Part Two: A Submission Walkthrough

Follow-up:

It's way cool if a mag sends you a note for an electronic submission.... Just so's you know they GOT the sub. Sometimes they'll even tell you about how long you'll be waiting, but often it's just an autoresponse. TS didn't want any bio info in the email and since they wanted both an attachment AND the story pasted into the body of the email, I didn't want to get chatty there. If they hadn't sent a response telling me they got my sub, I'd query in a week just to make sure they got it and it's in the sub queue. So now I log the entry in my submission tracker and wait for the response.

Tenth step ...

Enjoy or start over:

Enjoy if you get an acceptance. Start over with market choice #2 if you get a reject. BEWARE of changing your story in between. This is a very bad habit of beginners. (Maybe I'll do a whole article on that subject... so we'll just leave it for now.) There is another option and that's what happened with my sub to TS... they wanted to consider a rewrite. The editor liked my story (yes, this example is taken from real life) and asked if I'd consider rewriting the ending for more clarity. I was okay with that (although it's not always worked out in the past), so I did the rewrite and resubmitted. The story was accepted and was published in the February issue of TS.

The good side: the story got read by a lot more people than if it had been published in a hardcopy magazine and I got more email from people who'd read it and wanted to comment or congratulate me.

The bad side: the issue was only up for one month and there are no archives. Basically, my story is absolute history. At least with a hardcopy mag, even if it's not on the stands or even available anymore... you can still SHOW people.

Ah well, I love the mag and I was thrilled with the opportunity to showcase my writing in it. The editor was a joy to work with and he pays his writers promptly.

They don't all work out this well. I definitely have more reject slips than acceptances, but my odds get better all the time.

Go To Page: 1 2