Am I Sabotaging Myself?

I submit to anybody who will take me.

I've had publications from ranging from game play magazine to Nature.

I've done books with really established publishers I have a book coming from a new publisher.

You take what you can get.

People take both roads. I try and get the best publisher my work is appropriate for--but I take what I can get rather than nothing for any given piece.

Personally, I work from the top down. If the best places reject my story, I'll either retire it or work down the list to those that are lower paying and might have a higher acceptance rate.

Rate

What on earth does acceptance rate have to do with anything? Either you can write a story an editor wants, or you can't, and acceptance rate doesn't change this. Editors do not buy rotten stories just because they see too few good ones.

Even if only ten writers submit in a given month, a bad story, or an inappropriate story, will still be rejected by any real magazine.

Honestly, standards are something you have no control over. All you can do is write the best way you know how. Then you send the story to an editor and let him decide.

And you never know who will take what. I once had a story rejected fourteen or fifteen times by tiny little magazines than paid almost nothing. A couple of them paid well under a penny per word.

Then I sent the story to a national glossy, and they sent me a check for $1,000.

I believe an MFA can be extremely valuable, but an MFA is no guarantee that you can write a grocery list without help, and lack of an MFA doesn't mean you can't write the best fiction ever penned. Hemingway not only had no MFA, he never even went to college.

So what if the big boys reject your stories? Big deal. It happens all the time. Joyce Carol Oates was rejected more than three dozen times before she sold a story to The Atlantic Monthly. She's still doing all right, isn't she?

Rejections happen. Who cares? If you want to be as good as the best, you have to get in the same ring as the best. You have to submit to top editors, and learn as you go. Start at the top and work your way down. You'll learn what the top does and doesn't want, and you'll sell to the best magazine that wants your story.

If there's a rule in writing that's 100% true, it's this one: If you start at the bottom and work your way up, the worst magazine that wants your story will get it. But if you start at the top and work your way down, the best magazine that wants your story will get it.

Just don't stop submitting the stories. If the highest-paying magazines don't want to take it, send it somewhere else. Smaller magazines may not be as glamorous, but it's better to have them there than nowhere at all.

Jenn, you have to write what you want to read. There's absolutely no way around that. If you don't enjoy it, then it becomes work, and very hard work with very little reward, financial or otherwise. Plus, if you don't love it, it'll show, it'll suck, and no reader will enjoy it,

With that out of the way, write what you love and you will be a very happy person. You can know you wrote something nobody else can write, because nobody else is Jenn.

Then, for publication, follow Caro's advice. Work from the top down. You'll find an editor who loves to read what you love to read, and then you'll sign a contract. Editors are just readers you'll never meet, same as most of your other readers. Just people, in other words.

(Well, I'm an editor who probably isn't a people, but the others are.)

As for publications that don't meet your standards, well, if they don't meet your standards because everybody else they publish sucks, then you don't want to associate with them anyway, do you? Nah.

So quit beating yourself up. Yeah yeah yeah, I ignore that advice myself half the time, and I'm the one giving it to you. Ain't writing wonderful?