Literary Publishing — Sonya Huber

A Note on Forming a Strategy To Submit Your Work

It's a big wild world of literary journals out there. What you don't want to do is to ask someone else to read your work and make them tell you where to submit. Then you're missing all the fun and the learning about future opportunities!

The best strategy is to DIVE IN, somewhat at random, to some of the links below. You'll see that there are databases that list all of the journals, with new ones cropping up all the time and others fading away. The best analogy to this is to think about your own taste in music. How did you learn what you liked? By listening, randomly turning on the radio, listening to what friends listen to, reading music writing… This is the same kind of work. Journals, like bands, range from indie upstarts to epic rockstars playing the Superbowl. If you subscribe to a magazine like Poets and Writers, you will get a good introduction to that landscape. The most important thing to do is 1) put in the time, 2) explore randomly, 3) submit to places where you like the writing, 4) and maybe occasionally or regularly submit to a superstar place, because you never know what will happen!