Are You Ready to Publish?

Five Questions to Ask Yourself Before Trying to Publish

Trying to publish your writing requires a huge amount of administrative work: preparing submissions, researching your market, and tracking submissions. After all of that, the resulting rejections can take a toll on your confidence. Before beginning this process, it’s important to evaluate where you’re at as a writer. Included here are five points to consider before embarking on this next stage of your writing career.

1. Do you have a large body of work? If you have only one “finished” story, wait to begin submitting. First of all, this is a good sign that your work and your confidence would benefit from a longer gestation period. Secondly, should an editor reject your work, but ask you to re-submit, it’s best to do that right away, before he or she forgets you. If you get a request for more work and have nothing else to send, you’ll have squandered an opportunity to forge a lasting relationship.

2. Have you received feedback on your work? Giving and receiving feedback is an important stage in the evolution of any serious writer. Furthermore, if the work has not been read and evaluated by others, it is less likely to create a professional impression.

At the very least, someone else should have read your work with an eye for grammar and spelling.

3. Are you ready to commit time and energy to the administrative aspect of getting published? Can you afford to spend more time researching journals, creating spreadsheets, and addressing envelopes, or will you be sacrificing time that might be better spent honing your craft?

4. Have you done your research? While I’ve found it to be unrealistic to subscribe—or even read--every magazine and journal I submit to, it is important to at least be familiar with the market. Spend time at the bookstore thumbing through journals, pick up a copy of Writer’s Market, and visit the websites of journals you’re considering. Make sure your work fits what they’re looking for. Otherwise, you’re only wasting time and postage.

5. Are you prepared for rejection? Do you feel secure in yourself as a writer? With the exception of a lucky few, most writers encounter a great deal of rejection before earning any notable recognition. If you’ve been writing for a while, have a schedule for writing, and a network of supportive fellow writers to bolster you when your spirits are low, you’re more likely to weather the inevitable failures. If you still feel somewhat fragile in your identity as a writer, it might be better to focus on establishing a writing life before exposing yourself to the whims of the publishing world.

In spite of the rejection and the work involved, the process of getting published can be rewarding in and of itself. In reading journals and receiving feedback from editors, you may begin to feel yourself a part of a community. The people who run journals and small presses aren’t that different from you and I. They’re just people who love literature and writing enough to commit time and money to getting new work out there.

This, of course, is part of the reason for the rejection slips. Journals and magazines reflect specific tastes and perspectives. Rejections are often more a reflection on their taste rather than your talent. Keep this in mind when the rejection slips come in. If you feel yourself becoming bitter or discouraged, take a break and go back to doing the work you love--the reason all those publications exist in the first place.