Organising story and poem submissions as a writer

Recently I was asked in a writing group chat if I could try and explain how I keep track of what stories and poems I send to literary magazines where and what is happening to them and so forth.

I thought I could use some of my answer for this month’s blog post. Perhaps it will be interesting in some way to a few others.

Online, I mostly use the website Submission Grinder to sort through short story markets.

I’m not submitting as much as I used to, because part of my current strategy is to only submit to publications which pay me if I’m successful. (I’m also not getting published as often as I used to, because, naturally enough, the competition is tougher in paying markets!) I do sometimes make exception to the “are you going to pay me” rule for Canadian magazines.

The Submission Grinder site is useful because I can filter-search for only paying markets – it also allows me to “unfollow” market listings that I know I’m never going to submit to – over time, I’ve removed many limited demographic markets for which I don’t qualify, for example. There are other sites that do similar things, but I’ve gotten used to this one, it’s free, and because I’ve been working and adjusting my searches for a couple of years now, my account with them is fairly personalized towards what I want to see in search results.

When I have a story (or poem) that I’m ready to send out, I search for paying markets, (I forgot to say earlier you can also filter by genre at the same time) and let’s say ten markets will show up on my grinder search. Then I’ll look at which of the ten will accept simultaneous submissions, and I’ll decide if I feel confident enough in the story to send it to a market that does not accept simultaneous submissions first. Often I’ll send it out to five or six markets that do let you submit to different places at the same time, and then I’ll just wait and see what happens. If it’s the first of the month and I’m giving myself essentially all my spare time that day to submit, I’ll sometimes have a story out to as many as 10 different magazines at a time. (Some markets are only open for the first few days of a month, so a first of the month submission-frenzy is not unknown to happen.)

I tend to only send out to markets that show on submission grinder as having a response time of less than six months, although those numbers are not particularly reliable, relying as they do on authors to update their submission’s information.

Every week I get a list of newly opened markets from the submission grinder website in an email and I’ll either glance at it and decide I don’t have time to do anything, or I’ll open up the links and see if there’s something I’d like to send off.

(Sometimes as soon as I get a rejection from a story I’ll turn around and look for another place to send it off to.)

Sometimes I’ll learn about a contest or publication through the submission grinder email that seems interesting even if it doesn’t show up on my usual filtered lists, and sometimes I’ll hear about something through one of my writing groups.

On my computer, I keep a word document where I keep track of which publications have sent encouraging words with their rejections – especially the ones that say it was a close call and they’d like to see something else from me.

I try to remember to have a look at this document when it comes time to sort out what I’m going to send where, next.

And finally, I have a literal notebook which I use to keep track of what I’ve done with each piece. I don’t fully trust the internet – or my laptop – to be reliable!

It all more or less works together, although it’s messy and not very pretty and could probably be done more efficiently some other way. I like it!

As for how many times I’ll send out a story or poem before giving up on getting it published, it really depends. For some stories/poems I’ll tell myself to send it out 15 to 20 times and then stop. Other stories or poems I’ll send out a lot more. It depends on how much I believe in the piece, and sometimes I’ll be encouraged by a “good” rejection to send something out a bit more. Right now I have a couple of pieces out that I wrote last year, they’re the oldest that are actively out on submission for me. There’s two that I’m pretty much ready to give up on, one just isn’t that good, and the second has been rejected 22 times so far. I’ve got one more place I’ll try to send it the next time I’m doing submissions, and then I’ll probably stop looking for places for both of them. Maybe in a few years I might try again with the better story.

My favourite published poem took several years and dozens upon dozens of submissions before it was finally purchased. My best advise is if you believe you’ve written something good, don’t give up on it!

Are you also a short story writer and/or poet? What does your submission tracking process look like?