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Want to Get Published? It’s Time to Make Your Move.

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Timing is everything, they say. And if you’re hoping to get published–either online or in print–September is the time to begin sending out your stuff.

Sure, many publications accept submissions year round. But as we all know, things always slow down over the summer. People go on vacation. They get lazy. Nobody wants to be in their office in front of a computer–even editors of literary magazines. As a sort of anecdotal evidence to support this assertion, here’s the response to a query letter I recently got from a mid-level magazine that has had one of my stories for nearly six months:

Thank you for your email and your flexibility. Right now, we’re just behind in responding to our submitters. Things fell behind over summer, though we hope to have all submissions responded to in the next several weeks.

As with this publication, others are now furiously trying to work through the backlog that developed over the summer.

Mid-level publications are typically run by MFA graduate students like myself. These students are now coming back from their summer vacations, their classes are just starting, they’re on campus more, and they’re going to begin combing through submissions to fill upcoming issues as fast as possible.

Another reason why it’s good to start submitting at the beginning of a cycle like this? Because you’re giving yourself the maximum time window to develop a relationship with editors–many of whom only stick around for a year or so before graduating or moving on. If you catch an editor’s interest in September or October, even if a publication doesn’t accept your first submission, that gives you a few extra months to continue working with the editor and trying them with different pieces.

So if you’ve never tried to submit your writing anywhere before, now’s a good time to start. Don’t worry about rejection. It happens to even the best writers. It happens to me. (I’ve even posted some blog entries about it.) In fact, some very well-regarded writers have told me personally that their success is owed mostly to their dogged determination to submit.  Your work still could be quite good, but for various reasons it just didn’t catch the attention of an editor.

And when you submit, it’s always a good idea to avoid mix-ups by tracking your submissions. To manage that, use Duotrope. I have another post about this.

Good luck!



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