It’s award season! The National Book Awards just took place at the end of November, and we’re on the cusp of that moment when the National Endowment for the Arts recipients in creative writing are going to get to announce that they’ve been selected for the $25,000. Other book awards and end of the year lists are on their way.
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.
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.
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.