These are my five tips for short story submissions to literary journals. Disclaimer: I’m not a professional editor, published novelist, or experienced publisher. There are plenty of better qualified people to get advice from. I won’t try to replicate their advice. But I do want to share my view from the “other side” of the submission process.
I am a former fiction submission reader for a literary journal. In the 3-4 years I volunteered with this journal, I read literally thousands of short stories. The stories ranged from flash fiction to longer pieces of 5,500 words. That’s a lot of words, a lot of authors, and a lot of hours spent staring at a computer screen for no monetary compensation. But I learned a lot in the process.
If you’re a pro, this won’t be helpful. (If you’ve got tips, add them in the comments!) But some new writers might benefit.
Quick word on my job. I read all the short story submissions in the fiction category. I voted yes, no, or maybe.
That was it.
- The no stories received rejections from my supervisor, the fiction editor.
- The maybe stories were read by another person, and might either go on to the fiction editor (a “yes”) or receive a rejection (a “no” vote).
- The yes stories went to the fiction editor.
Assuming the editor liked it, she and other staff members (editor-in-chief, managing editor, etc.) discussed it. If they rejected it, they sent an encouraging rejection letter. If they decided to publish it, they sent the happy acceptance letter.
After my initial reading, I had nothing to do with the deciding process. I don’t know how many literary journals use a similar process, but this was ours.
Okay, now for my 5 tips.
1. Please, please, please use standard submission formatting.
Look at the latest copy of Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript from Chuck Sambuchino and the Writer’s Digest Book editors. It’s incredibly helpful. There are other guides available, too.
Use standard fonts.
On a typical day, I read 30+ short story submissions on a computer screen. That takes over 3 hours (and that was a fast pace!) Think about how you feel after working on the computer for several hours. Your eyes hurt, right? If you decide to use fancy-smancy fonts to mimic handwriting, typewriters, etc., it’s harder for me to read your story.
Use standard layout.
Some authors want to do huge headers or put the story into two column formats or otherwise show that they can use different style templates. I don’t know why. Maybe they were trying to mimic a book layout? Or tell the editors how to layout their story in the journal’s pages? Here’s two reasons those aren’t good ideas:
- The two-column format is difficult to read. On a screen, I only saw part of the page. So a 2 column page meant scrolling down for column 1, scrolling back up to read column 2, scrolling down to move to the next page . . . That doesn’t sound like a huge deal. But it’s tedious. Please, use one column per page.
- Our journal had a person/team dedicated to the journal’s physical layout. All the illustrations, column breaks, page breaks, fonts, etc., were designed by those people. The writers had nothing to do with that process. Use your time to write terrific stories!
Make it easy for me to read the story you’ve poured your soul into. I want to be wowed by the story. Really.
2. Proofread.
It amazed me how many people submitted stories that desperately needed a proofreader for spag (spelling, grammar, and punctuation). These are basic things. They are learnable. If you’re not confident in your ability to proof your own work, have a knowledgeable person do a line edit.
This goes for both new writers and professional ones. I can’t believe the number of people with MFAs in creative writing who submit stories that are filled with misspellings, etc.
3. Read the submission guidelines and follow them.
If the journal’s limit is 5500 words per story, don’t send in 7K words because “it’s such great quality that you should overlook that!” (It’s happened.) The journal (or agent, editor, whoever) has those guidelines in place for a reason. Space limitations in physical journals, for example. We’re probably okay with 100 words over the limit, so don’t stress (too much), but it’s better to stay under the word count limit.
Please don’t tell me in the cover letter that I am free to “edit it down” from a 10K+ story (or even novel!) to whatever size the journal needs. (It’s happened.) That’s your job.
If the agent/editor/journal doesn’t accept certain genres, don’t send them your story/novel in those genres. Most places make it clear what type of material interests them. They are unlikely to make an exception for your work, no matter how wonderful it is.
4. Remember: rejection is not personal.
It won’t feel that way. I understand. I’ve been there. I’ve submitted short stories and query letters for novels, only to receive form rejection letters and wonder why this journal/agent won’t give me a chance. (Or worse, hear nothing at all.) After some encouragement from an agent, I began submitting my first novel to agents. After 60+ rejections (which included 2 requests for partials) and multiple re-writings of the entire novel, I gave up.
It stinks. There were times when I cried myself to sleep.
So, yes, I get it.
But there are multiple reasons why a short story (or novel) might be rejected, and they aren’t about you as a person:
-
Quality.
Sometimes the quality was clearly horrible. Other times, the story was so-so. And other times, the story was good, but something was missing. It was great but not publishable, and the difference is almost indefinable. It’s not that these authors would never be published at all; it’s just that the story wasn’t quite there yet.
- Too many other submissions with similar themes/concepts.
Maybe we’d published a story with a similar plot in the last year, or similar ideas, or had a similar story scheduled for publication.
- Too many other short story submissions, period.
Our year was cut in half: six months for an open submission reading period, and the other six months for a short story contest with an entry fee. By the time I quit volunteering with the journal, we were receiving over 900 short stories in our 6 month open submission reading period. (We received most of those in the last 2 months. It wasn’t spread evenly across the 6 months.)
Here’s the math:
We published 4 times a year; one issue was devoted to the short story contest winners, the other 3 to the general submissions. We published poetry, creative non-fiction, and visual art, so we only had room for 2-3 stories per issue.
You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to figure this out. At most, we published 9 stories per year. If there’s over 900 submissions, that’s a lot of rejected short story submissions. Most would receive the form rejection without any personalized message. (I didn’t send the rejection letters; the fiction editor did.)
And here’s the thing:
Some of these rejected stories were terrific. Wonderful. Publishable. Memorable. Some I still remember, even years after reading them. And yet there wasn’t room for them.
Those cuts are heartbreaking. I was always thankful that during the general reading period I didn’t have to do that! A few times, the fiction editor rejected a story that I loved and I almost cried because I wanted it to be published so badly.
But the rejection of those short story submissions wasn’t a rejection of the authors.
It didn’t define the author as a person. It didn’t define their worth, or even the worth of their writing or ideas.
5. Know this: you are valuable.
Your voice is valuable. Keep learning. Read well. Get the best feedback you can. Don’t give up.