Welcome to the first edition of Sorry We’re Prosed.
The idea of this newsletter is to share opportunities for prose writers, and to look at how we can make our writing successful – whatever that means to you.
Some newsletters will be reflections on the practicalities of writing and publishing like this one, but the main substance will be a monthly list of submission opportunities for prose writers. That means ideas for where to send your short stories, novel, essays, memoir, and other creative fiction or non-fiction.
Poets and playwrights, feel free to subscribe anyway given that many of the opportunities will be general submission periods for magazines and competitions which accept all forms.
But the point of this newsletter is that I already spend a lot of time filtering through opportunities, and I figured if I’m putting in the hours to do that, I may as well share it with other people. The lists will be totally arbitrary, and so will these occasional meditations on writing.
As it’s nearing the end of the year, I thought I would kick off with an annual review.
Getting serious about submitting
How do you measure success as a writer? Is it the number of readers your work attracts, or the endorsement of a single person you respect? Is it the amount of money made or the number of publication opportunities? Is it based on your own, deeply-held view of whether what you’ve produced is any good?
The answer for most of us will be a mix of all the factors listed above, and more.
For me, the question itself is one I only began to consider in 2020, when I started working more seriously on writing and submitting fiction to magazines and competitions.
The 15th of May 2020 is the date on which my Google Sheet of writing submissions begins. That date alone probably tells you why I was able to start seriously sending out my work.
Like many other people, I ended up with a little more time on my hands when lockdown began, and while I did not produce a King Lear-style plague masterpiece, I had more time to think, and unravel, and finally to get these ideas – which had been squatting for too long in my mind – out onto the page.
Even more importantly, I was able to spend time researching the vast world of publication opportunities. Previously, my method was to enter one high-profile competition a year and to feel discouraged when I inevitably didn’t win. You hardly need me to tell you that this is not an efficient or helpful way to submit your work. But what is? I’m still learning.
Because some magazines and contests take several months to respond, I have waited until now to finish this annual review. The submission period I am discussing ended in May 2021.
One reason I wanted to write this is that I know from experience what it’s like to see writers sharing all their publication wins, and to feel like a failure in comparison. I want to be honest about just how many submissions are hidden by the water, below that iceberg tip of acceptances.
The numbers
So first, my stats.
I sent 57 submissions between the 15th of May 2020 and the 14th of May 2021.
That consisted of 21 competitions, 30 magazines or websites, five anthologies or other publication opportunities, and one writing scheme.
My work was accepted for publication in three places, and it was longlisted in two competitions.
Counting those five as wins, my success rate is 8.77%. I’m pretty happy with that.
But there are other metrics we can look at.
For example, I spent £124.85 on competition entries or submission fees, a total which ran a little higher than I thought it would. Meanwhile, I earned a total of £36. So my loss for the year was £88.85.
Another way of looking at success would be to zero in on the acceptance rate of a particular piece of work. This throws up wildly different results.
My story ‘A Pain in the Head’, which was published by Dear Damsels in May, has a 100% success rate, having been accepted the first place I sent it. I will talk about why I think that was a little further down.
Other stories have a 0% success rate. That tells you very little, so we have to look at the numbers.
My most-rejected story went out to 10 different places in the 2020/2021 writing year (as a financial journalist, I write about companies whose ‘financial year’ started in March or sometimes July or any number of other dates, so I see no reason not to invent my own ‘writing year’ that begins on the 15th of May annually).
Looking at that number, I’m surprised it isn’t higher, which shows you just how disproportionately large rejection can loom in the writer’s mind. We’ll get to more on that in a minute, but let’s look first at some other things I learned.
Goals are good but not everything
Early on, I decided that my monthly goal would be ten submissions per month. As you can see from my totals, I got nowhere near that. In fact, I only met the goal once, in March 2021.
Looking back at that month, the reason is simply that I had a critical mass of finished, unpublished work that I wanted to send out. What that tells me is that my writing practice is not consistent month-to-month, and that I have to ride its ebbs and flows.
My current writing year will be even more ebb-y and flow-y. I’m over halfway through writing the first draft of a novel, and though my attention periodically roves back to my short stories, I only have a handful of pieces that would be ready for submission right now.
I do, however, want to achieve one small goal by the end of this year: submit at least one thing every month. Much like writing itself, keeping a regular habit of putting things out for submission makes it easier. I also find that submission deadlines motivate me to finish writing or editing a piece, and I want to keep that rhythm as part of my writing life.
Spending money is worth it – sometimes
I don’t have a problem with paying to submit to a competition, in part because I know how much time and work is involved for whoever has to collate the entries, and also because I see it as supporting the magazine or arts organisation which is running the contest.
Spending £125 on submissions in a year feels, at first, like a lot. But if I reframe it as £10 a month, that sounds more reasonable.
It’s worth noting that not a single one of my successful submissions last year were from things I had paid to enter. Yet that hasn’t put me off paying for some entries this more recently.
There are two main factors I consider when deciding whether to enter a fee-paying contest. The biggest is whether writers I admire have previously won or been shortlisted for it; they don’t have to be famous or even have a book published, but if I’ve read their work and liked it, that’s a big plus.
The other is what is offered to winners. Some combination of prize money, a free retreat or writing course, and publication in a book or respected journal are all enticing prospects.
There are, however, a few things I regret spending money on. Interestingly, it was my smallest payment which I regret the most.
I spent £3 submitting to a prestige magazine early on in the year, and in retrospect I don’t think it was worth paying to do so.
While it was a small amount, I regret it because the magazine seems rarely to take work by unknown writers, and much of any given issue is made up of extracts from upcoming novels or memoirs.
It makes me angry when I feel that the hopes of aspiring writers are being used as a cash cow. It is of course a tricky balance, because I do believe in paying the writers for their work and the editors for their time. But if I don’t see the magazine publishing a decent amount from their slush pile, I now won’t pay to send anything.
Dealing with rejection gets easier
Rejection is discouraging, no matter how many times it happens.
As I mentioned earlier, I have one story which I have submitted ten times and which has not yet been accepted. It’s about a woman whose fiancé is replaced by Death (inspired by the German ballad Lenore, after I saw a painting depicting the poem on Instagram), and could sit in a range of genres, from literary to horror to urban fantasy. That means it could also be submitted to several different places, and has been.
At the end of the day, there are a few reasons I feel able to continue sending this story out, despite the lack of interest shown in it.
The first is that I deeply love the story. I know it is not objectively my best piece of work, but to me it has a very emotional core. Sometimes all you can do is keep putting that out there and hope it resonates with someone.
Secondly, I have accepted that at this stage the story is as good as it can be. It was the first story I completed during the March/April 2020 lockdown, and has been through more than enough revisions. There is a point, for me, at which a piece of work solidifies. This story is at that point, and while I’d be open to an editor’s changes, I don’t think there’s anything significant I could do now that would win over a reader who doesn’t already like it.
One thing that has helped me with rejection is to record small victories as well as big ones.
On my submissions spreadsheet, each entry is colour-coded based on its eventual result. Acceptances, longlistings/shortlistings, and wins are green. Rejections are red. But there is also orange.
Orange can be a range of things, including getting a personalised rejection, getting a ‘tiered’ rejection (a message which is more encouraging than a rote rejection, and often explicitly encourages you to submit again), or anything where I’m aware I got through at least one of the submission stages.
This reminds me that it isn’t always a bland, computer-generated “no”. It also serves as a database of publications which seem to be receptive to my work, and which I should try again.
What succeeds, and why?
This is the hardest part to reflect on, not just because I don’t always know why my work was able to rise up the pile, but also because my approach was so scattergun.
I submitted to competitions that received hundreds of entries, to old-school literary journals, to genre-specific magazines, to contests exclusively open to people in my demographic, and to others open to anyone in the world. I submitted to magazines in the UK, Ireland, Australia, the US, and Canada.
If I were focusing on one segment of the writing world, I might have got a better feel for what does well with particular editors, learning a lot about a single genre. As it is, I have instead learned a very small amount about a lot of different parts of the literary landscape.
So, I can only really guess at the reasons why some of my work succeeded. Even if an editor has explained what they liked about it, it’s not as though I’ve seen any of the work that didn’t quite make it.
Nevertheless, looking back on what landed, here are three things I think helped me get that 8.77% success rate.
Attention to theme: General submissions are great for the work I can’t fit into a particular theme, but there’s a eureka moment whenever I see that a callout addresses something I have the perfect story for.
That’s what happened with my story ‘Desk Flowers’ which was published by Popshot Quarterly in their “growth” issue. The story, which features office plants abandoned in lockdown becoming outsized and taking over a building, is about growth in more ways than one.
I was excited to make the submission, because I felt it would fit really well, and though that feeling of excitement doesn’t always add up to an acceptance, it always seems like a good sign.Being familiar with the publication: Every single magazine asks you to familiarise yourself what they’ve published previously before submitting, but as writers keen to maximise our chances of finding a home for our work, we often skirt around that request.
I’m going to be honest with you and say that of the 30 magazines or websites I submitted to, I was only very familiar with four or five. For a few others, I was at least familiar with writers they’d previously published or knew a bit about them by general reputation. As for the rest, I had a look at a few stories on their website before submitting, and if there were none available then I went in blind.
I think a lot of us will make some random submissions to places we know very little about, and that’s fine. But it also makes sense to me that one of my acceptances last year was from one of the literary websites I read the most: Dear Damsels.
Not only do I know what kind of thing is published on the site, I know from social media who its readers are, and that some of their tastes are similar to mine. That helped me know, for sure, that my story would work, whereas with other submissions I’m only guessing.Having a go: Whatever. You know this. It’s boring. “The only people who have no chance of winning are the people who don’t enter!” We’ve heard it all before, and we know it’s not so simple as that.
But… it also has some truth to it.
The two competitions I was longlisted for in this period felt like complete stabs in the dark when I entered them. I didn’t really know what the judges wanted, there was no theme. In one instance (Women’s Prize Discoveries) it was the first time the competition had ever been run so there was very little to go on. Not to mention that I felt my idea for a novel was silly and not worth pursuing.
Making that list certainly changed my mind about that, and it also reminded me that even when I’m not feeling confident, it’s worth pushing through that and trying anyway.
Final words and where to find my work
Some people find the submissions process painful. Between the rejection, being ignored, and feeling envy for other people’s successes, it can get to you. The admin of navigating multiple submission methods and style guides doesn’t help either.
But I have a confession. Much as I feel the frustration of submitting, I also find it a bit addictive. It’s like gambling, but with very – sometimes extremely – delayed gratification. I like the thrill of finding somewhere new that looks like it could be a good fit, and I like daydreaming about where my work could end up. I even, in a weird way, like receiving a rejection: at least it’s a response, and at least someone read my work.
I want to use this newsletter to turn the hours I spend investigating publication opportunities into something that can be useful to you as well.
As well as monthly submissions opportunities emails, I’ll look to do deeper dives on what succeeds. For example, if I’ve read all the previous winners of a short story competition, I’ll write up what the common factors are between them and what appears to do well with the judges – again this is something I’ve done for myself before and so may as well share.
I’d also be interested in interviewing editors of literary magazines, drop me a Twitter DM if that’s you.
For now, I’ll wish you a happy Christmas, and ask that if you’ve enjoyed this post to make sure you sign up for the newsletter, or if you’ve done that already then share it with a friend. The first submission opportunities round-up will be going out on Thursday the 6th of January 2022.
And if you’re so inclined, you can follow the links below to check out my short stories.
‘Desk Flowers’ in Popshot Quarterly issue 32
‘Scratching’ in Weird Horror issue 2
‘A Pain In The Head’ on Dear Damsels (free to read)
‘The Birdmen’ in Spellbinder issue 4
Alys, this is great! As a fellow writer; enterer of competitions; submitter of manuscripts to agents etc, I found this post HUGELY informative and relatable. Like a lot of us, I tend to imagine I'm the only one with a rejection list longer than the longest thing you can think of, and as I approach my 60th year (erk) I wonder where the hell I went wrong with my writing over the previous 40! When I was studying undergrad creative writing (where I got a First class Honours, which I thought might help mentioning when submitting... um ... that's a No) I did a similar thing to you - although not as well because spreadsheets elude me, and on the Writing Short Fiction module, decided, as I was getting good results and feedback in my assignments, that I'd start entering competitions, randomly, I think in cost order because some entry fees are eye-watering) and kept a folder separated into months of deadline and scribbled a note of what/if I'd sent anything to them. Like you, I was surprised over that year to have been longlisted a couple of times, shortlisted and published in anthologies, and won £250 for coming second in the Yeovil Literary Prize.... (I cried, I cannot lie) ... I 'tested' this entry out in another 2 or so short story competitions last year, and didn't even get longlisted with it - so it shows that judges opinions are vastly varied - everything's as subjective as it's always been. Looking forward to reading more from you, in fact I'm considering starting a Substack newlsetter myself! Debs