And I write The Sub Club Newsletter. For the past two years, I have spent every day researching lit mags, talking with editors, and consulting writers on how to find the best place to publish their work. I have no MFA. Nothing against them; I’m just broke. I did not have a professor, mentor, or submitter friends. I learned by making all of the mistakes possible over and over until I learned. I am a big fan of data-driven decisions, front-loading prep work, and spreadsheets. There will be a lot of these three things in this course. I don’t like loads of SEO keyword fluff, obvious explanations, or moralizing. You won’t find much of that in this course. At any time, all questions are welcome.  

For additional readings, I’ll default to writer’s blogs or small magazines when I can find them rather than fluffy articles by big publishers. I find them to be more concise and will always lean toward supporting indie creators over content farms.

Here is an example, using today’s intro, of how I will share the details for any lit mags I mention throughout this course - WoD101: Intro List. (If you click the second tab on that spreadsheet, you’ll also find links to any articles or resources I found helpful.)

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1. Sally is intimidated by Jim’s success at training goats. Jim is intimidated by Sally’s success with hamsters. Both Jim and Sally feel real bad about themselves and neither feels they deserve their positions as Advisors To The Animal Kingdom. idfk, google it.

2. Examples of genre fiction include fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, horror, and so on. Basically, genre fiction is just any genre that isn’t considered literary.

3. Do words real good.

4. You might hear them called literary journals, reviews, publications, quarterlies, communist rags, and so on. Same-same.

5. Let me know if that joke landed. I have been advised that it will not land.