How to make 1,000 submissions in 3 years

I hit a really cool milestone yesterday: I’ve made 1,000 writing submissions!

I wanted to write up this quick post to explain how this happened, in the form of advice. I know a lot of writers wish they submitted more, and I’m always encouraging people to submit!

So here’s a bunch of tips on how to do that.

1. Write a lot, and write widely

Officially, I have 33 stories that are submit-able (as in: finished, edited, formatted, etc, and not moldering in my WIPs folder). But I also have poems, nonfiction pitches, and a couple novel excerpts. Some are more successful than others, as you can guess.

My first decade writing (2008-2018), I was struggling with a huge novel and made some attempts at short stories, but they never got anywhere because I believed I wasn’t “capable” of having any ideas “small” enough for short stories. I never finished anything, my work was never read by anyone, and I felt like a failure.

But then I started reading–and writing!–fanfiction, which introduced me to micro/flash and more experimental forms. It got me to rediscover what I loved about writing and the confidence to put myself out there. I was published in a couple fanzines, and my first two “original” fiction pieces were published in the conbooks for my local furry con. The first one was cyberpunk, of all things! Something I’d never thought I’d write.

The first story I sold (for money)(and in a non-fannish publication) was actually the fourth I finished in this “phase” of my writing journey. By the time it came out, I already had six other pieces I was submitting.

The most important thing I learned from writing fanfics is that you need to finish your stories. So much of the writing advice we hear is how to write a story, but you can be writing the same one for decades. You gotta put down the pen and say it’s done at some point. So, even though I joke about my WIP pile, I push myself to finish my stories.

The more pieces you have finished, the more submissions you can make. You can’t submit one story 1,000 times (there just aren’t that many markets!), and you can’t submit 1,000 stories once each (you can’t write that much). You gotta find something in the middle.

2. Submit widely

Whatever type of writing you do, you know there’s a handful of places that are the most prestigious. They have the most awards, the highest readership, they pay the most money.

But, odds are, you’ll have pieces that get rejected by all of them, or you’re waiting a year (or more) for them to open up, so you got pieces that are sitting, not being considered anywhere. So what are you supposed to do?

Well, there’s plenty of fish in the sea, and there’s always new fish being launched! They may not be well known or prestigious today, but they may be in the future. Or they might never get a wide readership, and that’s fine, too.

When you’re looking for markets, keep an open mind. Try places that are web-only, podcast-only, zine clubs, anthologies for a lootcrate for book lovers. Try places with websites that were probably made in Microsoft Word and places that haven’t even published their first issue yet.

A good piece of advice is “don’t self reject.” If there’s a chance the editors will like your work, then why not! I’ve never paid for a submission, so the only thing I’ve ever wasted was my time (and a couple postage stamps). Unless your piece is on their hard no list (e.g. absolutely no stories above X words, no explicit violence, no selkies) and it’s a type of piece they publish (i.e. a poem and the market actually publishes poetry), then you always have a chance.

Pro tip for Submission Grinder users: make sure you choose “general” as one of the genres for most of your pieces. If a market says “we accept everything,” then it’ll be filed under “general” instead of every possible genre, so this’ll let you find way more markets for it.

3. Submit often

It goes without saying, but you need to submit in order to make submissions, and you need to submit if you want to get acceptances. Set out some time to make submissions at a regular schedule, and stick to it.

Every Friday, I go on the Submission Grinder and run searches on my stories to see if there’s open markets that fit the piece (more on that in the next item). But I also do this on the first of each month, as that’s when a lot of markets open up. For each of these days, I might only submit once or twice, or maybe twenty or more. It’s a surprise which it’ll be!

If you want to be serious about submitting, at least make time on the first of the month (or as close to that as possible) to do so. Find yourself a buddy and do it together, or give yourself a little treat if you make X submissions. It’ll soon become a habit, and you’ll become a submitting expert, too!

4. Submit smarter, not harder

At my college, people said Bill Gates once said that he’d always rather hire a lazy engineer over a hard-working engineer. The lazy engineer will automate a large portion of their work, so they’re consistently getting more and more done, even if it looks like they’re doing nothing.

Honestly, we probably told ourselves that because we’d rather be playing League of Legends than doing homework, and you always want to think you’re smarter than some other shmuck. But it’s true for a lot of things.

As a writer, you probably want to be spending most of your time writing, not submitting. And when you’re submitting, you’ll want to be spending that time getting as many subs out as possible, instead of formatting files and writing emails.

Therefore, it’s smart to have everything you’ll need pre-made, so you can just grab what’s required quickly. You should have:

• Two versions of each story/piece in standard manuscript format (one with your information, the other anonymized)
  • While there are some markets that want something slightly different, these are the minority. Make a one-off file if needed.
• Packets of 3-5 poems (also properly formatted with an anonymized copy)
• Two versions of your bio (<100 words and <50 words)
• Someplace to track all your submissions (Submission Grinder account, spreadsheet, etc)
• Information about all of your stories/pieces (title, genres, word/line count, publication history)
  • You can also write up a list of content warnings, too, but they’re not required often enough that I think it’s necessary
• Cover letter template

The last one I have as a script in my spreadsheet; I choose a piece from a dropdown menu, and it populates the title, wordcount, and publication history, so I just need to copy/paste a couple cells to have a complete cover letter. Even if it would have taken me a minute to write it by hand, that minute adds up when you make lots of subs! I’ve literally saved myself more than a dozen hours of time by taking the 20 minutes to write that script once.

You don’t need to do something that complicated. You can make a table with the information and copy/paste as needed, but since cover letters are formulaic by design, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel for each sub.

If you want to prioritize your pieces in a certain manner, make sure you have a system for that. I used to use a corkboard, but, due to the number of pieces I have, I now use Trello. I label pieces by the “tier” of markets I want to submit them to, the availability of pieces to be sold as reprints, and even which ones still need the contract/payment/contributor copy/proofs/to be published.

As you finish more and more pieces (and rack up more and more acceptances!), it’s absolutely critical that you have a way to keep track of everything. There’s tons of options out there, so use whatever system makes the most sense for you. And keep an open mind, as you might have to change your system as your circumstances change.

5. Do simultaneous and multiple submissions

A sim sub is having one piece under consideration at multiple markets at the same time. Some places, like Clarkesworld, don’t allow them, but they’re open every day of the year and respond quite quickly, so it’s no big deal. But Strange Horizons is open maybe once a year and take several months to get back to you. Do you want to keep that piece tied up for that long (and risk missing out on anthologies and other windows) or keep it unsubmitted while you hope the window opens soon (they don’t give a ton of heads up)?

There’s no right answer to this, as it depends on how you want to approach submissions and how you feel about the practice, but it’s a lot less painful when you have multiple pieces looking for homes.

I usually have all but one or two pieces being simultaneously submitted. Most markets allow the practice (or, at least don’t say you can’t). When I finish a new flash fiction, it usually goes to the simsub markets first, so I can get ten or twelve submissions done right then. Yes, it does mean that it’ll take some time to send all those withdrawals, but isn’t that a nice problem to have?

Multiple submissions is having more than one piece under consideration by one market at the same time. This is expected for poetry, but less common for fiction. This can be for the form as a packet of flash fiction, or a combination of pieces as long as they total less than X words, or making Y submissions per window. If a place doesn’t mention they allow this, assume they don’t.

The more pieces you have, the more often you can take advantage of multiple submissions. So, if it’s ever an option, do so!

6. Submit reprints

This is where my Trello board really kicks ass. Once a piece is published, I set a timer for the exclusivity period, so I’m able to send it right back out the door the moment it’s able.

Yes, you’re almost never going to make more money on a reprint sale than an original sale…but you can sell a reprint many times. I have two pieces tied at four reprint sales each, all paid (and one of those pieces wasn’t even paid for its first publication!) The total of reprint sales could one day eclipse the original sales of your work, and isn’t that neat?

For accessibility reasons, I like making sure each of my pieces have at least one audio adaption, too, and there’s tons of audio markets that take reprints! A story that was only available in a paid issue/anthology is also inherently unaccessible for many people, so I also like having a free online version, too.

So don’t discount rerpints! Since there’s way fewer paying markets for them (if that’s one of your primary goals in publishing), it makes it way quicker to search for compatible markets for them, as you usually only get one or two results at a time.

7. Don’t give up on a piece

One of the things I hear that makes me want to bite people is, “My story got rejected three times, which means it’s terrible! So I trunked it.” Or, “Clarkesworld rejected three of my stories, so I gave up submitting forever.”

Did you know [Harvard has an acceptance rate of 3.64%]? Now, here’s acceptance rates for some lit mags:

• SmokeLong Quarterly | 0.21%
• Asimov’s Science Fiction | 0.34%
• Clarkesworld | 1.49%
• Radon | 2.04%
• Analog Science Fiction & Fact | 4.77%

If you applied to Harvard and got rejected, does that mean you’re dumb? Does that mean you’ll never get into any other college, or ever succeed in life? Of course not! So why should you think the same about your story, especially if breaking into a mag is harder than getting into Harvard?

There’s tons of reasons why you didn’t get into Harvard (or any journal), and a lot of it can be distilled to “there’s only so many seats, and lots of strong applicants.” If you’re new to subbing, you might think this is only something to make you feel better, but it’s absolutely true.

At some point, you’ll get a rejection that says “We loved your piece, and it made it to the final round, and it was really hard, but we won’t be publishing this.” If there was enough space (or more budget), they would have bought your story! They really did love it that much! And it means someone else will, too. You just have to find them.

Which pieces are published are chosen for lots of different reasons. They want a diversity of themes/styles/subjects, or they decided to make an issue more tightly themed, or they have a really specific vibe they’re going for, or maybe they recently bought a story that’s a lot like yours, and it would be weird to have two in such close succession. Most of the factors are outside of your control and have nothing to do with the quality of your work.

I have five different stories that have racked up 50+ rejections over their lifetimes. For two, it was before they were even got their first acceptance! But those were also literary-y but also sci-fi-y, and kind of fantasy-y? And also flash fiction, so they were eligible for way more markets than a 6,000 word hard sci-fi.

There’s always new journals being launched: one of them bought the 50+ reject for their first issue. There’s always new anthologies: this is where I found a home for my first short story (after a year and a half of submitting it). Just because your piece got rejected a bunch of times, it doesn’t mean it won’t eventually get a “yes.”

8. Remind yourself why you’re submitting

When I was first “getting serious about writing,” I was seeking out more crits, and looking at them was always so anxiety-inducing. Getting rejection emails hurt a lot. Ah, but my sister went to art school! They do crits all the time, so there must be some secret to making this more bearable!

“There’s no secret,” she said. “You just get used to it lol.”

And, yeah, she’s right. It’s exposure therapy; it gets a little less bad each time. Sometimes, though, you do get a kinda-mean rejection, or a bunch in a row, or you were already in a bad mood and it hit you in the weak spot. Sometimes it’s been months since you got a nice personal, let alone an acceptance.

So, don’t forget to be kind to yourself. Take a day or two off, but you do need to get back onto that horse. You miss all the shots you don’t make, or something like that.

It’s helpful to remind yourself why you’re even doing this in the first place. If you want to publish really weird, queer stories because you want to see more weird, queer stories in the world, then, yeah, it’s going to be harder to sell them to many mainstream places (don’t get me started on the trouble I’ve been given for using neopronouns).

But there’s plenty of smaller markets that focus on these specific types of work. Another thing that makes me want to bite people is, “My work is too queer/neurodivergent/disabled/BIPOC to be published by anyone! So why even try.”

If the only place you look for writing is The New Yorker, then, yeah. You’re not going to find stories like that. But here’s [a queer sword-and-sorcery anthology that many people are excited about] and has a bunch of really cool people in it. There’s markets that only publish queer voices, BIPOC voices, immigrant voices, disabled voices. [There’s a really good anthology of Indigenous horror stories by only Indigenous authors], and some of the stories were explicitly queer, too!

If your goal is to be a millionaire, selling short fiction and poems a’int gonna do that. But if you want your words to be read by people, especially people like you, who want to feel seen and heard, to know that their stories are worth being told, then find and support places that platform those stories.

Remember what your goals are, and submit to places that’ll help you accomplish those goals.

Final thoughts

I knew I submit a lot, but I didn’t realize it was actually this much until I was running out of rows on my spreadsheet lol. I honestly didn’t intend to become an “expert” on submitting, especially this quickly!

But I really love helping other people do this, too. I know being published is the goal of so many people, and that this process can seem really opaque and scary. Honestly, it’s a whole lot of waiting and checking your email once a day. But that gives you plenty of time to write 🙂

And remember:

appendix: my silly numbers

If you want to crunch everything up:

• Stories: 33
  • 12 published
  • 4 pending first publication
  • 17 looking for homes
  • 68,000 total words (so 2K/story average)
• Poems: 9
• Novel excerpts: 1
• “Other”s: 2
• Total submissions: 1,008
• Currently pending submissions: 81
• Rejections: 811
• Acceptances: 40
• Total publications (of fiction): 34
• Earnings total: not enough to need to tell the IRS lol

And for some year-by-year comparisons:

I know some things look Funky, but that’s because a sub might be made in year X and then accepted in year Y.