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How To Submit A Short Story For Publication by Robert Price
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How To Submit A Short Story For Publication |
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Education
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So you've written a story, rewritten it, given it to some close friends and family to read, revised it, obsessed over it, lost sleep, thrown it out, started over, and done the whole process a second time with something else. Now you want to submit your story for publication. First things first. This is an article on how to submit a SHORT story. If you are looking for advice on how and where to submit your novel, look elsewhere. This procedure does work for novellas--if the outlets you are submitting to will take them--but my general thought on the matter is that the longer a story is, the better it has to be to get published. So until you've proven you're a competent writer, I'd stick with short stories. Also note that this is an article on submitting your story to MAGAZINES who will PAY you for your work. There are plenty of unpaid literary magazines attached to college campuses and community centers and whatnot out there if you want to look. I'm not all that interested in those, so I won't talk about them here. The first step is finding outlets that will read your story. A great resource for this is Duotrope.com. Duotrope lists just about every periodical that accepts submissions from the general public grouped by genre and includes details about accepted lengths, wait times for responses, pay rates, etc. You might already know of a few places, but I doubt you know them all. Duotrope knows them all. The next step is making sure your story is formatted correctly. Most submission pages will tell you to conform to the Shunn Manuscript Format. You can find details about it in any number of places. Just Google it. It's pretty simple: double space, monospace font, page numbers in the upper right, etc. You also should make sure you have the right file format. Most submissions are done online, so it's important that you submit you story as the right type of file. DOC and RTF are usually the only two accepted formats, so all you Office 2007 and later users need to make sure you are saving as the legacy format and not sending DOCX files. Chances are the publisher will be able to open it, but following basic directions is a way to ingratiate yourself to a publisher (and every tiny bit of this helps). The final step is writing a cover letter to go along with your story. These should be brief. My standard cover letter is two sentences: "Please accept [story name here], a short story approximately [word count here] words in length, for consideration for publication at [magazine name here]. I am an unpublished writer, and I would greatly appreciate any feedback should my story not meet your standards." If you have been previously published, then you would mention that and include a list of publications. Sometimes a magazine will ask you to include a brief summary of your story. Whatever they ask for, make sure you include it. The better you follow the rules, the better the chance the editor or whoever reads your story will be in a good mood when they get to your submission. The real final step, after you do the above three and send you story in, is sitting around and waiting for an answer. Don't stop writing other stuff or put your life on hold or hold your breath. Look on Duotrope at the acceptance rates for most magazines. They're usually around 0.25%. That means 1 in every 400 stories is accepted. Now, I suppose you can figure that a good number of those are complete hacks who send in absolute garbage. If you believe you don't fall into that category AND you figure that group makes up a full 50% of submissions, your chances have only increased to 1 in 200 or 0.5%. Bottom line: unless you are really, really, really, out of this world good, you aren't going to get accepted your first time out. I've been on absolutely everything in the year or so that I've been submitting stories, and I don't expect to get anything different anytime soon. The important part is to keep trying. If you stop sending in stories, you'll stop getting rejected. It might save you some heartache, but you'll also never get published. essays online
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