I have never been a patient person. It’s just a virtue I lack. Which means that the oftentimes months long wait to hear back regarding my short story submissions is excruciating. I know I’m not the only one, even though we all strive to appear stoic. I assume that most of you are just as anxious as I am underneath that calm collected façade. So how do we deal with the wait?
Get Organized
Firstly, I recommend making sure that you are keeping proper track of your submissions. I use Duotrope (that link hooks you up with a promo code if you want to try Duotrope out) so I’ll be referring to it a lot as we discuss submission managers. Using such a tool helps to ensure that you know where a given piece is submitted to at any given time and don’t forget to pull a submission if it is accepted elsewhere.
You can also see how long your pieces have been out to each publisher. Duotrope shows you each publisher’s average response time, as well as most recent response, as reported by other Duotrope users. I find it valuable knowing how long of a wait to expect. One piece I’m waiting to hear back has an average of a 24-day response and another has 120 days. It is much less stressful for me to know that the 120-day response is a long way off rather than constantly expecting it.
In addition, knowing average response time can give you an idea of the status of your submission. For example, the 24-day response time journal that I mentioned above. My piece is 29 days out – five days over their average response time. Duotrope also shows me that the journal has been sending out personal rejections over the course of the last week. Logic implies that my piece has made it past the initial couple rejection rounds. I say ‘couple’ because they are sending out personal rejections which means that they have likely sorted out the hmm-maybe submissions as well as the absolutely-no submissions. Yay me!
Another question that I see frequently is what to do if your piece is accepted somewhere but you still haven’t heard back from a journal that you prefer. Honestly, if that is the case, you’ve already fucked up. We’ll go over how to avoid this situation but first I’ll tell you how to handle it: suck it up, buttercup. Take the acceptance you’ve got and carry on with your life. You could politely reject the submission and pray to the literary gods that The New Yorker finally accepts your magnum opus, but the literary gods are assholes and it’s most likely a gargantuan mistake. Take the win, pull your simultaneous submissions from the other journals, and don’t put yourself in this position again.
So, how do you avoid ending up in such a predicament in the first place? Well, you take honest time getting to know potential places of submission for starters. Read, read, read till your eyes shrivel up in your head. If you want a place to feature your work, you better know what kind of work they feature. Next, make a spreadsheet organizing potential journals into groups based on how much you would like for them to publish your work: Dream Tier, A Tier, B Tier, and so on. Label them however you like. I use:
- Pretty Please with Sugar on Top
- I’d Still Flex It
- I’ve Had Better
- Help, I’m Desperate
Now shoot out your submissions to the first group. Wait until you’ve heard back, or are reasonably sure you’ll never hear back, until you submit to the next tier. There, problem solved.
Stay Busy
Okay, so now we’ve got everything organized but there are still months left to wait. There are a couple of options at this point. One is to submit the same piece to more places. I generally don’t recommend performing further editing on a given piece while it is out; that just creates remorse that you sent out a different version. The exception would be if you received a personal rejection with valuable feedback – in which case you may want to go ahead and implement the suggested edits. Your piece should generally be sent out to multiple journals at any given time, but make sure they accept simultaneous submissions. I usually aim for about ten journals per piece at any given time.
Another thing you can do is work on your next piece. You can work from any ideas you already have brewing or, if you don’t have something lined up, look at calls for submissions and contests to see if any have a specific theme they are looking for. There are usually plenty of these to give you a starting point to write from. Again, even though you may initially write a piece for one journal’s call for submission, that doesn’t mean you should only submit it there. Spread the love and submit to as many places as you want.
But It’s Been Foreeeeeever
When is a suitable time to follow up to find out if a journal has ghosted you or just hasn’t gotten around to deciding yet? Well, that depends on the journal. Let’s go back to Duotrope. As I said earlier, each journal has different average response times. Ergo, if the average response time for Journal A is 30 days and you haven’t heard anything for 40 days, you’re probably in the clear to send a brief and polite note inquiring the status of your submission. However, if Journal B has an average response time of 160 days, you’re going to want to wait until after that window has passed in most cases.
Another handy feature of Duotrope is that the color of the ‘P’ for pending in your submission tracker changes to red when it is appropriate to send a status query. They also mark the ‘P’ purple for editors that prefer not to receive status queries or are known not to respond to all submissions.
That’s really all there is to it. No magic trick to make it go faster or anything like that. Just stay organized and informed, keep working, and don’t be afraid to follow up when appropriate. Now go write or submit or both. Stop procrastinating by reading blogs on the internet.
