For those who haven’t encountered it yet, the author questionnaire is a (long!) worksheet that most book publishers send you after they accept your work, about a year before your book is due to be released. Its style varies depending on the press, but in general the questionnaire’s job is to give the editors all the details they will need as they put the book together and think about how to promote it.

The author questionnaire includes simpler stuff like an author bio and a list of previous publications, plus your address and social media handles. Your publisher wants to have all your info in one place. But the bulk of the author questionnaire is the harder stuff:

• How would you describe your book in 8-10 sentences?

• What’s your elevator pitch for the book?

• What are the three most important things about your book? What makes your book unique?

• Are there any particularly engaging stories behind your writing of the book?

• Who is your target audience?

• Who are the organizations, publications, podcasts, and fellow writers and editors you are connected with who might be interested in reviewing, sharing news of, or otherwise engaging with the book?

This is a condensed sample; the author questionnaire goes on for pages, especially when it’s fully filled out. Tbh, it can be stressful to receive this document just when you’ve gotten that long-awaited acceptance for a book you wrote. You might want that acceptance to mean the manuscript is out of your hands, but instead you have a whole bunch of thinking and working and pitching still to do.

Not to mention that your book is a piece of art; it can feel weird to shift gears to how you can promote that piece of art. You have to distill a book that needs all its words into a clippable message that looks good on a back cover or the Amazon description. You may even end up thinking of the connections you have in the writing world in terms of how you can “leverage” them toward the success of your writing, which doesn’t feel comfortable or good.

How can we avoid these feelings of pressure during the first stages of book promotion? The trick, I think, is to fill out the author questionnaire (and be perpetually ready to fill out the author questionnaire) in a way that connects you authentically with people and energizes your creative process. You don’t have to turn into a marketing whiz. Instead, you can use moments like the author questionnaire to remind you of the collective vitality and expansiveness of your writing.

Writing an Elevator Pitch for Your Book Isn’t Actually the Worst

Here’s a first point to hinge on: trying to summarize or distill your writing into a digestible blurb isn’t actually as bad or mercenary as you’d think it might be. I first discovered this when one of my PhD teachers at University of Denver, Brian Kitely, asked me to write a 100 word description for a project I was working on, like the paragraph that appears on the back of a book.

The thing I was writing was called “Day Dream Home Land,” and it consisted of vague, interconnected fragments from my time living in Malta and traveling in Eastern Europe before returning to the states. Although Brian’s assignment stressed me out, writing the little self-blurb both allowed me to understand the threads connecting all that cobbled-together writing, and where those threads frayed out.

More recently, I had the chance to reimagine my forthcoming poetry book Biolamp through the lens of the “describe your book” section of author questionnaire. For a month, I spent a little of my writing time each day working out a short description of the book, and it was a fun challenge. Here’s part of what I came up with:

Passing feeling through the haunted landscape, Biolamp transmutes the materiality of the ever-altered natural world into futures that absorb, alchemize, but never absolve history. Like flora on the pores of a decaying city, the eponymous “biolamp” serves as an energetic prism: where material breaks down, a heat-image remains.

OK, I liked the description, lol, although I’m not sure that anyone else will. Still, the opportunity allowed me to articulate (in my own off-kilter poetic terms) the themes that I have always felt running through the book. Being able to say them enables me to take ownership of the book, in a way: to take responsibility for its overall effect, to believe in its particular angle to the conversation.

My recommendation is to do this regularly. Try to pitch your book to yourself before it’s ever even done, before it’s ever accepted. Part of the revision process is understanding if what you’ve done with your book is legible, not just on the sentence level but as a whole piece of writing. The bonus, if you do this along the way, is when the time to submit and/or promote the book arrives, you’ll already have the language you need to put toward your pitch letter and/or author questionnaire.

It’s Helpful to Speak to People Who Might Not “Get” the Book at First

I’ve always been inspired by literary community, and especially by the small groups of readers who will “get” the hybrid form I’m working with, or the strange image I’m evoking, or the line break that’s kinda unpredictable but special and kindred for its embrace of messiness. But the community of experimental poets isn’t my only community!

I was reminded of this when Christine Stroud, the editor of Autumn House Press, responded with some thoughtful comments to the first draft of my author questionnaire. Her comments were accompanied by this note:

I think the main thing to focus on is figuring out a way to talk about the book to folks who may be open to reading experimental poetry, but are less familiar with it. That is, in the simplest language possible, tell me what Biolamp is about, and as you consider, you can think about trying to answer these q’s: Why should someone read your book? What question does the book answer? How is your book unlike any other book that has been written?

The implication here is for real: it’s important to be able to share the conversations that move me with more than just the small group of poets who are writing the same kind of stuff.

This isn’t because a book needs a big audience to be relevant, or because we have to make compromises with mainstream discourse in order for our radical poetics to matter. Instead this practice helps us bridge the gaps between our communities, while helping us articulate why our work is important to all the parts of us.

In my own case, I’ve got lots of parts of me to bring together: my raised-in-Ohio anti-elitist self, my need-for-a-good-story self, and my fuck-it-the-weirder-the-better self. They all express parts of me that are deeply rooted in collective experiences; accordingly, they all deserve attention and to be brought into conversation with one another. That happens in language and thought before it happens between people, which the author questionnaire gives us a chance to feel out.

It Feels Good to Keep Track of Who Cares

It is also so helpful and energy-giving to keep track of points of connection and care along your writing path.

Yes, this is the kind of thing the author questionnaire will ask you about: who would be interested in promoting, blurbing, reviewing, teaching, or otherwise giving attention to this book? But keeping track of people like this doesn’t have to instrumentalize your real relationships, as making lists of people and venues can sometimes feel.

Instead, consider making a note every time someone encourages your writing—not as a career decision, but as a reminder to yourself to keep going. I started making notes about this sort of thing a couple years ago, as well as keeping a document of positive feedback on already-published books, and it does so much to counter the negative internal narratives. People really do care! They have done so much to support my writing and my life, and I don’t want to lose track of that.

And those people want to hear from you too. A writer whom I really admire recently emailed me and asked me if I would be interested in receiving a copy of the book she has just come out with, a manuscript she was working on when we met. I said yes, and she just straight up sent it to me! I was so complimented and excited to receive it in the mail. I’m similarly delighted by the rounds of “I just had a book published” emails that go out from writers I know. It’s such a celebratory moment to be able to welcome a book together.

This kind of ethic—the gift economy that I’ve heard many literary citizens evoke—is one of the best ways to follow through on people’s belief in you as a writer. The key is not to have your contact with someone be contingent on their promoting your book or advancing your career. If you get in touch with people with the spirit of sharing your writing and connecting on a personal level, rather than of trying to generate sales, it’ll keep your connections sincere.

Another way to frame this sort of contact is to write in the spirit of “thank you”: Thank you for previously publishing this poem that just came out in my full collection! Thank you for supporting this work in its earliest phases, because I wouldn’t be where I am without you!

I always try to use the day of book publication, for example, as a chance to tell the people who have supported my writing how much it has meant to me. Writing thank-you notes (instead of getting obsessed with your performance on Instagram) is a great way to stay connected to the spirit of communication that buoys our writing practice.

The Conversation Around the Book Is Part of the Book

The author questionnaire, like the publication process as a whole, resonates the most when we treat it as an authentic part of our creative lives, rather than as a side-thing that we do to get the most readers or book sales.

The conversation around the book is part of the book, and that’s not something to be scared of. It’s something to embrace. To bring our creativity and the spirit of connection to our “professional” lives, to our “careers,” is to understand life itself as a generative opportunity. We are making things together, whether they’re funny little elevator pitches, personal connections across time and space, or simply the feeling one member in an audience gets when they hear your work aloud.

Stay open to the miraculous, even in the nitty gritty work of book promotion. It’s there: each sentence, each motion, has room for us to expand.

I also got to do a panel called “Double Exposure: Writing, Submitting & Publishing in Literary/Mainstream Outlets,” which bloomed out of a conversation I got to have with on her podcast last year. The panel also included Dionne Ford and Katie Henken Robinson, and it was awesome. I learned so much about how writers pitch their writing to mainstream venues, what editors reading pitches are looking for, and how that ethic contrasts and overlaps with the literary publication contexts I’ve focused on in my writing life.

There were tons of good takes from the panelists, but one from Dionne Ford stuck with me. In talking about when we choose to pitch mainstream venues vs. when we choose to submit to a literary magazine, Dionne described how she focuses on mainstream venues for more timely, argument-driven pieces of writing, while more reflective pieces tend to be the types literary magazines would publish. And then she described how these different ways of writing actually emerge from different versions of herself: one who needs to make a point right now, for example, versus one who needs to take more time to process an experience.

I’m paraphrasing and hopefully not totally misquoting Dionne, but her take really resonated with me. Even though I have sometimes wished to understand myself as a specific kind of writer, I’ve never written in one way for one audience. I realize now that I’ve always shifted between styles of writing because they felt like they were expressing different parts of me.

Exhibit A: Way back in MFA school, I remember writing short stories meant for my fiction workshop in the morning, and then working on these strange, off-kilter Antarctica prose poems at night or in the gaps between short stories. The Antarctica prose poems (which became In the Antarctic Circle, my first book) always felt like they weren’t what I was supposed to be working on. That was the magic in them—the fact that they were emerging from a less-acknowledged part of my creative self.

Exhibit B: More recently (but still, it seems, forever ago) I got to go on some residencies at I-Park, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Brush Creek, before the last one shut down permanently in the middle of our stay due to the pandemic. I was working on essays for The Last Remedy, my book in progress about navigating Inflammatory Bowel Disease and my own resistance to seeking care. With The Last Remedy, I was intensively focused on telling a story I’d never allowed myself to tell, not even to myself. But there was often this unwieldy remainder that I felt after working on the book each day. That remainder leaked into brief pockets of time spent writing strange ecological poems, which have recently been accepted by Autumn House Press (yay!) as Biolamp and will be coming out in Fall 2027.

These days, my writing continues to shift and flow between genres. I spent a ton of time working on How to Submit, my very logistical manual for writers about publishing, but my brain needs more than the logistical. This means it’s been dancing back toward the personal essay, toward new weirdnesses of poetry, and even in the direction of fiction again. The multiple parts of me need to speak in different ways: sometimes by combining language in unforeseen ways into poems, sometimes by telling a more direct autobiographical story, sometimes by making things up.

All of these styles/genres demand different publication contexts. The personal essays can sometimes hang with more well-known literary magazines, even though (since I wrote them) they’re on the experimental side of mainstream. The poems largely belong in small, DIY online venues. Fiction publication can range from tiny magazines and presses to Big 5 publishers, depending on its style.

I have realized, too, that a lot of my favorite writers inhabit multiple modes and play in different publication contexts. Laird Hunt, who began his career by publishing experimental novels with independent publisher Coffee House Press, moved in more recent years to publishing with mainstream literary fiction imprints and was a Finalist for the National Book Award for his novel Zorrie. But this kind of recognizable success didn’t stop him from returning to Coffee House Press for the essay collection This Wide Terraqueous World, which I loved for its weirdness and willingness to be fully itself. Only a small press could publish this book, but it’s only part of Laird’s expansiveness as a writer.

Kathleen Rooney is another writer whose flexibility between genres and publications I really admire. Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, published by St. Martins Press, was a best-seller with tons of readers from a mainstream fiction audience. And at the same time, she’s publishing books of poetry like Where Are the Snows with small, often experimental publisher Texas Review Press and working as a founding editor Rose Metal Press, a small press focused on hybrid writing. She even co-authored with her sister the picture book Leaf Town Forever, which was recently published by University of Minnesota Press.

I love when writers are able to embrace these multiple parts of themselves, and to tie these varying forms of expression to the publication contexts that support them. This kind of dynamic practice is, to me, much more exciting than building a “brand.” In a social world that wants us to be knowable and finite, it is much more interesting (as creative practitioners) to let our art forms bounce off each other: writing this novel makes me need to write that strange personal essay, or working on this how-to book makes me need to write poems. We can follow the strands of our creative energy, rather than taking cues from what others seem to want us to do.

The more we define ourselves with this confident variousness, the more it becomes possible to embrace the multiplicity of ourselves. We are lyric, we are storytellers, and many times, we need to make a point. The key is to use the styles and forms we are familiar with—which are tied up with the available publication contexts—to help us plumb and develop the work that speaks most deeply from ourselves. If you listen to what’s been said so far, it becomes ever more possible to envision what new thing you need to say, and how that will extend the conversation beyond the bounds that have been imagined so far.

Btw, there’s some good things up recently! Elise McHugh kindly interviewed me about How to Submit for Rain Taxi, a bucket-list venue that I’m very grateful to be featured in. Also The Call Center, a poetry mag run by sentient fungi, recently published some poems from my forthcoming collection Biolamp. Thanks everyone for tuning in!

Instagram was blowing up about it; publishers were asking for donations to cover the lost funds, since they’d predicated their publishing plans on the funds that were promised. You can find Literary Hub’s write-up here. To get a sense of the scope of who lost support, there’s even a shared document of the grantees who have lost funding—a $27 million blow to the arts, part of the MAGA movement’s step-by-step dismantling of governmental programs that help people in America.

There are lots of really good, inspired posts on social media about why this loss of funding matters. But I wanted to throw in my two cents, too, by reflecting on why small presses and literary magazines really matter to me, personally—with the hope that this will resonate for those of you who are also mourning this moment.

1. Small presses and literary magazines are accessible, in an “industry” that often feels like it’s made up of gatekeepers.

Small presses were there for me when I had no idea how the hell anything worked in the literary world. I am a white person from a pretty well-off family in a nice neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, so I had a lot of privilege growing up and still have a lot of social power; I even had a neighbor who worked in New York publishing who I did an internship for one summer (checking and updating facts for the Frommer’s Best RV and Tent Campgrounds in the U.S., possibly this very edition). I went to a private college and graduated debt-free, with huge gratitude to my parents and grandparents. But when I got out and decided I wanted to be a writer, I still had no idea what that meant. I hadn’t majored in creative writing, and I hadn’t learned anything about publishing contexts or, more broadly, how to “make it.” All I knew was that writers write.

I was privileged but naive, in other words; I was passionate about what I was doing but definitely not strategic about achieving “success.” Literary magazines were the very first context where I felt like I could be a real writer in a public way. They popped up in Google searches; they were referred to on cool websites I discovered like HTMLGIANT. They often published online, so I could read them while living outside the country (I was based on Taiwan the year after college), and the online mags didn’t have the imposing, implicit gates that a lot of the glossier publications did. I’m talking early online lit mags like elimae, Juked (also a print mag), and >kill author: they were born of communities of people just making stuff and publishing it. For the most part they weren’t trying to be famous or build a “career.” They just loved what they were doing and put their energy and time into it, like I was doing with my writing.

Plus, from my point of view as a writer and submitter, there weren’t too many steps between the writing and the writing appearing. You could just submit and the editors would read what you sent. To me, it was miraculous: whether they accepted my work or not, they made room for me when I showed up.

2. Small presses and literary magazines prioritize the writing over how well the writing can be sold.

This fact really came home to me as I got to know the submission process itself. As most publishing books tell it (I hadn’t read these at the time), getting published with mainstream magazines and Big 5 book publishers is a matter of pitching your work first and foremost. You have to make your writing sound good, and you have to make yourself sound good. The pitch precedes the writing itself.

But with lit mags (and eventually small presses, when I began to submit to them) the implicit contract was totally different: You just send them your work, try not to say something completely alienating in the cover letter, and they read it. The writing itself.

Because the writing, as we know, can’t be distilled to a soundbite. It has to be as long as it is to say what it wants to say. You have to show up for all of it.

I didn’t know this practice of prioritizing the work (rather than the pitch) was magic at the time, but it is magic. Like I said, I was kinda naive. It’s actually really hard to find a corner of the world will people will take you seriously and read your writing just because you exist, but that’s exactly what these editors were doing. It was a gift of time, energy, and passion. And sometimes, if I got lucky, they would even publish what I wrote.

3. At their best, small presses and literary magazines center the marginalized, both stylistically and in terms of the subject matter of the writing they publish.

After I got into literary magazines, I started learning more about small presses. The expansive landscape of independent publishers opened up my world. Up till then, my experience in bookstores had become a bit of a disappointment whenever I tried to find something new and fresh to read. Booksellers are the best, but my experiences even in the coolest bookstores were usually scattershot and often resulted in me forcing myself to read 200 pages of some coolly-designed book by a major publisher that actually kind of sucked.

Libraries were more curated, but the magisterial hardbacks that had staying power there were both excellent (Dellillo! Murakami! Atwood!) and, it felt to me, too classic to resonate personally with. I was always looking for something unheard of, something that felt like a discovery, a contribution to the conversation just to be reading it.

That’s when small press publishers began playing a big role in my reading life. Specifically, publishers like Tarpaulin Sky Press, Sidebrow, Les Figues Press, and Civil Coping Mechanisms made a practice of publishing hybrid/cross-genre writing, which resonated massively with me. They were often small prose fragments with intentional, poetic language, but woven together with narrative, and readerly/fun to boot. I loved pieces of writing that let you in as a reader—they felt possible to reside in, to be in community with. And that’s what I really wanted, both as a reader and a writer: to communicate, to be with.

It’s not just style, but marginalized subject matter and authors themselves that small presses and lit mags support, especially when they’re explicit and conscious about this mission. Margot Atwell says it really beautifully in her article for Lit Hub in 2022:

One thing that’s especially galling is that independent presses often lack the money to provide authors with higher advances because we take risks on work that is more experimental and pushes boundaries—books written by writers who are BIPOC, trans, queer, disabled, neuroatypical, immigrants, or in other ways marginalized by mainstream society and mainstream publishing. We often publish work that has less obvious “commercial appeal” to serve our missions and enrich the literary landscape.

When I read the writing published small presses, I always felt like I was getting the real story, something under the surface of the stories it was more profitable for larger publishers to sell me.

4. I would rather love a book for its gaps and aporias than be bored by its perfection.

Over time, as I read more lit mag and small press writing, I did discover the limitations that the lack of labor and funding bring up for publishers. When you don’t have paid staff and are running a press entirely as volunteer labor, or when you’re a single person publishing 8-10 books a year, you can’t catch every single formatting error. You can’t sand each book down to a lucid, sparkling sheen. Oversight is a little looser and awesomeness is prized more than professionalization, so you get books that are fire, and that sometimes burn holes in themselves.

I’ve always loved writing that embraces its own imperfections. Clarice Lispector is like this too; it’s not just small presses. Her work is often crazed, uneven; sometimes it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t need to. It’s also absolutely brilliant, too bright to even look at. Lispector was writing at a different time in a different place, but she’s emblematic of the best of small presses (and, of course, her translated books are published in the U.S. by the very established, large small press New Directions): when we letting go of a highly professionalized, glossy text, the more visceral, revelatory stuff can come out.

5. Small presses and lit mags are not a rung on the ladder. They’re a wellspring that keeps the whole thing going—on both a systemic and personal level.

What I want to say, finally, is that small presses are still there for me, even now that I understand better how things work in the literary world. I’ve walked the path of getting an agent. I know (more or less) how big publishing works, even though I’m not in the New York publishing cool-kid circles personally. I’ve published several books, and it’s still hard to “get published”—even though I wrote a book on the subject.

And still, small presses are the place: they’re where people are doing the work without marketing departments telling them what to do, without trying to guess at the next big trend, without requiring a pitch for writing that stands on its own. In the small press and lit mag landscape, I’d argue, “getting published” isn’t the point. Being part of the community is. And that community goes on and on, generating passion and the language we really need to bring into being the world, and I guess even the country, we want to live in.

For some other great articles about the meaning of small presses especially, my go-tos are these:

• “Books Are Not Products, They Are Bridges: Challenging Linear Ideas of Success in Literary Publishing” by Janice Lee, December 4, 2019

• “The PRH Trial Has Revealed a Barely Hidden Scorn for Independent Publishers” by Margot Atwell, August 18, 2022

• “'Power to the people's mimeo machines!' or the Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics” by Matvei Yankelevich, February 3-25, 2020

• The ongoing podcast Index for Continuance

To support the publishers and arts organizations affected by the NEA cuts, consider directly supporting the organizations who have had their grant funding rescinded. It’s a great excuse to buy some books.

But getting too obsessed with kind of stuff is a recipe for an unsatisfying, no-fun relationship with your writing life. Specifically, a few weeks after publication day for How to Submit (it came out on February 25 of this year), I started to feel suddenly and inexplicably down. Was it the lack of sleep and frayed nerve endings from our new baby crying? Yeah, partially. But added to that was the weird sensation of subsiding excitement: For the months leading up to the book, and the couple weeks following it, I had done media appearances and podcasts. There had been positive attention for the book on social media. I had reached out to fellow teachers over email and received encouraging words in response. I had felt like I was in the middle of the thing.

Now the thing had come and gone, and my life hadn’t magically changed. Sure, I had another book to my name, and there were some cool articles and interviews out there. I got to meet a lot of very kind, very smart people who read the book and discussed it with me on their podcasts. I got to write for Writer’s Digest and Poets & Writers. Despite all this, I worried about how the book “was doing.” I worried that my publisher would regret publishing the book, that my agent would regret selling it, and that the whole thing would be a disappointment, relative to my expectations and the energy I had put into it.

I realized how whacked out my brain was when I met with Fauzia Burke, my publicist (she is great and extraordinarily helpful), and had a conversation to wind down our work on How to Submit. I found myself asking her all kinds of questions about how I could “leverage” the publicity I got for the book, including how to keep up the connections I made during the publicity process and make them “work” for me in the future. (Ew, I don’t even like writing that.)

Kindly, Fauzia reminded me that connecting with fellow writers, editors, and people involved in the literary world wasn’t about achieving some goal at the end of those relationships. The relationships I’d begun while promoting the book were just that: relationships! The people I’d talked to were members of my community now. Keeping in touch with them was just for itself, not for getting something out of it.

I smacked myself in the forehead (maybe just metaphorically). “Right,” I said. “I guess that’s what I wrote my book about in the first place.”

In fact, I had actually included the following passage in How to Submit itself:

I believe in getting involved because it increases your familiarity with the literary landscape and helps you become an authentic part of it. When you’re part of the conversation, deciding where to submit feels less like an attempt to break into an unfamiliar scene than a continual act of participation. Publication begins to fit into your life naturally. I can’t promise that getting involved will help you get published, and you shouldn’t think about your contributions as a quid pro quo. But you can treat your literary contributions as a gift to the community you’re asking something from, too.

What Fauzia helped me realize was how, even in promoting a book that’s literally all about community in publishing, I had gotten sucked into the idea that the measure of my success was how many books I sold, how well-known I was, how well How to Submit “did” (see also my post on hype).

In the midst of this toxic brain cloud, I had been envisioning my relationships related to the book much more instrumentally than I ever wanted to. It wasn’t that I saw people as means to an end; it’s that I wasn’t thinking about people at all. I forgot the whole point of reading, writing, and sharing your words.

The whole point is communication! It’s connection. The relationships and conversations we have are the outcome.

And those connections aren’t quantifiable. They can’t be measured by book sales or “popularity,” by all the false rubrics we use to determine whether we are successful.

Whether we are successful is, most of the time, about whether we are happy in a deeper sense (see my post on setting process goals, not accomplishment goals). We want to make money and sustain ourselves, sure. We might want to be “well-known,” in a doing-numbers kind of way. But at the core, I think most of us write because we want to be in contact with other people in the deep way that only deeply thought-out, long-form writing can do.

Accordingly, the most meaningful things that have taken place through this book have been those moments when a single person writes to me telling me How to Submit, or its message, have meant something to them. I’ve heard some things from fellow writers, blurbers, and interviewers that really moved me—that made me realize I did have something to contribute with the book, and that I said it, and that it’s out there, emanating. Those instants of contact help remind me what this work is all about: being in touch with one another in a way that only several hundred pages of shared language can bring about.

So I’ve begun to chill about how How to Submit is “doing”. Plus I know now that this arc of obsession accompanies book releases for more than just me. I would have done well to pay attention to Kate McKean’s post “Why I’m Not Anxious About Publication Day.” As she reminds us,

I already know that I won’t be a different person on June 11th and I won’t be looking for my name on the best seller list that week or the next and there won’t be a camera crew outside my door, blinding me with their flash blubs. Reese Witherspoon will not call me and say omg we forgot to tell you! Your book is our new bookclub pick this month!!!! Several other great books come out that day…It’s a big day to me. It’s a big day to other authors, too.

And to everyone else it’s Tuesday.

So here’s what I’m saying (for a second, or third, or millionth time, since I live in the constant tension between what I’m supposed to want and what I actually long for): Being a writer, this act that can feel so elusive when we’re trying to get published, is not about selling books or getting pieces of writing “accepted.” It’s about co-creating, creatively, the circumstances of our shared communication; it’s about talking to each other. When we’re doing that, no matter how loudly or quietly, we are doing exactly what we set out to do.

The word that keeps coming to me is “immanence.” The word has theological roots: God is in our everyday life, not in some transcendent experience outside it.

To me—at my most idealistic, which is most of the time—real satisfaction as a writer comes from being right where we are in every stage of the process, from the rapture of drafting to the headache of revising to the anxiety of submitting to the tension of preparing for publication, all the way to the strange hopeful/depressive cloud of finally sharing our writing with others and (agh!) hearing or not hearing what they think about what we’ve written.

Every act is part of this strange, quixotic practice of writing. What I’m hoping is I can keep remembering that, even as measurements like “book sales” threaten to magnetize me off course. We’re already right here—this is it! this is the thing! No need to point to something else. We’re already saturated in it.

Specifically, writers want to know you should give up on a piece of writing that you are submitting. How many rejections mean a piece is unpublishable? How much time submitting a specific story, essay, poem, or book is too long?

This is an extremely reasonable question, and it’s one that embodies many of our inner worries about submitting. We submit because we want to someone to care about our writing. We want them to believe in it the same way we believe in it. The underlying anxiety, I think, is that we might never find someone to love our writing as much as we do—especially enough to publish it.

Recently, provided helpful insight into the writer’s mentality when confronted with the many rejections we receive when submitting our writing. In his Substack post “Rejecting Rejection,” Faulkner writes:

After rejection, most people move into an “appraisal stage,” in which they take stock and formulate their next steps. It’s in those next steps where a person’s fate resides.

Do we shut down in a fit of anger? Or does that fit of anger motivate us to do better? Do we wallow in bitter jealousy, sipping spite with an extra glass or two (or three) of wine, or do we measure ourselves against others’ work and look for areas to improve? Do we go it alone, or do we see rejection as a moment to seek feedback?

Or do we indulge in a self-satisfied arrogance and decide that others are wrong? Or maybe they are wrong—maybe it behooves us to disregard their assessment and hold strong to our vision.

One important finding is that people who can frame their rejection as an opportunity for growth and self-discovery tend to recover more fully than those who see themselves as victims.

When it comes to his own writing, Faulkner views rejection as part of the creative process. It allows him to move forward with his work with the information he’s received from those rejections, growing as a writer instead of shutting down.

I’ll agree with Grant here in a big way: a similar spirit has been essential for me as a writer, even before I saw him articulate it. Rejection has become an opportunity to re-evaluate my writing on both macro and micro levels. If I’m honest, though, I’m a whole lot less judicious about it.

When rejection comes, I always have the initial disappointment: “I’m the worst! I’m a terrible writer! I’m actually getting worse as a writer on a daily basis, rather than better! I’m never going to have success and no one will ever care about me!”

On a good day, this hyperbolic reaction gives way to similarly hyperbolic positive self-talk: “I’m the best! This editor has no idea what they’re rejecting! They need to work on their taste! You have to be a true visionary to recognize how awesome my writing is and clearly this editor isn’t that!” (I’m grossing myself out with my inner monologue, but I’m trying to be real here. I have to hype myself up sometimes, OK?)

On a really good day, those two extremes eventually balance each other out, and I arrive at a third place: a real honest look at the piece of writing that I’ve been submitting.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I haven’t thought about that piece of writing in depth already. By the time I submit a piece I’ve already revised it over and over (and over) until I couldn’t stand to look at it. Then I revised it two or three more times. I spend probably 70-80% of my writing time on revision, even though it’s not my favorite thing to do. So when I send it out, it’s ready.

As I receive rejections, I might poke and prod at the piece. I change a section here, a passage there. Over time, my view of a piece changes, so I adjust it as it goes.

But after about 20-25 rejections, that’s when I sit down and get real with myself. “Does this piece really deserve my attention?” I ask. “Do I care enough about it to keep trying, even in the face of all this rejection?”

Sometimes the answer is no. Especially in my earlier life as a writer, I wrote lots of short stories that were experiments, that were fun and that I liked, but that didn’t have a deep resonance in terms of content for me. I didn’t feel committed to their message. I liked them, but I realized eventually that if they didn’t get published it didn’t bother me that much. I even wrote whole books that I submitted—including excerpts that did get published—which I gave up on because they didn’t mean as much to me as I thought they did when I first wrote them.

If you don’t care enough to keep doing it, that’s completely OK. Letting go and moving on is its own healing.

Sometimes, however, the answer to the question “Do I care enough about it to keep trying?” is an unqualified yes. That was the case with my first book, In the Antarctic Circle. When I finished the first draft of it, my friend and fellow writer told me prophetically, “This will be your first book.” I believed her. I don’t know why. It just seemed true. I believe in what I was doing with that book, even if it took me years to understand it.

In fact, getting the book published took five years of submitting, publishing excerpts, and being listed as a finalist and semifinalist in contests I thought I would never win. I started to think the book would never get published. But finally, miraculously, it found the best publisher I can imagine for it: Autumn House Press, when Yona Harvey selected it as the winner of Autumn House’s Rising Writer Contest. Was it better than the other books I had written? Probably, yeah—because I kept working on it. The real difference between In the Antarctic Circle and the other books I had written was that with In the Antarctic Circle, I didn’t stop trying. I cared enough to keep giving my time and energy to the book.

The same was the case for The Rolodex Happenings, which began as my MFA thesis and continued to evolve over almost a decade before it won Stillhouse Press’s novella contest. I simply couldn’t let the book go, even though I went long periods without working on it. The book was strange, perhaps hard for editors to stomach in its fragmented and non-chronological form. But I believed in it, so I didn’t let it go. And now—I would have long since given up on a piece of writing I cared about less—it exists in the world.

That’s my answer to the question, “Should I ever give up?” After a certain amount of rejections (set your own number!), it’s OK to honestly ask whether you should throw in the towel with that particular piece of writing. It’s OK to stop working on and submitting a piece of writing! The writing life is all about continuing to write, no matter what; it might just be time to shift your attention to a writing project you love, and to let go of one you care about less.

But if you truly believe in a piece of writing—if you trust in its importance, even if you don’t know whether someone else will believe in it—I don’t think you should ever give up. Keep revising, keep tweaking, overhaul the manuscript if you need to. Send it to another set of beta readers. Re-write it from scratch. Do whatever you have to do to share that story/essay/poem/book.

Because the only thing we have, in the face of rejection, is our own conviction. Even though rejection is the worst, that’s also what’s beautiful about it: receiving a “no” from editors helps you take ownership of what you really believe in. It helps you understand what you won’t let go of, what you’ll keep writing no matter what anyone else says about it.

If that’s what you write, you’ll stay fulfilled as a writer—and you’ll know that rejections aren’t the point or the judgement of your work. Then you can get on with the writing, knowing whose opinion matters the most: yours.

The submission process, too, was simple: I emailed the editor with my submission in the body of an email. The editor wrote back declining the initial submission, but requesting more because he had liked my writing. I responded with several flash fictions I had recently written. Within a week of my initial submission, he had accepted three of the flash fictions for the next month’s issue. I was thrilled: that first acceptance arrived like a welcome banner to the literary world, a way of saying I might really belong here.

The editor happened to be Brandon Hobson, whose Where the Dead Sit Talking was later a finalist for the National Book Award, but at the time we were just two writers without books communicating over the transom. It was 2011. My piece went up the following month. It meant so much to me. I had never seen my creative writing in print, even online, before. Brandon said he liked my writing and I could send him more anytime. It hit me in the heart. Somebody out there believed in what I was writing.

That’s the simple magic of the so-called “slush pile.” Having the opportunity to submit to elimae, and then seeing my writing published there, felt like a sign to keep going. For most writers, our first publication is a foundational event. That first publication almost always comes through the slush pile.

Complicating this magic, however, is the term “slush pile” itself. The term itself dates back to at least the 1950s, according to Jane Hu at The Awl. Originating with the physical stacks of manuscripts publishers had to sort through, “slush pile” describes the unsolicited submissions that literary magazines and presses receive from writers. The problem is, it describes them with a particular dismissiveness. Its negative connotation has not faded: consider, for example, Jean Hannah Edelstein’s 2007 article “The shocking truth about the slush pile” in The Guardian, which supposedly bared the slush pile as a container of mostly terrible writing. More recently, the significantly more thoughtful “On the Tyranny of Slush Piles” was published by Samsun Knight in The Millions. Knight describes the difficulty of differentiating and selecting writing to publish when many submission calls end up with hundreds or even thousands of responses. Given this flood of submissions, identifying which pieces to read closely is a task that editors often don’t have the resources to do.

Many editors will recognize these difficulties. I recognize them myself: when I was an editor at Denver Quarterly, I regularly read tens of submissions that showed a simple unfamiliarity with the journal. Although we were an innovative and language-focused publication, straightforward realist stories and memoirs tended to outnumber the submissions that were right for us. Many writers didn’t know much about our mission as a journal, and the large number of submissions made it difficult to identify the writers who were serious about submitting, specifically, to us.

Did I get frustrated by these submissions? Yes, sometimes. But I never wanted to make fun of these writers or decry their efforts. I didn’t even want to filter out those submissions that didn’t click with us—because there was magic in each submission, including the ones we didn’t accept. Every single person was telling their story in the way they needed to tell it. Even if they didn’t know that much about Denver Quarterly, they knew about their own experience, and I had to respect that.

I try to think of the so-called “slush pile” through this generous lens, and I think most editors do too. They wouldn’t invite submissions if they didn’t believe it was essential to consider work from any writer who chooses to share it. They know holding an open reading period might invite writing they don’t want to publish. But they do it anyway. Offering up their time and attention is an expression of faith in writers.

Equally, writers engage in an act of faith by submitting. When they put their writing out there, they trust an editor they have never met. It’s so easy for the question of acceptance to feel like a value judgment on their writing. So the writer, too, is taking a risk. Both writer and editor tap into a shared feeling: the sense that it is safe to try something, to become vulnerable, to share our work with each other.

That’s why “slush pile” doesn’t work as a name. It’s mean-spirited, when the actual people involved are engaging in a reciprocal act. It’s dismissive, when the writers and editors on each end of the process are both just trying to connect on the basis of the writing that means the most to them.

The parts of our creative and publishing lives become what we call them. That’s why it’s time to stop calling submissions the “slush pile.”

It’s time, instead, to acknowledge submissions for what they are: the source that keeps renewing our creative lives.

For a replacement phrase, I would propose something beyond “submissions queue.” “Queue” is better than the metaphorical mix of ice and snow, but it draws up the image of a line of people holding manuscripts, waiting to be considered at a small window. It makes editors sound like customer service agents. The idea of submissions lining up feels a little too close to the “pile” for me.

Instead, I propose “wellspring.” Try it out. “Wellspring,” to me, evokes a welling up. The continual power of our creativity rises like water to the surface.

A wellspring, definitionally, is “a source of continual supply.” It is the root we all draw from. It is where we can always return and find something to sustain us. Sometimes, its flow might be overwhelming. That’s contained in the word too. But we take from the well only what we need to. We draw water when we’re thirsty.

Indeed, “wellspring” acknowledges the deep tie of our creative lives with the literary magazines and presses where we envision our writing being published. We are all made of water, which means the work of the wellspring is a shared one, not only of the flow itself but of those who draw and transport it.

It would mean something to all of us to use a word, like “wellspring,” that acknowledges this shared creative work. A positive term for submissions would create space for a more openly reciprocal relationship between writer and publisher. It would allow us to keep building a literary world in which we respect each other’s work, brought together by the words we use rather than separated by them.

This line of thought, probably obviously, is related to Trump’s frantic policies and his party’s ideologies, particularly but not limited to his prioritization of the rich, which continues to expand wealth inequality in our country. As I speak about small presses—and even set myself up as a kind of “expert” on them, through my book How to Submit—it’s important to me to articulate the political commitments behind what I’m doing, as well as possible complicities. has been a real paragon for me in leaning into the political valences of small press publishing, in all of her literary activities but especially in her podcast with Zach Peckham, Index for Continuance, and her conversation with Matvei Yankelevich in the Chicago Review special issue on small press poetry in the U.S.

In a different article at Poetry magazine’s blog, Matvei Yankelevich helpfully lays out the history of small press’s relationship to the political. The four part history/essay begins with “'Power to the people's mimeo machines!' or the Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics.” It’s pretty intertwined stuff, but basically Yankelevich argues this:

The small press today is threatened by injunctions from funders and institutions to professionalize and to abandon a legacy predicated on amateurism, autonomy, and anti-capitalist and anti-institutional politics. Institutions that ostensibly support the work of the small press, in conjunction with a more professionalized literary culture of the MFA and the AWP, have served to marginalize small press practice, diminishing its political significance and redefining its boundaries, while plunging its mostly volunteer laborers deeper into debt and dependence.

What I am reflecting on is how, with my book How to Submit, I’m jumping into this particular point in history. I’m trying to figure out: What are my political commitments in speaking about small presses and literary magazines? What is my relationship to this history?

I have two possible answers to these questions regarding my own activity in the literary world, particularly vis-à-vis small presses. They’re not final answers, and they’ll continue to evolve. But I hope they engage with and further the spirit Plum and Yankelevich continue to channel; I hope they continue to make the political meaning of our publishing lives part of the conversation.

Answer 1: Examining Complicity

So there’s this one part of me that understands, and even embodies, the movement from anti-establishment publishing toward a professionalized literary practice.

When I first discovered small presses, I was young! I had few financial commitments, and I barely thought about my own economic life. The very thing that drew me to small presses was the fact that they opened space for literary possibility outside of commodification. Often, their aesthetics were a vibrant alternative to mainstream literary culture, while also being really welcoming and generous toward their own communities. I didn’t have much language for anti-capitalism or subversive definitions of literature’s role, but I felt it: small press writing just had something that mainstream, Big 5 writing didn’t. It wasn’t always polished, but that was what was beautiful about it. It avoided that streamlined, overhyped aftertaste.

And then I got older. I got married. I had a kid.

Along the way, I had also gotten an MFA and PhD. I mainly did it because they supported my writing; they paid just barely enough to live. In the case of my PhD especially, the academic community was intertwined with the small press writing I cared about. But these degrees also contributed to a shift in my priorities when it came to my writing/publishing life. They made it possible for me to conceive of making money through writing-related stuff, even though I had never pursued writing to make money.

But having my first kiddo especially did it. My thinking about my financial life totally shifted. We needed a lot more money for daycare, food, a more spacious apartment. Doing well financially wasn’t just for me anymore.

I was in a position, then, of really wanting to make money. But I really wanted to make money from this very thing I love.

Small press publishing and writing had given so much to me, on a deep-non-commodified level. And now I wanted to find a way to build a “career”—helping me achieve more gainful employment and recognizable status in the literary world—on the basis of the anti-capitalist spirit of small presses.

Around that time I lucked into an academic job teaching creative writing (as a spousal hire at Amherst College), and it felt like magic: I could actually get paid to be a writer. But my position wasn’t as secure or well-paid as I wanted; there was more I needed to do in order to make my life financially sustainable. So I continued to try to lean into ways to be institutionally “recognized” for this work I loved.

I did this partially by putting together a group of students to build the Small Press Database at Amherst College. I also wrote a proposal for my book How to Submit, not exactly in hopes that it would make money but with a desire to bring the small press conversation to a larger, more mainstream audience. And so I was suddenly in a personal, embodied position that reflected the history I was in: I was “professionalizing” my small press commitments.

I had my reasons: family and financial stability. But it was still happening.

And so I understand in a personal way the history Yankelevich describes. Because I’ve lived it, I can’t too much blame anyone who participates in it. Money has gotten tighter for everyone, and the literary world has become more accessible, fortunately, to people who might not have the resources to not make money from their literary contributions. Additionally, institutions like MFAs have become the mediating institutions for a lot of writers trying to survive. We are trying to find a way to live. But this isn’t an excuse: it’s a description of how our bodies and personal lives interact with larger histories to fuel this shift.

Answer 2: Keeping the Dream Alive

But here’s the other way I think about my involvement with small presses and contribution to the larger literary conversation. To me, this second way of thinking and acting blooms out of the awareness of my own complicity that I describe above. That awareness comes first: then, the political commitment behind the work.

As I see it, commodifying small press publishing becomes a problem when it is primarily the commodification that drives our decision-making. If we’re running small presses, writing about them, and publishing with them fundamentally as ways to make money (sometimes not through the publishing itself, but through the academic and other institutions that reward us for that involvement), we have indeed betrayed the spirit of the thing. Treating small press publishing as a business, from the POV of writers or the publishers themselves, still rings inauthentic to me.

Because my take—my whole approach, really—is that How to Submit, and the conversations I’m having around it, are an attempt to key into the anti-capitalist commitments still simmering in small presses and to bring that sensibility to a larger audience. I emphasize community and lateral connections between writers and editors in my book. I de-emphasize money, because I don’t think writing is about that.

I never say, “This is an anti-capitalist credo!” That’s not how I wanted to present the book to the wide range of writers who want guidance in their submitting process, and it isn’t the kind of language that I think works in the book. But fundamentally, my goal is to advocate for a definition of creative writing, and literary “production” more generally, that casts aside professionalization and monetization in favor of the more core sense of connection that underlies our work. To me, that sense of connection is lateral, non-hierarchical. It can’t (or shouldn’t) be commodified, even though the real world requires publishing to have a connection to the marketplace.

That core sense of relationship among readers, writers, and editors—a utopian, probably socialist dream—survives in small presses, even amid the transactions that accompany the production of books and writing. It’s what always drew me to small presses: a revolutionary aesthetic that still gives spirit to the whole project of publishing.

If we’re to live in accordance with this spirit—in accordance with our deepest values, keeping the edge of small press literature even while bringing it to a larger audience—I think we can then take a different attitude toward the colleges, universities, and other institutions that help us survive. Those institutions become frames for literary production, and they surely influence it, but they don’t control it. They aren’t the central spirit that motivates this work.

That’s why I keep believing in small presses, and why I keep believing in writing, even as history bounds and defines us. I don’t think anyone starts writing to make money or “win.” I think almost all of us start from deep place of wanting to communicate, to connect, to be equitably with another person in a space of language that, even if just for a second, resists commodification. That small but initiatory liberation continues to glow. If we keep our attention on it, it can spread like good fire.

I’ve done a few talks/features recently that relate to these ideas. One is an article called “Finding Community by Publishing With Literary Magazines and Small Presses” at Writer’s Digest. Another is a lecture called “How to Get Published—And Love Doing It” on Authors Publish, a resource for submitting writers. Both of them are trying to find ways of giving word to this collective journey, while continuing to inhabit that strange space: between professional and authentic, between “achieving” success and defining success in terms that come straight from the heart.

But this Substack is mostly about writing, so for today I wanted write a little about the process behind How to Submit, because milestones like publication day are a good chance to reflect on where these achievements begin.

There are so many starting points. Here’s the first one: Back in the early 2010s, I was first putting pen to paper and trying to be a writer. Writing was cool, but I also had this feeling that I wanted to contribute to the literary conversation, rather than lurking quietly in the shadows and trying to get my fiction published. I’ve always been this way. Back in college, for example, I went from writing for the student newspaper to becoming part of the masthead as an editor; I trained to be a peer counselor and then decided to train others; I worked as an RA for freshman because it felt good to be there for them like others had been for me. For me, being a part of a community isn’t just about showing up and getting the benefit of being there. It’s about contributing my energy and time to the thing that is giving so much to me.

So I emailed Janice Lee, who was the reviews editor at HTMLGIANT. I asked if I could start to review books. She said yes. They started sending me books (free books!). I wrote lots of reviews.

Eventually Janice invited me to be part of the literary website Entropy. She put me in charge of the “Where to Submit” list she created, which listed submission opportunities for writers each season. Over the four years I ran it, the list became a pretty extensive, well-known thing. That was when I realized how much it meant—both to writers and the editors of lit mags and small presses—to be connected together in a community setting. I wasn’t the only one who was longing to be an active part of my literary contexts. Everyone wanted to connect, and so many of us did it through submitting our writing (or publishing others’ writing).

I glimpsed this same community feeling in person a few years later, when I started teaching a course called “How to Submit” for GrubStreet. In that course, which ran many times over the next few years, I realized that it wasn’t just resources or information people wanted. Me talking my butt off for three hours didn’t really serve my students. Instead, it was our shared conversations around submitting that really resonated. It was being vulnerable and authentic together as we talked about our goals, fears, and hopes surrounding publication.

It was in those conversations that I understood submitting our writing needed to be inspiring, uplifting, good. Seeking publication needed to give energy, not take energy from us. I had lucked into that feeling in my own publishing life, and sharing that feeling with others was a gift I wanted to give. That’s what I wanted to get across in my teaching.

A little while after that, the idea came to me as if it had been there along: I needed to write a book about this.

I never thought I’d write a how-to guide. My books before now have been wild and unpredictable, sometimes (my mom reminds me) at the edge of comprehensibility. But I saw that I could bring that same eager energy—a desire to arrive at the authentic heart of things—to the question of our shared journey toward publishing our writing. I could help people get what they really wanted, on a deep level, out of their writing and publishing lives.

I saw that I could give this book (and the energy in it) as a gift to all the writers who wanted guidance. I could give this a conversation like a story: a place to enter.

What the hell, I thought. I’ll try it.

But publishing a book is ridiculously hard and uncertain! In the case of How to Submit, I knew it would have to be “sold” on proposal, which meant I’d have to write three chapters plus a bunch of extra material like a competitive analysis, chapter outline, and marketing plan. I began the proposal without ever really admitting I was working on the book. I’d try the proposal with a few agents, I told myself, but it would probably be rejected. The good thing about a proposal was you didn’t even have to write the whole book before trying to get it published.

I wrote every day, which is just what I do. The initial chapters started to take shape. I remember especially Christmas, when I huddled in the laundry room at my sister-in-law’s house during my kiddo’s naps. I had to get my concentration where I could get it. After about three months, the proposal was finished.

I typed up a query. Like I said, I figured it was worth a shot. But as Grant Faulkner has recently and thoughtfully noted, rejection is the rule as a writer. I didn’t set my heart on the book getting picked up.

But then, somehow, magically, it happened. The most wonderful agent, Reiko Davis, wrote back to me and offered to represent the book. Then, magically again, about a month later, she sold the book to New World Library, a visionary publisher that publishes writing guides alongside new age titles.

I was filled with delight and the surprise that comes with something I’ve put my heart into being recognized in the world.

And then, almost immediately, I was like: Oh wow. Now I have to write this.

So I procrastinated really hard for a couple months. I gave myself permission to be terrified that I sold a book I hadn’t yet written, which I now had to deliver on.

Finally, in summer of 2023, I had no more excuses. It was time. I put my head down and worked on the book.

I’ll spare you the play-by-play of my alternately smooth and very un-smooth writing process. Basically, I kept writing every day. Sometimes I wore myself out with the writing. I wanted a break, but a break wasn’t really possible given the timeline we had set up. I finished a draft by early 2024. I worked on edits and production stuff with New World Library for the rest of the year.

Then 2025 hit. Suddenly we had a cover, and we were promoting the thing, and now, somehow, we’re here.

The strangeness of the whole process has only now caught up to me. How to Submit began as a very quiet, very insistent idea. Specifically, the idea was “I can’t believe this book doesn’t exist yet. I could write it. Maybe I’ll try.”

And then I just sort of did it.

That’s the part I can’t believe. I did a little bit every day, with the hopes that at the end something good would exist.

And now—I don’t know if it’s good—but it’s a real-life book. You can hold it.

Along the way, I have had SO MUCH help. Janice Lee has always been the biggest guiding light for me in the literary world. In fact, everyone I talked to through my work at Entropy did so much to influence my view about what it means to find a home for our writing. So did the people in my “How to Submit” classes over the years. Reiko Davis is a stellar advocate and agent. Jason Gardner and everyone at New World Library have been super supportive and good at what they do. Fauzia Burke has been committed to helping me promote How to Submit. And these magical people took the time to read the book and write blurbs for it: Jennifer Acker, Dariel Suarez, Hilary Plum, Kathleen Rooney, Ruth Dickey, Grant Faulkner, Robert Lee Brewer. At Amherst College, Judy Frank and Kirun Kapur have helped me find a real-life writerly home. And of course, Thirii and our kiddo (now kiddos!) have made it possible for me to live this life, which includes being a writer, in some kind of amazing harmony.

Every single step on the way to publishing this book could only happen because someone else showed up and cared. I am more aware than ever, these days, of how interdependent our lives are. In the context of that interdependence, I’ll admit that I’m also proud of myself. I hope I have added to the conversation.

So now, if you want, you can buy the dang book:

Bookshop

Amazon

New World Library

Thank you to everyone who’s been there along the way, and everyone who’s here now. I don’t know what to say on a day like this except: The book is out of my hands.

That’s the big thing to celebrate on this publication day, I think. I’m not in charge of How to Submit anymore, even though I’m still going to follow along close at its heels. It gets to go out there and live its life in the world.

P.S. If you want to read/hear more about How to Submit, and had me on their podcast Write-Minded last week: you can listen to the episode here. Grant also took the time out to provide a blurb for How to Submit, in which he says a lot of really kind stuff, including, “This isn't just a book about submitting and publishing. It's a book that speaks to the very heart of what it means to write.”

I also had the opportunity to contribute a guest post to ’s website, an essential publishing resource that most every writer eventually finds their way to. Jane is the author of The Business of Being a Writer, another great book about making a living as a writer that is due out in a second edition this April. My article at her site is called “The Perfect Guide for Where to Submit Your Writing (Does Not Exist).”

That’s why I wrote How to Submit. I wanted a book about the process of sending out our writing that channels all the good energy I’ve received from literary magazines and small presses over the years. I wanted a book about publication that prioritizes keeping writers inspired. It’s so easy for the submission process to get us down or to distract us from the writing itself. I wanted make a manual that would help us feel at home in our publishing lives.

How to Submit will be shipping in late February, and you can order it now:

Order on Bookshop

Order on Amazon

Order from New World Library

If you don’t have the book yet, I have also created this Substack post in order to give you a start as a submitter. This post will guide you toward essential resources for submitting your writing, and even more importantly, it will help you think through what it means to send out your work.

Subscribe now

A Few Pieces of Advice

There are many reasons you might have arrived at this page: Because you’re in a college class and you’ve produced a piece you’re proud of that you’d like to try sending out. Because you’re working on your MFA and want to explore the publishing side of the writing life. Because you’ve been writing on your own for years, and you’re finally ready to take the leap of sharing your work. Or maybe you’ve submitted before, but you want some guidance for the process. Maybe you want to explore pathways to publishing that don’t involve querying agents. Maybe you’re looking for community and moral support in the act of sending out your work.

Thank you for reading, no matter who you are. I think it’s important to seek out meaningful support for the act of seeking publication.

It’s also important to think about the big picture before we get into the details. Here are four pieces of big-picture advice for your submissions, which I believe will allow you to pursue publication with happiness and heart:

1. Stay in touch with your goals.

It’s easy to get caught up in the whole “publish in the fanciest venue you can find” rat race. Prestige is the easiest measurable rubric for choosing where to submit. But prestige is not the most important thing! The most important thing is what you want out of submitting.

Take some time to reflect on what it means to you to share your writing. If you are clear-eyed about that, it’ll help your inner compass bring you to a place that satisfies you on a deeper level.

2. Slow down. You don't have to do it all at once.

The expansive landscape of literary magazines and small presses can be overwhelming! It’s OK. If you choose to do this work in the long term, you’ll eventually come to a wide knowledge of the submission process and the venues you want to prioritize. But you don’t just start with that knowledge. Instead, you’ll probably feel like you’re jumping into the deep end at first.

Don’t worry. You can send your writing out a little at a time. You can send it out a couple of times and then take a break, or slow down, or change your approach altogether. You can submit at your own pace, your own style. No one gets to tell you what your trajectory should be except you.

3. Expect rejection.

Rejection really is the rule, whether you’re a writer with multiple books or someone who is just starting out. I get that it’s hard not to take a “no” answer personally. But the person whose relationship to the writing really matters is you. If you believe in your writing, keep working on it and keep sending it out. Eventually (it may take years, even decades), the story you want to tell will find a home. Years and/or decades sounds like a long time, but it’s not uncommon for reaching your publication goals to this long. We’re all in this together, collectively waiting for that next acceptance, and sometimes it takes a really long time.

A good way to avoid focusing on the outcome of your submissions is to set process goals, not accomplishment goals. If you do this, you’ll remain in charge of your writing life, rather than giving the power to judge our writing to others.

4. Only submit in ways that give back to your writing.

Here’s my biggest piece of advice: Avoid any submission practice that makes you feel emptied out, tired, and discouraged about your writing. Instead, find a way to seek publication that motivates and inspires your work.

There are many ways to do this:

• Read widely, exploring a variety of literary magazines and publishers, as “research” but really to inspire an expansive sense of the possibilities for your own writing.

• Set aside a specific day, time, and space where you submit. Make yourself tea, get yourself treats, and relax. Invite friends over for a submitting party. Use submitting as an opportunity to connect.

• Organize your writing schedule around external deadlines and publication possibilities, a long as they feel like positive motivations.

• Get involved by contributing your labor to publications. For example, you can volunteer as a submissions reader. Getting involved helps you build community and become an authentic part of the publishing landscape.

Only pursue publication as much as it inspires you. Once it starts to become stressful or worrisome, forget about it. Focus on writing for you.

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Resources for Submitting Writers

Now I’ll share a few posts that will guide you step by step through the process of submitting your writing.

I’ll remind you again: All of this can be overwhelming, but you do not have to make a big deal out of submitting. I’m sharing a lot of information here, but the only thing you have to do to submit is 1) write a piece you really care about, 2) revise the heck out of it, and 3) send it to a venue that’s open for submissions.

That’s it. Everything else here is meant to support you, but you only need to read it as much as it is helpful to you.

Here are the posts that will guide you through the process (or you can buy a copy of How to Submit to get a fuller picture of what I recommend).

The first bit of information you’ll probably want is how to find literary magazines and small presses to submit to:

If you’re sending out a full book, you may also be interested in deepening your research of small presses or learning more about submitting to university presses.

Next you might wonder: How do I make a decision about where to submit my writing? This post should help:

Once you’ve reached the submission portal of a venue where you’d like to send your writing, you might wonder what your cover letter should look like. Here’s how to write a cover letter when submitting to a literary magazine:

I also think it’s essential to organize your documents and files right off the bat. If you’re curious about efficient ways to keep track of your submissions and your research about publication, read this:

Finally, it’s good to stay inspired as a writer and reader if you’re seeking to grow your presence in the literary world. That’s why my Substack has several other sections, including prompts for finding new ways into your writing, mini-interviews with writers who publish with small presses, and regular writing advice for staying true to your creative process.

More submitting advice will appear here as I write more and answer questions. You are cordially invited to follow along.

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Pep Talk

The last thing I’ll tell you is this: Getting your writing published is a long process. It takes time. It might never work out exactly the way you want it to.

That’s OK, because if you stick with it, something will happen, and that something might even be more beautiful than what you envisioned. The thing that happens will ultimately become your own.

That’s why the community aspect of literary magazine and small press submissions never stops resonating for me. This is how you get your writing published, yes. But it’s not strictly a deal, a quid pro quo. Instead it’s a place where we build the connections that will sustain us over the course of our writing lives.

And I’ll say it one more time: You don’t have to do everything at once. You don’t even have to do everything ever. You can just try submitting writing you care about to a venue you like, and see what happens.

Who knows? It might even click on your first try. Even if it doesn’t, you’ll have taken the first step. All the possibilities follow that.

That’s why this post exists: to help you decide between the hundreds (even thousands!) of possible submission venues. While it may be tempting to fling your writing out to the very first publications you find, you will have a more fulfilling experience of submitting by thinking through your strategy beforehand.

Like a few other of my posts on this Substack, some of this post is excerpted from How to Submit, my guide for writers, which is due out February 25, 2025. For a deeper exploration of how to make your submission decisions, you can pre-order the book at your local bookstore or online:

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Strategies for All of Us

Some strategies will apply to almost anyone’s submission process. Understanding the rough shape of these questions will allow you to make the decisions that best suit your goals as a writer.

Tiered Submissions

Part of choosing where to submit is deciding how many venues to submit to at a time. You have to consider a number of questions: How selective is each publication? What is each publication’s response time? Should I wait for my favorite publication to get back to me before I submit to those I’m less interested in? How can I make sure my writing gets published in a reasonable amount of time?

It’s exhausting and, for most of us, unsustainable, to agonize over these questions every time we submit. This is why the logic of tiers reigns for many submitters.

With tiered submissions, you submit in small groups of publications based on your preference for those publications. Your first tier includes publications where you would most like to be published. If the first tier doesn’t work out, you submit to the next tier, which has slightly less preferable publications. If that doesn’t work out, you submit to the next tier, and so on. The only calculation involved, once you’ve chosen your tiers, is when to send out the next round of submissions.

Here’s how Clifford Garstang approaches it:

Tiering is an aid to simultaneous submissions that groups the best magazines together in the top tier, somewhat less prestigious magazines in the next tier, and so on. It is advisable to submit work to the top tier first, or at any rate within the same tier, so that an acceptance by one, which requires withdrawal from the others, won’t be painful. (If you get an acceptance from a lower-tier magazine while you’re still waiting to hear from a higher-tier magazine, that could lead to a difficult withdrawal. Withdrawal is ethically required, but what if the higher-tier magazine was about to accept the piece?)

Garstang’s approach is prestige-based, which is what led him to create his helpful literary magazine rankings. But there are many other ways to develop your own tiers, based on your goals and preferences.

The reason I like tiers is that grouping submissions in this way takes the pressure off. You don’t have to constantly think about submissions, reevaluating your strategy with every new development. You just have to submit to the next tier when you’ve heard back from the previous one.

How Many Publications to Include in Each Tier

Part of tiering is deciding how many magazines or presses to submit to in one go. How many publications you submit to comes down to how long you’re willing to wait.

The fewer places you submit to, the more selective you can be about who publishes your writing and the longer your wait for acceptance will be. The more places you submit to, the more likely you’ll get an acceptance quickly. Submitting too selectively can mean waiting years for an acceptance. A middle ground is to submit to five to eight literary magazines or presses at a time. More than eight risks feeling like “carpet-bombing,” the term often used to describe submitting indiscriminately to lots of publications at once.

When to Send Out the Next Tier of Submissions

Response times are ever-fluctuating, even with a single publication, meaning you can never be certain when you will receive a response. Since waiting for every single venue to get back to you could take over a year, it often makes sense to send out your next tier before every venue in the previous tier has responded.

This means that your tiers may blur into one another over time. If I’ve heard back from three of five magazines in my first tier after six months, for example, I would send out to my second tier in order to ensure that the piece still has a chance of being published relatively soon. Once I’ve run through several tiers, I might even stop tiering my submissions, instead submitting to one or two new magazines for every magazine that rejects me. At this stage, I try to have each piece out at four or five venues at any one time.

For Book Submissions

Tiering gets more complicated when it comes to book submissions. Many presses open sporadically, or only once a year, and most take at least nine months to respond to submissions. This means you can really only submit your book to one tier of submissions a year. If you are too picky, you might wait many years to receive an acceptance.

This is where you have to be realistic with your goals. Which is more important to you, limiting submissions to a few select presses or seeing your book published soon? If you want your book to be published in the next few years, you may have to be less particular about where you submit. A middle way would be to take one year to be incredibly selective about your submissions, take a second year to be a little selective, and take a third year to not be selective at all. That would put you on three yearlong tiers for your submissions.

If Your Work Is Declined

Rejection is a normal part of submitting your writing. You will receive far more rejections that you receive acceptances, even if you are a successful writer.

Not all rejections are equal. If your rejection letters are peppered with encouraging notes, consider it a sign that editors like your writing but that it just hasn’t clicked perfectly yet. Don’t be shy when continuing to send out a piece that has gotten a good number of positive rejections. It might need a rewrite or a few more rounds of judicious revision, but something there has editors excited about your work.

If you’re getting a lot of rejections without any encouraging notes, it might be time to kick your contingency plan into gear. Ask yourself: How much do I believe in this piece of writing? Is it worth it to keep going back to it over and over, revising, resubmitting, and playing the waiting game? If it is worth it — if you really believe in the piece — stay with it as long as you can. But if you prefer to work on something else, if you feel comfortable letting that piece go, do let it go. Tabling a manuscript can feel like failure. Think of it instead as a kind of success. Moving on gives you a chance to reprioritize. Choose the writing that matters most to you.

For more on how to prioritize and keep working even in the face of rejection, consider my advice in a previous post: “Set process goals, not accomplishment goals.”

How to Follow Up on Positive Rejections

There is magic in an editor reading your work and, even if it they can’t publish it, making an effort to support your writing. Positive rejections are an investment in your future, a way of saying you’re on the right track.

Positive rejections also give you a leg up in the submissions process. If you mention in your cover letter that you have received an encouraging rejection from the publication where you’re submitting, editors take note of this fact and pay special attention to your work. Always include a note in the first line of your cover letter if you have received an encouraging rejection from that publication in the past.

Know Thyself

Your experiences and intersection of identities may also inform your strategy for submitting. Editors regularly note the disparity in submissions they receive across gender lines, for example. Men tend to flood the submission portals. As per the influential VIDA Count, men are also overrepresented in the proportion of genders published in literary magazines. These kinds of disparities persist, even though parts of the literary world are working to change them, and it’s worth thinking about how they affect your submission practice.

In the early years of my writing life, my own submissions followed this pattern, influenced by my own experiences as a person with privilege. I was much too quick to submit. I would write, quickly revise, and then submit in a flurry of self-confidence. Only after several years did I realize that this process didn’t result in writing I felt good about, and it didn’t show adequate respect to editors. I needed to slow my process down.

Do you tend to be overconfident in your work, sharing it before you’re ready? If so, tap the brakes when you first decide you want to submit. On the other hand, do you tend to be overprotective of your writing? Are you hesitant to submit it? In that case, consider sending your work out earlier. Changing that last turn of phrase might not be worth it if it means never letting your work see the light.

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Your Personal Strategy

The above strategies will help you navigate common questions in the submissions process. But when it comes to personalizing your submission strategy, every writer will have their own set of goals.

What follows are several possible strategies for structuring your tiers. You can mix and match these as desired, as well as add your own strategies.

Prestige

Prestigious publications have an undeniably magnetic draw. These achievements can fuel your writing, since they are more likely to result in paid writing opportunities and the expectation that you will write more.

There’s nothing wrong, therefore, with aiming for prestigious venues. But it’s always wise to remember the trade-offs. The more well-known a venue is, the longer response times are and the lower the likelihood of acceptance. If you’re aiming high, you should be prepared to wait a very long time to hear back about your writing and to submit many times, perhaps over many years, before receiving an acceptance.

It is also wise to see prestigious publications as more than just rubber stamps of approval. Like other publications, they are part of a conversation. There is community and shared sensibility, even at the top.

If you’re submitting to these venues, make sure you’ve read the writing they publish and you see your own writing as part of that conversation. How would you define the personal resonance—the writerly sense of connection—that draws you to these venues, aside from their prominence?

Working Your Way Up

What if you don’t feel ready to submit to prestigious publications? Maybe you want to get some publications under your belt before trying the best-known magazines. Maybe you want to focus on building literary community during the earlier stages of submitting.

“Working your way up” means starting small and following your submission practice as it grows. You may eventually want to publish with prestigious journals and presses, but for now your goals are to see your work appear in the world and to lay the groundwork for your future writing and its publication.

When following this strategy, begin by submitting to small and/or less exclusive literary magazines. As you connect with publications that feature writing you like — and as they connect with your writing — you’ll grow more confident. You will begin to find your place in the literary world without relying on prestige to define you.

Eventually, you may begin to submit to more prestigious publications. This will feel like a natural progression, an act of growing alongside your writing. If and when the time comes, you will already feel grounded as a writer and submitter. Prestige is just the cherry on top.

Online or Local Community

You can also choose a submission strategy that puts community at the forefront. This strategy recognizes the importance of the specific editors you publish with, the particular readers you write for, and the writers you connect with in the real world.

If you want to focus on in-person community, submit to magazines, presses, and literary organizations in your geographical area. Attend readings. Buy local zines. Help assemble chapbooks with a local publisher. In-person writing groups, reading series, and literary festivals abound. Publishing locally is a way to stay grounded and connected with these active literary communities.

The internet helps you connect even more widely, even though it can feel more diffuse than in-person community. Online clusters of writers and editors often form through loosely related sets of publications across the country. Cadres of writers and publications create ongoing conversations on social media. Through online connections, you can expand your reach to writers who work in the same subgenre as you, who write about a related subject area, or who share your identity or experiences.

To find the in-person or online communities that are meaningful to you, begin with writers you already like and publications you already know. Follow the breadcrumbs: Where have those writers published? Who else have those publications featured? Where do these interconnected threads lead you?

Personalized, Specific Goals

You can also make room in your strategy for your specific, very personal goals. For example, I tend to be attentive to the graphic design of the literary magazines and presses where I publish. It’s important to me that my writing is presented in a way that is professional, eye-catching, and readable. My decisions about where to submit, therefore, are highly influenced by the look of each publication.

Your aims will likely differ. Don’t be shy about choosing where to submit based on what is meaningful to you. It’s easy to get caught up in where you “should” submit. Instead, submit where you really want to, even if your goals are strange and secret and only you understand them.

The Joy of Submitting

All this talk of strategy and goal setting can feel overly calculated, especially when we are submitting writing that is close to our heart. Our writing blooms from a place of passion and intuition, so why should the process of working toward publication be so cut-and-dried?

That’s why it makes sense to choose a strategy that prioritizes joy. You can still make a plan, use tiered submissions, and be smart about how you’re sending out your writing. While doing all this, you can decide where to submit on the basis of sheer enthusiasm. When you find a publication you like, even if you don’t know why you like it, embrace your intuition. Welcome the parts of submitting that light you up.

In practice, you will likely use a combination of several strategies to submit your writing. There is no need to limit yourself to one style of submitting.

Allow your strategies to respond to your writing, your needs, and your hopes. Forget about what you “should” do. Choose the path that keeps you writing.

As a reminder, pick up How to Submit if you want a more systematic, comprehensive guide to submitting in the same spirit of what I’ve posted here. Good luck!

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The reality, however, is that your literary magazine cover letter does need to do a few essential things:

• communicate your interest in the venue where you are submitting.

• present you as a reasonable, thoughtful writer whom editors would be able to work with easily.

• give the basic facts about your piece: genre, word count, and special circumstances surrounding the writing such as a previous positive rejection, a themed issue, or your relationship with one of the editors.

• honestly represent who you are through your bio.

• display gratitude to the editors for reading your work.

This doesn’t sound like a tall order, but it means you have to find a balance between overdoing it and underdoing it, between saying too much and not saying enough. A successful cover letter walks that thin line. Instead of convincing editors to accept a piece, it allows them to consider your writing on their own terms. While it describes your accomplishments, it does not brag or seem over the top. Being professional in a cover letter means offering what you have clearly and concisely, then stepping back to let the editors do their work.

FYI, this advice is drawn from my book How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses. The book gives lots of additional details, support, and resources for writers and submitters. It comes out next month, and you can pre-order now!

The Parts of a Cover Letter

1. Salutation

In the first line of your cover letter, you already have a chance to show you’ve done your research on the publication you are submitting to. Find the names of the editors and include them in your salutation. For a more formal submission, you can use the editor’s full name, which helps you avoid applying inaccurate honorifics:

Dear Firstname Lastname,

For a more casual tone, including when you have a preexisting relationship with the literary magazine or press where you are submitting, you can simply use the editor’s first name:

Dear Firstname,

A personalized salutation lets editors know you’ve taken the time to find out who they are; it also bridges the impersonal gap created by submission managers.

Address the editors of the genre you’re submitting to. Find the fiction editor(s) if you are submitting fiction, nonfiction editor(s) if you are submitting nonfiction, poetry editor(s) if you are submitting poetry, and so on. If there are no specific genre editors, address the person (or people) at the top of the masthead. If you can’t find their names, it is fine to write, “Dear nonfiction editors,” “Dear fiction editors,” or “Dear poetry editors.”

2. Introduction and Essential Info

I recommend maintaining a cover letter template you can copy and paste into each submission. The introductory paragraph of your cover letter, however, is one paragraph you can’t standardize. It will change based on what you are submitting, where you are submitting, and your relationship with the publication.

The introductory paragraph of the cover letter should include the following information, in roughly this order. You do not have to include all this information. If a line doesn’t apply to you, leave it out.

• Positive rejection? Inform the editors if you have received a positive rejection from them in the recent past. This should be the first line of your cover letter, after the salutation. You want to make sure the editors see it.

  • Example: “Thank you very much for your encouraging words about the last submission I sent.”

  • Example: “Thank you for your kind comments on my last two submissions and your invitation to submit again.”

• Connection? Inform the editors if you have a personal relationship to the publication or an explicit invitation to submit from one of the editors.

  • Example: “I appreciated getting to meet you this spring and am grateful for your invitation to submit.”

  • Example: “I am a former contributor from issue ____, and I thought this new essay might also be right for your pages.”

• The logistics. Give the basic details of the piece. This information should be in every cover letter.

  • Title: Put the title in quotation marks.

  • Genre: Say whether you are submitting a short story, essay, or poems. You can be more specific, using subcategories such as flash fiction and lyric essay, but this is usually not necessary. If you are sending multiple shorter pieces, such as poems or flash fiction, let them know how many you are sending.

  • Word Count: Round to the next 100 words.

  • Example: “Thank you very much for considering ‘Title,’ a 2,800-word short story.”

  • Example: “I am writing to submit three poems, ‘Title 1,’ Title 2,’ and ‘Title 3.’”

• Your (or your writing’s) relationship to the publication. The first paragraph is also an opportunity to mention the qualities of the publication that motivated you to submit. You only need to include this if you have something unique and substantive to say. Generalized praise for a publication is not necessary. You can also mention upcoming themed issues that are relevant to your piece.

  • Example: “I am submitting this to you in particular because of your magazine’s focus on ____. This essay is particularly interested in ____.”

  • Example: “As a longtime subscriber, I thought this might be a good fit for your consistent mix of ____ and ____.”

  • Example: “I thought these poems might be a fit for your ____ issue, since they revolve around ____.”

• Background. Give context for the piece of writing you are submitting. This can be helpful when you want editors to understand your depth of engagement with the subject matter or personal relationship to the material.

  • Example: “This short story is part of my collection in progress, ____, which tells the story of ____.”

  • Example: “These poems grow out of my time in ____, where I lived recently on a ____ fellowship.”

Less is more when it comes to cover letters, and the introductory paragraph is no exception. The main job of this paragraph is to introduce your submission to the editors who will be reading it and remark on any special circumstances. You’re aiming for connection, not comprehensiveness. Two to three sentences is plenty.

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3. Bio

The author biography, which comes after the introductory paragraph of the cover letter, is also a balancing act. On the one hand, you want to convey your seriousness about writing and accomplishments. On the other, you don’t want to exhaust your reader with a laundry list of publications and achievements. Include the highlights of your writing life and not much more.

This means that if you’ve published in fifteen lit mags, truncate the list to the four or five most impressive ones. If you have an MFA, include it, but leave out your undergraduate degree. You can also include publications you help edit, literary organizations you contribute to, reading series you organize, and other forms of literary involvement. Information like how long you have been writing is not necessary. The primary goal of the author bio is to place you in literary context and to help editors understand where you are in your writing career.

Here are a several templates you can use when constructing your bio. You will likely add to, subtract from, and otherwise alter these templates.

If you have no publications:

I live in ____, where I work as a ____. This would be my first published ____.

If you have a few publications:

My fiction/nonfiction/poetry has appeared in ____ and ____. I live in ____, where I work as a ____.

If you have several publications and a couple of fellowships or residencies, along with additional involvement in the literary community:

My fiction/nonfiction/poetry has appeared in ____, ____, ____, and ____, among others, and has been supported by ____ and ____. I live in ____, where I run the reading series ____.

If you have a book, several publications, an MFA, and editorial positions or other forms of literary involvement:

I am the author of ____. My fiction/nonfiction/poetry has also appeared in ____, ____, ____, and ____, among others. I am an editor for ____, and I run a local writing organization, ____. I received my MFA from ____ and live in ____.

These templates are written in the first person because I flows better in a cover letter, but you can use third-person for a more formal approach. Some submission guidelines ask explicitly for third-person. If you are using a third-person bio in your cover letter, I would precede the bio with, “Here is a short biography.”

As you write and publish, your bio will inevitably change. Keep updating it in your cover letter template by adding new publications while revising for concision. Reading other author’s bios is a great way to fine-tune your bio-writing sensibility.

4. Sign-Off

The sign-off paragraph isn’t strictly necessary, but I include it to make the cover letter more generous and less curt. For me, this paragraph is an opportunity to express my gratitude to the editors for reading what I’ve submitted.

A few examples:

Thank you for considering ____.

Thank you again for considering ____. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you for your consideration, and I hope you’re doing well.

I use the last example only if I personally know the editors. Additionally, you can use this paragraph to inform editors you are sending a simultaneous submission, which some publications ask for in their submission guidelines.

5. Valediction

Keep it simple. “Sincerely” or “All best” will do the job. Sign off with your full name, since you’ve likely addressed the editors with theirs, unless you know them personally.

Tailor these templates to your own style, but don’t worry about making them exciting, interesting, or funny. As with formatting, a cover letter should be largely unremarkable, which makes room for the submission itself to shine. Remind editors that you are grateful for their work, that you know the rules of submissions, and that you are a real person who would be nice to work with. Then press Submit!

In other words, it’s that time of the year that encourages writers to stack themselves up against other writers. It’s a recipe for feeling great, if you win the thing, and for feeling not-so-great, if you’re one of the much larger number of writers who did not win the thing.

That’s why it’s also a good time to go back to a frequently asked question:

How important is prestige when I am trying to publish my writing? Should I only publish with the “right” presses or magazines?

This question is a big one, in part because it is the first way we learn how to categorize submission venues. It’s much easier to distinguish between literary magazines using Clifford Garstang’s Pushcart Prize rankings, for example, than it is to make a careful study of each magazine based on how well their aesthetic lines up with your own.

When we first come to writing, we often dream of winning awards and being widely read. We want to appear in the most famous venues. And why not? We want to be read. We want to be seen for the work we do.

But seeking prestige isn’t always—isn’t even usually—the way to achieve your goals for your writing. Does prestige matter? I’ve got three answers for you.

Answer 1: Absolutely Not

This is the answer I really want to give you: No! Who cares about prestige? You can’t measure art in a hierarchical way. Art is its own thing, independent of our pecking orders and best-of lists.

It’s clear, especially if you read a book like Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin (which I’m currently in the middle of and having my mind blown by), that how successful your writing is has to do with a lot more than just the writing itself. In the old days, it was about being born with the right race and gender, in the right place, with the right amount of money, going to the right schools, and knowing the right people. These days all of those things help, but it’s also about satisfying the desired metrics of corporate publishers who want to sell as many books as possible. Publishing is a business, even for well-regarded independent publishers that are run as non-profits. This means that whether or not you achieve notoriety—the prestigious publishers, awards, and connections—isn’t a judgement on your writing. There is great stuff that comes out of prize-winning publishing circles, yes. But not all of it is good, and writing that is good definitely doesn’t always rise to the “top.”

Because you can’t control the amount of prestige you get, it’s best to build a different definition of success. Janice Lee’s article “Books Are Not Products, They Are Bridges: Challenging Linear Ideas of Success in Literary Publishing” in Vol. 1 Brooklyn is my go-to alternative to our understandable desires for money and fame. Connection and community are the things that really sustain us, not institutional recognition.

Personally, my definition of success is being able to get up every morning and write. That’s my goal: to be able to continue to be a writer. If I’m able to use my writing to achieve that goal, I’m a successful writer.

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Answer 2: Yes, Fine

That said, prestige is a thing in the world that everyone has to negotiate with. That’s why, if we do take this question seriously, we should ask it on a practical level: Will prestige help you reach your writing goals?

For some of us, the answer is yes. If your goal is to make money, share your writing with a wide audience, and receive extensive editorial and marketing support for your writing, pursuing prestige is not a bad idea. Better-funded publications will be able to provide these things, and prestige usually correlates with better funding.

The problem is when we begin to identify too strongly with the prestige we are seeking: when we begin to define ourselves by our level of achievement. If all we can say about our writing is what other people say about it, we’re setting ourselves up to be tied to an external world of flux and uncertainty, which will make us miserable. Even if we achieve great levels of recognition, we’ll always be waiting for the other shoe to drop. Our relationship to writing ceases to be up to us. It becomes up to everyone else.

If you do prioritize prestige in your writing life, remember why you’re doing it. You and your writing are already enough. Well-known publishers, awards, fellowships, and residencies just enable you to focus more on your writing, usually by providing you with the money you need to find more time to write. At the end of the day, no matter how much praise you get, you’ll always end up face to face with the page again.

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Answer 3: Think About Prestige through a Community Lens

When you strip away everything we’ve attached to them, the writers, publishers, and readers who pursue prestige in publishing are just another community. They’re not better or worse than anyone else. Instead, they’re like all the other loose coalitions of people that practice certain strategies in publishing and writing.

Over here, you have your poets stitching together chapbooks in their basement, inviting their friends to help in exchange for a few beers.

Over here, you have your fiction writers exploring the limits of language while still involving themselves with narrative, publishing short stories in edgy literary magazines and novels with small presses.

Over here, you have your memoir writers publishing with university presses, who are building new rooms in the growing house of creative nonfiction.

Over here, you have the people publishing with Big 5 houses, connecting with publishers through their agents, and reading their fellow Big 5 authors.

At first glance, we might see these different communities through the lens of scale, attention, and their access to the resources of the literary world. It’s true that writers with bigger print runs and wider recognition sell more books. They get more readers, numerically speaking. But at the end of the day, each of their acts of public authorship is an act of connection, just like every writer’s. Connection—those moments when one person’s words meet another’s—arises for them just like it arises for the rest of us.

What kind of connection do you want for your writing? How would you like to come in contact with other people who are committed to the written word? What conversations do you want to have, and when, and where, and with whom? What kind of connections will really sustain you?

When you make a decision about how seriously to take prestige, consider the kind of community you need in your life. And you don’t have to choose just one community. Engaging with multiple publishing contexts can be a key tool in helping you get you what you need out of sharing your work.

As you leap into the process, remember that the point is to feel good. It’s easy to forget that. As you build a relationship to the prestige, it’s OK to acknowledge the pressures of the world and adjust for them. But don’t lose yourself in the process. Whatever you do in writing and submitting, it should be for you.

If you’re submitting, a consistently funded publisher means more labor on behalf of your book as well as more resources to print and promote the book. Depending on your job, it also might mean a greater sense of prestige. If you work at a college, for example, publishing a book with a university press might mean more to your colleagues and higher-ups than publishing a book with an independent press who is only recognized by fellow creative writers.

Submitting to university presses is similar in some ways to submitting to small presses. For one, you can do it without an agent (although agents do submit to university presses). As with small presses, you’ll want to make yourself familiar with the university press’s catalog and think about how and whether your book will fit into their publishing practice. It will also be up to you to do most of the promotion yourself once the book is published.

In other respects, however, the submission process will be significantly different. Many university presses require submissions to go through a process of peer review, whereby fellow creative writers who are not associated with the press read your work and judge whether it is ready for publication. With creative writing manuscripts, you will usually receive an acceptance or expression of serious interest before the peer review process, even if your book must eventually be approved through peer review.

The main difference is that, especially if you are submitting nonfiction, you will have to write a proposal for your book. A proposal is an extensive document that will likely take you months to work on, if you take it seriously. At the bottom of this post, I give you several resources for how to write a proposal, as well as a brief description of what presses will be looking for in a cover letter.

Most of this post, however, will focus on how to find university presses to submit to.

How to Find University Presses that Publish Creative Writing

Finding university presses that publish creative writing is harder than finding independent small presses because university presses don’t publish exclusively creative writing. University presses are typically built on a foundation of scholarly/academic/critical writing, and if they publish creative writing it’s just a small part of their overall catalog.

This means university presses aren’t as active in the creative writing landscape as indie presses are; it also means university presses’ creative titles can get lost amid the scholarship that forms the bulk of their publications. This can be a good thing, however, for those of us looking to publish our creative writing. University presses fly under the radar as places to submit, and their potential as publishers are often quite a bit greater than their profile would lead you to believe.

Below are several ways you can go about finding university presses to submit to, which follow similar steps to my guidance for finding literary magazines and independent small presses but direct you to entirely different resources.

1. Ranked Lists

Unlike literary magazines, there are no specific rankings for the “best” university presses that publish creative writing. If you want to gain a sense of the university presses that get the most attention, you’ll have to turn toward the prizes given to already-published books. You can use any prize from the Lambda Literary Awards to the PEN Book Awards to regional book awards in your area; you could also compile your own personal rankings from a combination of awards, like Brecht de Poortere does here for literary magazines. Additionally, you could browse major book review venues, most-anticipated lists, and end-of-the-year reading lists to find out which university presses are mentioned in the same breath as major independent presses and Big 5 publishers.

For now, I’ll give you an example from the National Book Awards, which have honored books published by number of university presses in recent years. Below is a list of the university presses whose books were longlisted for the National Book Awards in each genre during the last five years:

2023

• Nonfiction: Yale University Press

• Poetry: Wesleyan University Press, University of Georgia Press, University of Chicago Press

2022

• Poetry: University of Nebraska Press

2021

• Nonfiction: Princeton University Press, The Feminist Press at City University of New York, New York University Press

• Poetry: Yale University Press

2020

• Fiction: West Virginia University Press

• Nonfiction: Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press

• Poetry: Wesleyan University Press

2019

• Nonfiction: University of Texas Press, University of North Carolina Press

• Poetry: University of Pittsburgh Press

This list gives you an idea of some of the university presses whose books have the highest chance of breaking into the mainstream. It also is a good indicator of the genres that are more likely to receive recognition with university presses: nonfiction (often heavily researched nonfiction) and poetry.

It took me all of five minutes to look up the above stats, and they are necessarily limited to the specific criteria of the National Book Award during the last five years. If you do this across a wide array of prizes, however, you can get a good sense of the more prestigious university presses when it comes to creative writing.

As a submitter, do note that appearance on these major prize lists (especially the National Book Awards) often shifts the profile of university presses and increases the number of submissions they receive. The appearance of West Virginia University Press on the longlist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2020, for example, raised the profile of the press significantly and likely precipitated a flood of fiction submissions.

2. Unranked Lists

The above metrics of prestige, of course, won’t give you a sense of the full field of university presses that publish creative writing. Beyond the prominent publishers you see listed above, there are numerous university presses who capably publish creative writing and who would be interested in considering your work.

The main resource for finding every university press that might consider your book is the subject area grid for university presses at the Association of University Presses’ website. This list tells you exactly which subjects (and in the case of creative writing, which genres) each university press publishes. Creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry are all included, as well as memoir. This list shows every university press that publishes these genres actively, although presses differ significantly in their commitment to these genres and how often they publish them.

Many of the unranked lists I include in my earlier post on where to submit will also include university presses, especially Duotrope and the Poets & Writers database of small presses.

3. Get Involved

It’s not as easy to get involved with university presses as it is to integrate yourself into the landscape of independent small presses. University presses tend to have paid staff and therefore be more professionalized than many of labor-of-love literary endeavors, which means that some of my advice about getting involved in literary community may not apply in the same way. But you can still:

• Read widely, choosing three or four books a year to purchase that are published by different university presses;

• Review books published by university presses;

• Attend readings and events associated with university presses, either at literary festivals/conferences or at colleges and universities near you;

• Consider working or interning with an academic publisher.

Additionally, as with any smaller publisher, it remains important to do even more in-depth research once you start to narrow down your list of where you’d like to submit your full-length manuscript.

These options won’t necessarily get you in the door or even get you a closer read by editors, but they will help you understand the corner of the literary world represented by university presses. That understanding will, in turn, influence your writing and how you present that writing—and especially how you construct your proposal.

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How to Write a Proposal for Your Submission to a University Press

I’m not going to give you a full-on tutorial for how to write a proposal for a university press. There are already several books that do this, including The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors, which focuses on the specific case of university presses; How to Write a Book Proposal: The Insider's Step-by-Step Guide to Proposals that Get You Published, which is more focused on submitting proposals to agents and Big 5 publishers; and The Business of Being a Writer, a comprehensive guide that includes a brief discussion to the sections of a nonfiction book proposal.

As you can see from these titles, agented submissions to the Big 5 and submissions to university presses both use the proposal model. With the Big 5, you typically need to write a proposal only for nonfiction. With university presses, you may need to write a proposal or use elements of a proposal for fiction and poetry as well.

Additionally, just as university presses and Big 5 publishers require different things from proposals, each university press will have a slightly different variation on the proposal (as listed in their submission guidelines).

Once you’ve figured out which presses you want to submit to and what they ask for, it makes sense to build a boilerplate proposal with all of the sections you’ll need, then tailor it and cut it down to fit the criteria of the press where you’re submitting. Typically, book proposals include the following sections:

• One-page description of the book.

• Table of contents.

• Word count and details such as images in the manuscript.

• Intended audience.

• A marketing plan. (This section is rarely requested by university presses, since they are less beholden to the market. A marketing plan is more often a requirement for agents and submissions to Big 5 publishers.)

• Critical background or notes on the significance of your book in the field. (This is not always required for creative manuscripts, so you might be able to skip this potentially laborious section.)

• Comparable books, also known as “comps.” A list of three to six books that are comparable to your own, with notes on how your book differs meaningfully or adds something new to the conversation.

• An outline of the book, with about a paragraph describing each chapter.

• Your curriculum vitae.

• One, two, or three sample chapters.

As I mentioned above, university presses almost always require proposals for nonfiction. Poetry and fiction, however, rarely requires a proposal. University presses that specialize in publishing poetry, such as Wesleyan University Press and Carnegie Mellon University Press, have submission guidelines that prioritize the manuscript itself. Others, like University of Iowa Press, run on the contest system. The same usually goes for fiction, as with University of Pittsburgh Press (which runs both poetry and fiction contests each year) and University of Wisconsin Press (which has two open reading periods for fiction each year), although you’ll occasionally see a proposal requested for fiction manuscripts (as with Northwestern University Press).

A few university presses that publish nonfiction also avoid proposals in favor of considering the manuscript itself straightaway. Mad Creek Books (an imprint of Ohio State University Press) and Texas Review Press (an indie-friendly university press imprint), for example, takes nonfiction submissions through Submittable at certain times of the year. Other university presses publish nonfiction both through regular channels and through contests, like University of New Mexico Press (through River Teeth’s annual contest) and University of Georgia Press (through the annual AWP Book Awards).

When you submit a proposal to a university press, be prepared to wait for two to three months before receiving either a polite rejection or a request for the full manuscript. While scholarly books typically aren’t finished when they submit their proposal and are offered publication, it is more typical for editors to want to choose creative works based on finished manuscripts, since their merit has less to do with their argument and more to do with their execution.

If you’ve already submitted a full manuscript—as with poetry, fiction, and contests for any genre—you will likely wait longer, since the readers have more material to consider. Six to nine months is a reasonable expectation.

Finally, especially for non-contest submissions, pay special attention to writing a thoughtful and professional cover letter. The cover letter go beyond the scope of what I want to cover in this post, but university press cover letters should look more like a query letters to agents than the casual cover letter you might send with a literary magazine submission.

Some university presses, such as University of New Mexico Press, even have a guide to the kind of cover letter they want in their submission guidelines. Pitching yourself—and being specific about why your book might be a fit for the press—is an important part of what you communicate in the university press cover letter.

At the end of the day, the important thing is to find a home for your writing that feels right to you. If you’re sending out a full-length book, take the time to look closely at university presses. These publishers are an ever-growing haven for important creative writing, and it’s worth learning the language of academic publishing in order to explore whether your writing might be a fit.

One of the best ways to feel at home in submitting is to get organized! This includes creating the files you’ll use to keep track of submissions, developing documents that streamline your efforts, and placing everything in an accessible location. It won’t take long to bring the necessary materials together, and you will thank yourself later when they’ve grown into detailed accounts of your submission experiences.

This advice is just some of the material included in my forthcoming book, How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses. The book due out in February 2025, and it gives lots of additional details, support, and resources. It’s up for pre-order now, so spread the word!

Your Essential Documents

The documents I recommend you use to organize your submitting practice are drawn from my own experience of keeping track of submissions. But everyone’s set-up will be different. As you send out your work and determine what kind of information matters to you, you’ll likely change the style and organization of your documents. That’s good! Let your experience shape your process.

Your documents do not need to be devoted exclusively to nose-to-the-grindstone work. Let them be places of refuge, reflection, and imagination.

In my submissions document, for example, I sometimes write a celebratory note to myself after an acceptance, including emojis, exclamation points, and reflections on getting the news. After a vexing rejection, I may add a note encouraging myself to stay with a piece I really believe in. My file becomes a kind of journal in those moments, where I can say what I feel about the process. You can keep track, be detail-oriented, and still stay in touch with the emotional side of the submissions process.

Document 1: Keeping Track of Active Submissions

Your first document is the bread and butter of your submission materials. Its job is to keep track of every submission you’ve ever sent, as well as the response to that submission.

At the very least, your entries for each submission should include the following:

• Title. Which piece of writing you submitted.

• Venue. The literary magazine or small press where you submitted.

• Date of submission. Sometimes I include expected response time alongside this, if the publication makes it available in their submission guidelines.

• Response. Acceptance? Rejection? Encouraging rejection? Include the date you received the response so you can refer to it later when estimating the realistic response time for that publication.

You can organize this information in several ways, based on your formatting preferences and the software you use. I use a simple text-based Google document where I can control formatting and add notes here and there. My document has a heading for each piece I send out, and below it a line for each time I submit the piece. Each line includes title, venue, date of submissions, response, and date of response. If a piece is still out on submission, I leave the text black. I change it to red if I receive a rejection. I use orange for a positive rejection, and, if the sun is shining on me and I receive an acceptance, I change the line to green and make the text bold.

Many writers use Excel or Google spreadsheets. You can find a preformatted, fillable spreadsheets on writer Matt Bell’s website. Others writers use a submissions tracking system that’s integrated with a larger online database, such as Duotrope. Using Duotrope’s submission tracker keeps their tools at your fingertips and integrates your data with their information about response time. For more ideas about how to track your submissions, check out this short blog post at The Cincinnati Review, which details four different editors’ submission tracking systems.

However you choose to keep track of submissions, create a system, and stick to it. Plan for a system that will work even when you submit many, many pieces of writing. After a few years of sending out your work, you will have quite a lot to keep track of. You’ll thank yourself if you build an easy, organized system now.

Document 2: Aspirations and Possibilities

A second document, which lists aspirations and possibilities for your submissions, allows you to preserve your personal archive of knowledge about submitting. It might feel auxiliary at first, and I admit that I hadn’t realized I needed such a file when starting out. But after several years of sending out my writing, I realized I was reinventing the wheel every time I sent out a submission.

The below lists allow you to preserve the results of your research, which will grow into a stable launching pad for all your submissions. With their help, you can become your own authoritative resource for your submissions goals. There are a few valuable sections to include. I keep these lists in the same file, but you can separate them if that works better for you. 

a) Lit Mags and Presses Where You Want to Be Published

After becoming familiar with resources for finding where to submit, you will soon develop a personalized sense of your dream magazines and presses for publication. These dream venues will reflect your priorities as a writer, which means they will differ from the strictly prestige-based lists.

There are many ways to organize your list of publications to submit to, but one great example is Erika Krouse’s list. Instead of ranking venues, she organizes them into tiers. Creating your own tiered lists of preferred submission venues allows you to structure your submissions in easily navigable sets, sending out to five to eight venues at a time without having to parse the desirability of each one for each submission.

b) Deadlines and Reading Periods

Publication venues aren’t always open exactly when you want them to be. Sometimes their reading period is months away, and you need a reminder to return when submissions are open. Other times, a deadline is coming up soon and you want to keep revising until the last possible second. Keeping an organized, chronological list of deadlines will help you focus on the right submissions at the right time for your writing. 

Return to this file regularly. Consider setting aside a specific time each month to check on upcoming deadlines, reviewing whether any submission periods have opened recently. You can also place reminders on your daily calendar.

c) Literary Magazines and Presses That Have Sent Positive Rejections

Always keep a list of the publications that have sent you encouraging rejections. You will record positive responses in your main submissions document as well, but it helps to have a dedicated spot where you can see every venue that has encouraged your writing. I organize my list chronologically, so every time I get a positive rejection from a venue, that venue moves to the top of the list.

Another related list you can keep includes publications where you know someone or feel particularly welcome to submit. Knowing an editor won’t necessarily mean receiving an acceptance, but, like submitting after a positive rejection, it can increase the chance that your submission will be read closely.

d) General Notes about Your Submission Strategy

As you hone your submission strategy, it can be helpful to take account of that strategy on a regular basis. Think of this document like a submitting diary, where you can chart your progress, goals, and feelings about sending out your writing.

Having a concrete timeline can help ground these reflections. Questions you might ask yourself include: What are your goals for the next six months of submitting? What actions will you take to achieve those goals? How are you feeling about submitting? What can you do to bring life to your submitting process?

These self-check-ins help ground your submitting practice, keeping you connected to your overall plan so you don’t feel at sea every time you jump into submitting again.

Document 3: Cover Letter Template

The third document you’ll need contains materials for your cover letter. The cover letter is important, since it is your one chance to communicate directly to editors, framing the writing you’ve submitted and contextualizing yourself as a writer. But you don’t need to compose your cover letter anew each time you submit.

Instead, you can rely on a boilerplate letter that you tailor to each submission. This will streamline the process of sending out your work, buying you more time for the personalization you will do in the introductory paragraph of each cover letter.

Your author bio, especially, will stay relatively consistent, so it’s good to have an easily accessible place to keep it. You don’t want to overthink how you present yourself for each submission.

How Your Documents Help You Submit

There are several good reasons for investing time in developing these files at the outset. Practically speaking, staying organized is essential to making your submitting process more efficient, effective, and respectful. It will allow you to see the status of your submissions at any time, which will inform how you continue to approach each submission.

You’ll go to your documents when you want to know things like: Where is a piece currently under consideration? How many publications have responded, and how many are you waiting on? Having easy-to-find answers to these questions allows you to make decisions about when to submit, when to wait, and when to return to the drawing board.

Keeping good track of your submissions also makes it easy to do an essential task that is requested by almost all editors: withdrawing your work from other publications once you receive an acceptance.

But the benefit of having an organized set of materials goes beyond logistics. It also encourages you to compartmentalize your submissions process, locating it in a physical place on your computer that you can return to when it’s time to submit. The rest of the time, you can focus on the writing itself — and on living in the real world — knowing the many threads of your submissions are well accounted for.

This mental benefit makes sure submitting doesn’t take over your life and spill into your writing time. At the same time, building solid boundaries around your submitting practice, in the form of these documents, is an essential tool for helping you build a home in your submissions.

But for those of us submitting full-length books, the process of deciding which small presses to submit to can be significantly more complicated. If you’re submitting a book, you’ve likely worked for years on it! Who you entrust with your writing is no small decision.

Submitting to a small press is not like submitting a book to a Big 5 publisher. Writers who want to publish with the major, corporate publishing houses typically have a literary agent, who makes up a submission list, communicates with the publishers, and negotiates a deal. This process requires little familiarity with the specific publishers on the part of the author, except when it comes to making a decision between offers.

Small press submissions, on the other hand, require the writer to communicate directly with the small press they submit to. This means having familiarity with the press is an especially powerful tool in your tool belt. When publishers see that you know who THEY are, they become a lot more interested in knowing who YOU are. This is the work of community: speaking a shared language and working together toward a shared mission.

That’s why I’ve assembled a few pointers for how to deepen your research into small presses where you might submit your book (or chapbook). If these pointers are helpful, you can pre-order my book How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Small Presses and Literary Magazines, which has lots of additional information and support for your submitting practice.

How to Deepen Your Research into Small Presses

Ideally, you’d begin by taking a look at resources I discuss in my last post, “Where to submit your writing.” Once you’re ready to look more deeply into small presses, the following steps will help you strengthen your familiarity with the independent publishers you’d like to submit to:

1. Check out several books published by each small press you are considering.

Buying books is a great way to give back to small presses whose work you value, and it allows you to incorporate small press books into your reading life. This can be an important part of getting involved with the communities you will eventually be asking to support your work.

But you don’t have to buy books from every single press you want to consider. Requesting from the library—or requesting that the library purchase them—is a great way of getting your hands on a lot of books at a time, even if you don’t read them all cover-to-cover. If they are not available through the main catalog, you can usually find small presses’ books through Interlibrary Loan.

When you get the books, hold the books in your hand and ask yourself how you would feel if this was your book. Are the books high quality? Do you like their design? Do they fit your idea of what a book should look like?

2. Find out how their books are distributed.

Distribution is central, because it determines how and where your books are sold, which in turn determines who is able to buy them. Small presses often have a harder time getting distribution with the major distributors (because their smaller scale leads to a higher relative cost), so it’s a meaningful issue whose solutions can vary widely across independent publishers.

Small press distributing practices have just changed massively due to the closure of Small Press Distribution, but smaller distributors continue to help independent publishers reach a wider audience. One of those distributors is Asterism, initially founded as a cooperative distributor, which has taken on a lot of the presses who used to distribute with SPD. Other small presses distribute through networks such as the Chicago Distribution Center, or find a way to distribute with the major distributors. Still other small presses only sell through their website and at local events.

All of this determines whether readers can purchase books through bookstores and major online retailers, since independent bookstores often prefer to work with larger distributors and Amazon has its own ever-evolving terms for presses and distributors. Where do you want your book to be available, both online and in person? Will your book be accessible where you want readers to find it?

3. Research other authors who publish with the press.

Look up other authors from the presses you are considering: Do these authors have the outcomes you want as an author? Is their media presence what you want yours to be? Do they have writing-related jobs as a result of their publications? Did they turn their book into a meaningful profile in the literary community?

4. Check the publisher’s presence on social media and online.

Everybody has a different take on social media, so it’s worth checking to see if a small press’s take will align with yours.

More specifically, will the press get the word out in a way that feels right to you? Will they build a strong website for your book? Do their books receive coverage in venues you appreciate? Does their messaging and support for authors link up with the strategies you use as a writer?

5. Ask around and/or meet them in person.

Finally, community is an essential resource for those of us submitting books. Do you know anyone who has experience working with the presses you are considering? Can you find interviews with the editors of the press ? Learn as much as you can anecdotally, from unofficial sources as well as the official ones.

Even better, you can meet the editors themselves! If you go to AWP (or another, smaller book fair), you stand a pretty good chance of running into small press editors at their booth. You should be careful not to try to “pitch” your book or have a transactional conversation. Instead, ask the editors about their books that season, buy one or two, and get a feel for their ethic as a press. Just stopping by their booth will tell you a lot about if they are the right fit for you as a writer.

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The Small Press Cover Letter

Your familiarity with the small presses where you submit will also allow you to tailor your cover letter, so that you can let editors know why you believe your work is right for them. Cover letters for book-length manuscripts help editors get a sense of you as a person, writer, and literary citizen, as well as communicating why you believe their press is right for your book.

This is particularly important because you’re asking for a major commitment from editors when you submit a book. They’ll invest months of their time and energy into publishing you, and you’ll work closely on everything from editing to promotion. Some small presses publish as few as two books a year, and many publish fewer than five or ten. Each book they publish becomes a representation of their press. Choosing who to publish is the beginning of a long-term relationship.

Doing your research, therefore, is essential to submitting to a small press. While this research will help you make decisions about which presses to submit to, as I describe above, it will also inform the introductory paragraph of your cover letter. This introductory paragraph may even expand into multiple paragraphs if you have a lot of familiarity with a specific publisher.

In these paragraphs, you should communicate how your book intertwines with the publisher’s catalog and mission. Is there a book from the press that has been influential to you as a writer? Do they have a mission that is important to you? What do you admire about the press and their catalog? What made you want to submit this specific book to them? Your answers to questions like these will help the editors understand how you would fit in their catalog.

If you mention your personal connection to the press, however, make sure it is coming from a genuine place. You don’t always have to say something complimentary, because you can’t have read multiple books from every single publisher. If you have only done light research on that press in preparation for submitting, it’s better to say less.

These introductory paragraphs are also an opportunity to include a description of your book that suits the publisher to whom you’re submitting. This description should include word count, genre, and title, but it should also go beyond these basic details. You might give a pitchy description of your book’s plot. You might describe the book’s genre and style, if the press is attentive to matters of form. You might describe your intended audience, or your book’s relationship to the publisher’s mission.

How you tailor these paragraphs, of course, depends on where you are submitting. A chapbook micro-press, for example, might appreciate a cover letter that is personal, DIY, and not too pitchy. A press whose mission addresses a specific community might be interested in your and your writing’s relationship to that community. A large indie press might expect a cover letter that is more like a query letter, in which you emphasize the marketable qualities of your book alongside a bio with your most impressive achievements. Communicate in a way that fits each publisher’s style, catalog, and goals. Your research will be at the core of the decisions you make while writing this cover letter.

At the end of the day, your cover letter builds a connection. It tells editors why you’ve submitted to them and why you believe they might want to publish your book. You’re showing that you speak a shared language, then offering your contribution to a conversation they have already begun.

A Couple of Resources

If you’re interested in thinking about submissions from the point of view of a small press editor, check out Samuel Moss’s Introduction to Submitting Your Manuscript to Presses on the 11:11 Press website.

For a more expansive (but now defunct) resource, you can access Entropy’s Small Press Database of 230+ interviews with small press editors through the Wayback Machine. Some of the images might not work and the pages take time to load, but it’s worth digging through to find gems of wisdom about submitting to small presses. I built this database, with inspiration from Janice Lee, during the years that Entropy was active, and it remains one of the strongest resources for hearing directly from editors about small press publishing practices.

If you’re looking for a more comprehensive guide to submitting your writing, you can also take a look at my book How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses, which is now available for pre-order.

What It’s All About

At the end of the day, as I like to remind us, it’s not all about getting published. Small presses inspire us, they give to us, they help us imagine new writing into being by charting the most radical possibilities for it.

This means that researching small presses isn’t just about publication, either. A growing understanding of the small presses publishing today will inspire your writing in unforeseen ways. In other words, having a sense for the many editors and audiences who might read your work expands the possibilities of your writing. The more you read and research, the more vibrant your writing practice will become.

But How to Submit really began when Janice Lee invited me to start assembling the Where to Submit list at Entropy, which I ended up running for four years. It became a widely-used resource in the lit mag and small press world, and I was happy to have the opportunity to share submission resources with writers like me.

Entropy is gone now (RIP!) but this post will help you research and make decisions about where to submit. It’s all my take, of course, and you should follow your own intuition and judgment when following what I say below.

If you have questions, feel free to put them in the comments and I’ll answer them.

Where to Submit

There are three different types of resources that will help you find submission venues. Ranked Lists organize publications hierarchically, estimating each venue’s relative level of prestige. Unranked Lists provide a broader view of the many venues for submission, organizing publications using tags and categories instead of prestige. Getting Involved, which is less a resource than a practice, is the most long-term of these options, since it means building relationships with publication venues over time and learning about their suitability for your work through those relationships.

1. Ranked Lists

Ranked lists arrange publications from top to bottom, hierarchically. Even if you are not interested in prestige or conventional success, these lists can be a helpful tool for understanding where you are submitting. Prestige works as an engine for everything from response times to selectiveness to the resources and staff a publication is working with, so it will affect your publication experience regardless of your goals.

It’s important to recognize there is no objective “best,” and that these resources calculate prestige solely on the basis of their specific criteria. They can’t give you the final answer on where to submit. Instead, I think of them as a public service that allows writers to gain a quick familiarity with the reputation of the most well-known publications.

For literary magazines, the two most reliable rankings are maintained by writers who have decided to share their own processes for determining where to submit:

• Clifford Garstang’s Literary Magazine Rankings. Clifford Garstang uses a by-the-numbers method to rank literary magazines by their number of inclusions and honorable mentions in the Pushcart Prize anthology over the last ten years. Garstang’s rankings give a rough but reliable view of how much attention literary magazines typically receive. There are separate lists for Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. 

• Erika Krouse’s Ranking of 500-ish Literary Magazines for Short Fiction. Erika Krouse’s list can be used for any genre, even though its focus is short fiction. Rather than Garstang’s Pushcart Prize-focused approach, Krouse uses a complex system based on prizes, circulation, payment to writers, and “coolness” to divide literary magazines into tiers. Her list includes information about each of these categories plus deadlines, response time, and maximum word count. It is particularly helpful for thinking through which magazines are comparable to one another in terms of reputation.

Other rankings exist, if you want a different perspective. John Fox, at his blog BookFox, assembles lists using criteria similar to Clifford Garstang’s, except they are based on the Best American Short Stories anthology. Brecht De Poortere has assembled a database ranking lit mags based on a wide collection of criteria. For science-fiction and fantasy writers, Eric Schwitzgebel runs a ranking of lit mags on The Splintered Mind.

Small presses’ prestige can be harder to track. This is in part because prestige is concentrated in books published by major, corporate publishers. Most major literary awards go to imprints owned by the Big 5—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster—even if those imprints appear to be separate publishers. Prestige certainly exists in the small press world, but it’s often based more on hearsay and reputation than measurable recognition.

That said, there are several resources that will give you an idea of which small presses are regularly receiving attention:

• The CLMP Firecracker Awards. The Firecracker Awards are given annually to small press books published in the categories of Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Poetry by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), an organization that advocates for independent publishers.  There are also awards for Magazine/General Excellence, and Magazine/Best Debut.

• Book Reviews. Browsing book reviews will help you get a sense for which publishers’ books are being read and considered publicly. Mainstream venues rarely pay attention to small press books, so make sure you find the right outlet. Review venues for small press literature include Full Stop, Rain Taxi, and The Rumpus. There are many other literary magazines that feature book reviews on their websites or in print.

• Additional Literary Awards. Major awards like the Pulitzer and National Book Awards aren’t great ways to rank small presses, since small presses aren’t usually well represented (except in the poetry category). There are, however, awards that have proven more welcoming to small press writing, such as the Lambda Literary Awards and PEN Book Awards. Regional book awards, often organized by state, regularly make room for small presses as well.

All of these lists come with your regularly scheduled caveat: Rankings, honors, and awards only count as much as you let them. Let your goals be a guide when deciding how important prestige is to you.

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2. Unranked Lists

Instead of envisioning the literary world as a hierarchy of prestige, unranked lists represent each publication as part of a horizontally organized literary landscape. These lists don’t claim to judge. The benefit of this approach is that it leaves the judging up to you.

The drawback of this approach, of course, is also that it leaves the judging up to you. How do you distinguish between such a wide swathe of publications? How do you know which is “best,” or best for you?

The most helpful unranked lists solve this problem by using tags and categories to narrow down publications based on criteria such as genre, word count, payment, submission fee, and deadlines. Here are the most reliable unranked lists:

• Duotrope. Duotrope is a longstanding, comprehensive database with information on almost all active magazines and presses, including genre, style, word count, and payment, as well as submission response times. Built into Duotrope is a submissions tracker, if you prefer to use an external resource instead of your own personal system. A full subscription to Duotrope costs $5 a month.

• Chill Subs. Chill Subs is like a free, Gen Z Duotrope (although some features have recently been monetized). Its database is large and ever-growing, and it takes a fun, irreverent approach to submissions. Features include Write or Die, which runs columns, interviews, and listicles; curated newsletters; and classes on writing and publishing.

• Writer’s Market. Writer’s Market is the well-known, regularly updated print guide to nearly every submission venue, including not only book publishers and literary magazines but also trade magazines, literary agencies, and contests and awards. Since it is published in a print edition, it can be particularly helpful for tactile readers who prefer to underline, dog-ear, and flip through the pages.

• Poets & Writers. Poets & Writers, which is best known for its magazine about the craft and business of writing, maintains expansive databases of literary magazines, small presses, and literary contests and awards.

• CLMP’s Directory of Publishers. The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses has a similarly extensive list of member presses and magazines.

• NewPages. NewPages is a whole website devoted to lists of literary magazines and small publishers, as well as graduate creative writing programs, independent bookstores, and writing conferences. They’ve been in the game since the 1970s, and their comprehensiveness rivals anything else on the internet.

• Heavy Feather Review. After Entropy shut its doors at the end of 2021, Heavy Feather Review took up the mantle of “Where to Submit,” providing a regularly updated listing of small presses and journals that are open for submissions.

There are a number of other unranked listings, but they usually have few tags or categories, which makes them less easy to navigate. Among them are between the highway press’s publisher directory (which lists more than 1,500 presses), and The Nonconformist’s Big, Big List of Indie Publishers and Small Presses. If you’re looking to get a sense of the full breadth of small press publishing, these listings can act as a complement to the more robust resources I have listed above.

A final way to gain insight into the many publishers active today is to browse the exhibitors at the major annual writing conference, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). These exhibitors are listed on AWP’s website each year. Even better, if AWP (or another conference or book festival) happens to be taking place near you, you can attend and get to know the publications personally by visiting their exhibitor booths.

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3. Get Involved

The most long-term and, ultimately, most effective way to decide where to submit is to get involved in literary community. I know this is a lot to ask! It’s hard enough just to find the time to write and submit. But getting involved doesn’t have to be a major time suck. It includes all kinds of small acts you can sprinkle throughout your life. Once you take these steps, being an active part of the literary community often gives energy back to your writing—and to your life—in ways that more than justify the time and energy you put in.

The easiest way to get involved is simply by reading what small presses and literary magazines publish. There are many ways to find writing that inspires you:

• Browse online literary magazines, subscribe to print literary magazines, and read books from a diversity of presses. Reading literary magazines and small presses doesn’t have to be a big financial investment, although it’s good to support the publications you submit to. Libraries are often looking for new books to add to their collection, and by requesting books from small presses you do both the presses and your local community a favor. If you want to become more familiar with the breadth of print magazines, many sell back copies (non-current issues) for as little as $5.

• Attend local and online reading series. Many communities have regular reading series, where a single author or a group of authors shares their work aloud and answers questions afterward. Readings take place at bookstores, bars, and coffee shops. In addition, the Zoom reading scene has taken off in the last few years. If you follow writers on social media, you’re sure to see many announcements of online readings.

• Use presses and magazines to guide your reading. One of my favorite ways to read is by letting publication venues, rather than authors, guide my reading life. That is, if I like a book, instead of reading another book from that author I’ll read another book published by that press. This is a great way to recognize the thoughtful curatorial work editors put into selecting which writing to publish.

• Research the publishing histories of authors you like. If you discover a new author whose writing you like, look up which literary magazines and presses have published them in the past. Chances are, if you liked the author’s work, the venues that have published their writing will appeal to you too.

All of the above are effective and long-lasting methods for getting familiar with the literary landscape.

A more quantifiable, if more energy-intensive, way of getting involved is to give your time and labor to a magazine or press. If you are particularly ambitious, you could start a press or a literary magazine of your own. But relatively few people have the time, inclination, skills, or funding to do that. Instead, I would suggest beginning with manageable contributions to one or two publications you feel particularly drawn to.

Here are some of the best ways to get started:

• Write book reviews. Nervous that you don’t know how to write a book review? That’s OK. Start by reading a few examples, then write about your experience of reading a book in the most generous and thoughtful way you can. Even if you are relatively inexperienced, the author and publisher will be grateful for your words. Reviews are a gift, both to small presses who don’t receive mainstream media coverage and to the authors who publish with them.

• Conduct interviews. Like writing reviews, conducting interviews with authors allows you to be part of the conversation by engaging with others’ work. Literary magazines are often looking for interviews to publish, and authors appreciate the chance to talk about their writing in a public forum.

• Volunteer as a reader for a literary magazine. Much of the initial work of evaluating submissions is done by “readers” who read everything that comes over the transom before recommending pieces to higher-up editors. Literary magazines frequently need more readers to help them consider submissions more quickly. Some magazines will post calls for readers on their websites and social media.

• Get involved in a reading series. Bringing authors together for a regular literary reading is a great way to meet people who are actively publishing books. Presses and writers always appreciate when someone can host authors on tour. Consider offering to help with (or start) a reading series near you.

• Participate in writing groups, workshops, and classes. This option might not directly connect you with publishers, but it will help you build community with other writers. You can learn a lot from your writerly friendships, not only about writing and publishing but also about your own goals as a submitter.

I believe in getting involved because it increases your familiarity with the literary landscape and helps you become an authentic part of it. When you’re part of the conversation, deciding where to submit feels less like an attempt to break into an unfamiliar scene than a continual act of participation. Publication begins to fit into your life naturally. I can’t promise that getting involved will help you get published, and you shouldn’t think about your contributions as a quid pro quo. But you can treat your literary contributions as a gift to the community you’re asking something from, too.

There is one final way to connect with writers, editors, and publishers: social media. Much of what I know about the literary landscape comes from years of X and Instagram, along with stints on Facebook. There’s no other way that I know of to keep up with so many interesting venues at once, to get a feel for their sensibilities, and to build your own relationship with the work they are doing.

If you already have or choose to create a social media presence, think carefully about how you spend your time on it. Which people, publishers, and communities do you want to be involved with? How can you use your time in the digital realm to end up with more inspiration, not less? How can social media act as a conduit to better reading, writing, and living, rather than vacuuming all those things out of you?

Stay connected with your purpose in being on social media. Resist clickbait and distraction if you can. Go back for the new books you learn about, the new presses and magazines you come across, and the little interactions that make the literary world feel like it’s filled with living, breathing people (which it is!).

Regardless of which of the above strategies you prefer, getting involved is an important tool for writers deciding where to submit. Seeing your work in print is most meaningful when you’re part of a larger conversation—a conversation you’re helping to grow.

Putting It All Together

It’s important to remember that these lists are only the beginning. As you research, you’ll make your own lists of preferred venues for publication and narrow down your vision for what publication will look like.

If you’re not sure where to begin, here’s what I would do if I were just starting out: First, spend some time browsing the ranked lists. Do some journaling about your goals, think about what prestige means to you, and note the differences between more- and less-resourced venues for publication. When you’re ready to submit, get a Duotrope account. I wouldn’t keep the account forever, since it costs money, but I would use it for your first year or two of submitting in order to build your own criteria for submissions. Use Chill Subs and Heavy Feather Review to supplement and the other lists when in doubt.

Once you’ve spent some time working through the above methods, consider what you might do to expand your involvement in literary community. You could change your reading habits to include one new literary magazine or small press each season. You could spend ten minutes each day searching for new publishers and authors to follow on social media. You could apply to be a reader for a lit mag. Take it slow and steady. Building literary community is a lifelong process.

Soon, your relationship with submitting might become a more positive one. When submitting your writing, you may no longer have to look up every literary magazine in the world. Instead of depending on ranked lists, you may carry a list of dream journals around in your head (or in a Google document). You may know the exact search criteria to use on Duotrope or Chill Subs for each story, essay, or poem you write. While writing, you may even find yourself thinking, “This would be perfect for _____.”

To me, this type of deeply interwoven relationship with publishing is the goal. Literary magazines and presses become not just places to publish your pre-existing writing, but active inspirations for your work. Your writing begins to have the feel of a conversation between you and every other writer and editor. Let publishers’ work speak to you, and soon yours will speak to them.

Just a reminder that this kind of information plus a lot (!) of advice and support for the process of submitting will be available in How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses, due out in February 2025. Looks like the cover is up now on Amazon and Bookshop, so take a look for an early glimpse of the book!

This new Small Press Database is the work of two years with a research group of four students. Our goal was to pull together a reliable, curated database of small presses publishing right now, so that students and faculty can expand their horizons beyond the writing from Big 5 publishers that gets most of the national attention.

It’s important to me to teach small press writing in my creative writing classes, because it gives a window into the most radical possibilities for writing. These possibilities become possible when publication doesn’t hinge on its marketability. It has always felt more interesting to me to teach writing that no one has ever heard of than to make students read stuff they’re going to encounter in some other class or mainstream media outlet anyway. It’s a way of develop a new “canon,” centering students’ reading experience around de-centered communities and styles.

The thing we discovered is, creating a Small Press Database is actually impossible.

OK, let me explain what I mean. The landscape of small presses in the United States is this massive and variegated set of publishers that ranges from tiny, one-person chapbook operations all the way up to independent presses like Graywolf that operate more like a Big 5 press. They are geographically all over the place, aesthetically diverse, and constantly opening and closing unpredictably. One of the students in the research group liked to talk about the “graveyard,” a part of our spreadsheet where we put the presses that had recently closed. Every time we combed through the database, there were more presses to add to the “graveyard,” whether because of lack of funds, lack of time, or lack of labor.

For every one that closed, though, there was another press that had started up. Similarly, the editors of each publication kept shifting, hiatuses began and ended, reputations changed, and, of course, books kept being published. As much as we tried to contain that scene in an easy-to-navigate database, there was no way we could capture it, because it simply wouldn’t hold still.

The metaphor that I came up with in this little blog post was ocean water. As soon as you try to pick up the ocean—as soon as you trap it in a pail—it’s sloshing, splashing, trying to get out. The box we put around these things is artificial. The waves are always washing up on the shore, evaporating into the sky, and pouring in from river deltas. The real landscape of small presses, literary magazines, and publishing in general is porous, dynamic, and impossible to grasp.

We still created the database, and I still think it’s an important resource, especially for educational institutions that might not be as familiar with the small presses world as those who are publishing and writing within it. But the tension between our goal (keeping track of small presses) and the impossibility of properly keeping track of small presses happily remains. As I put it in that blog post:

How were we going to make a resource that allowed people an entryway into small press community? How were we going to bring small press publishing “together,” creating a usable resource that acknowledged the unboundedness and uncategorizableness of the landscape it represented?

[…]

Maybe that tension is the definition of a database. And maybe that tension is the Small Press Database’s primary contribution.

Maybe the database is necessary, in fact, because it highlights everything it cannot do.

This is my hope, at least, with the Small Press Database. I want to open toward complexity. I want the questions that arise to be more important than the conclusions. 

In other words, I want the work I do to highlight the literary world’s incredible diversity and unboundedness, the possibilities that exceed our capacity to categorize. As small presses and literary magazines grow, change, evaporate, and flow, I hope the work I do can be an entry point into that ocean.

I want to be a shore. You can start here, but once you enter the water, the depth is unnavigable. That’s the exact beauty of it.

By the way, we also have a Small Press Resources page on the site. It includes a list of different ways people have tried to list, categorize, and otherwise direct people toward small presses and literary magazines.

Our list isn’t exhaustive, but it is another beginning that may help you dive into small press communities.

Small Press Lists & Databases

• CLMP Directory of Publishers is searchable by genre and category, and includes both literary magazines and small presses.

• Poets & Writers’ list of small presses is searchable by genre and reading period, and is geared toward writers who want to submit their writing for publication.

• Duotrope is a resource for writers that organizes literary magazines and small presses based on criteria involved with submissions.

• Chill Subs is a new resource for writers, founded in 2022. Like Duotrope, it organizes literary magazines and small presses in user-friendly format for use in submitting.

• The Small Press Database on Entropy (preserved on Internet Archive) was a series of 230 interviews with small presses published from 2014-2021. Click here for a shared folder including all of the Database’s interviews. 

• The Small Press Map of Canada, affiliated with the Toronto International Festival of Authors, provides a visual map of small publishers in Canada.

• Bookboro’s Resource Directory is an extensive, alphabetical (but untagged) compendium of hundreds of small presses, including university presses.

• between the highway press’s publisher directory lists the URLs of more than 1,500 small presses.

• The Nonconformist’s, Big List of Indie Publishers and Small Presses lists small presses alongside short descriptions and links to their submission guidelines.

Feel free to browse our Small Press Database if you’re curious. If you have suggestions about more resources we could include on our Resources page (which also includes articles and essays on small presses), let me know in the comments!