How much rejection goes into publishing a story collection?
On the iceberg illusion and the lit mag publication process
Dear Friends,
Last month I wrote a how-to guide on submitting to literary magazines. I did so because I’ve only recently begun sending work out for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. If you’ll talk to me, I’ll be candid with you that debuting as an author during a global pandemic was not a great experience. My debut story collection came out nearly 3 years ago in April of 2020, and my debut poetry collection a year after that in April of 2021.
For the most part, I wasn’t working on new poetry or short fiction after those books had been tracked to be published. I had a demanding job at the time, and any extra energy I had went to trying to usher those books into the world and find them their readers (maybe one day I’ll write about the small press and having to be your own publicist…). I was also, you know, trying to manage my mental and physical health during *gestures broadly at 2020 and 2021*.
This isn’t to say I stopped writing. Since 2017 I’ve been fussing around with trying to figure out novel-writing for myself. It wasn’t until last year I decided to stop prioritizing novel-writing and start actively trying to court my first loves again: poetry & short stories. I also wrote about that process with failure and transformation fairly extensively last year.
A writer’s journey is always changing—and always imperfect. Even though I’d say, on some level, I’ve gotten over the imposter syndrome that haunted my early years, I’m now also plagued with newer questions: such as what if the stories from my “Moonflower… era” are ‘better’ than what I’ve been generating this past year? Also, this sneaky, unhelpful narrative has started to appear in my head that the work from my story collection found homes in magazines quicker than the new work I’m trying to send out (i.e.: the newer work is less worthy and overall worse).
I started to think: if only I had a way to prove to myself that the hardships of the present are not more onerous than the hardships of the past. And then I thought: oh wait, I do! I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of my literary magazine submissions for an entire decade now, and although it’s mostly for logistical record-keeping, it does have other advantages. So what I’m about to do is show you the submission process for all ten works in Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day—but first—we need to talk about the iceberg illusion.
You'll have to excuse me for this one. I know the "iceberg illusion" has a sheen of ‘corporate seminar’ to it, but I also sincerely love it as a visual model and teaching aid.
In my own publishing journey Moonflower… is represented by the ice that meets the air. It is the smallest piece of the iceberg, the one in which people see a published story collection that won a prize. What people don’t see is all the effort that went into writing the stories, editing them across a series of years, trying to find them homes in magazines, experiencing rejection after rejection, organizing them into a collection, trying to find the entire collection a publisher…. The list goes on.
So what I want to say is that everyone’s process is different. There are writers who secured a fancy literary agent who slides their fiction to the top of The New Yorker’s reading pile. There are writers who have been trying for a decade and still haven’t published a single story. There are also dozens of different types of magazines that occupy different spaces: magazines started in small San Francisco apartments, magazines that are run out of MFA programs, magazines that been running for one hundred years, science fiction mags with huge readerships, journals with the highest submission vetting process in the country, and so on. So while the next section is an olive branch of transparency, it’s also my journey, not anyone else’s, and it might not reflect other people’s submission process. There are so many variables that cannot be accounted for in a simple list format.
"The Teenager"
2014 — Vinyl — Rejected
2015 — Front Porch Journal — Rejected
2015 — Joyland — Rejected
2016 — Burrow Press Review — Rejected
2016 — Saw Palm — Rejected
2016 — Fourth River — Rejected
2016 — Tampa Review — ACCEPTED
"Chinchilla" (F.K.A. "Frisson")
2015 — The Journal — Rejected
2015 — The Common — Rejected
2015 — The Masters Review — Rejected
2015 — Barely South Review (Contest) — ACCEPTED
2016 — Ninth Letter — Withdrawn
2016 — GRANTA — Withdrawn
2016 — Day One — Withdrawn
"The Hand That Sews" (F.K.A. "Bargain")
2015 — The Golden Key — Rejected
2015 — Tor.com — Rejected
2015 — Adroit — Rejected
2016 — APEX — Rejected
2016 — Black Static — Rejected
2016 — The Dark — Rejected
2016 — F&SF — Rejected
2016 — Clarkesworld — Rejected
2016 — Uncanny — Rejected
2016 — The Georgia Review — Rejected
2017 — Strange Horizons — Rejected
2017 — Pleiades — Rejected
2017 — StoryQuarterly — Rejected
2017 — The Collagist — Withdrawn
2018 — Gargoyle — Rejected
2018 — Lackington's — Rejected
2018 — Mississippi Review — ACCEPTED
2018 — Tin House — Withdrawn
2018 — Hunger Mountain — Withdrawn
2021 — Psychopomp — ACCEPTED*
* Note: This was a special reprint issue that was reprinting work online that had only been published previously in print-only lit mag issues. This story also has a small image component that I always wanted to see reflected digitally, as I think it has more impact than in print. Generally, once a story has been published in a magazine, that’s it, because most magazines ask for first serial rights.
"Cross"
2015 — Tin House — Rejected
2015 — BOMB (Contest) — Rejected
2015 — FENCE — Rejected
2016 — Fairy Tale Review (Contest) — Rejected
2016 — Mid-American Review — Rejected
2016 — Cosmonaut's Avenue (Contest) — Rejected
2016 — Gettysburg Review — Rejected
2016 — Ninth Letter — ACCEPTED
"Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day"
2016 — Jonathan — Rejected
2016 — StoryQuarterly (Contest) — Withdrawn
2016 — Booth — Rejected
2016 — Necessary Fiction — Rejected
2016 — Sonora Review — ACCEPTED
2016 — Missouri Review (Contest) — Withdrawn
2016 — Witness — Withdrawn
"Where Parallel Lines Come to Touch"
2017 — Fairy Tale Review — Rejected
2017 — Phantom Drift — Rejected
2017 — West Branch — Rejected
2017 — The New Yorker — Rejected
2017 — Cicada (Cricket Magazine) — ACCEPTED
2017 — The Georgia Review — Withdrawn
2017 — Mid-America Review — Withdrawn
2017 — Tin House — Withdrawn
2017 — Missouri Review — Withdrawn
"Night Things"
2014 — Wyvern Lit — Accepted
"Their Sons Return Home to Die"
2016 — Strange Horizons — Rejected
2016 — Clarkesworld — Rejected
2016 — Drunken Boat — Rejected
2016 — The Account — ACCEPTED
"After the End Came the Mall, and the Mall Was Everything" (Novella)
2016 — Lightspeed — Rejected
2016 — Asimov's — Rejected
2016 — Clarkesworld — Rejected
2016 — F&SF — Rejected
2016 — Beloit — Rejected
2016 — Seattle Review — Rejected
2016 — Ploughshares (Solo) — Rejected
2016 — Alaska Quarterly — Rejected
2016 — Conjunctions — Rejected**
2017 — Book Smugglers — Rejected
2017 — Nouvella — Withdrawn
2017 — A Public Space — Rejected
2017 — Hayden's Ferry Review — Rejected
2017 — Miami Book Fair's De Groot Prize (Contest) — Rejected
2017 — Curbside's Wild Onion Novella Contest — Rejected
2018 — Etchings Press — Rejected
2018 — Subtropics — Rejected
2018 — 1888 Center Novella Contest — Rejected
2018 — Lightspeed — Rejected
2018 — Tor.com — Rejected
2018 — Mason Jar Press's Novella Chapbook Open Reading — Rejected
2018 — Parvus Press — Rejected
2018 — Bull City Press's Chapbook Reading Period — Rejected
2018 — Fireside Fiction — Rejected
2018 — New England Review (NER) — Rejected
2018 — Twelfth Planet Press (Novella Series) — Withdrawn
2019 — Texas Review Novella Contest — Rejected, but received "Finalist" status***
** Technicality: it was a simultaneous submission, which they didn't allow.
*** My manuscript was accepted in summer of 2018, and so I had to stop sending it out at a certain point. Basically, knowing it might take 4-6 months for a publisher/mag to get back to me and could be 6-8 months before it actually got published, there was no guarantee the novella would get published before the story collection itself, and I didn't want to violate first-publication rights. I'd also felt like I'd exhausted pretty much every resource at my disposal that would read a novella-length work. I have more to say about this as well...
"Fordite Pendant"
2016 — Hotel Amerika — Accepted
Even though there were a few outliers with stories being published the very first time I sent them out, most of the stories went through a submission process that spanned across multiple years and multiple rejections. That’s what’s under the arctic water as well: the times I pulled stories back to edit and revise them again. There’s a certain ‘story of Theseus’ aspect to the submission process too. How many words did I take out or rearrange over the years? Was it even the same story in the end?
I also want to put out that the novella from Moonflower… that takes place in a speculative, enchanted shopping mall never found a publication home before the book itself came out. And I really let that get to me at times. Yes, novellas are long and notoriously hard to publish, but it was hard not to take that rejection as personal. It’s also worth mentioning—and I don’t say this to humblebrag—but that when my story collection actually did come out, most of the reviews focused on the mall novella first and foremost in their criticism. Reviewers loved it. They had questions about it. They wanted more. So here is this thing that I’ve been sending out nearly 30 times—rejected from every publication—and now people want to talk extensively about it. “The Hand That Sews” was also a nightmare to find a home for, and it ultimately received some kind press upon the book’s publication. Which is to say, you never know.
This is also to say that magazine publication is not the end-all-be-all, and it shouldn’t necessarily influence the value on what you place on your work itself. Hell, Moonflower… was published through a literary fiction prize in which a judge picked my manuscript out. It’s possible this could have happened regardless whether any of the individual stories had appeared in magazines or not before the collection as a whole was published.
If there’s any lesson here, perhaps it’s to trust in yourself and your work—and to refuse this type of numerology where we let data and the randomness of publishing influence your self-worth and the narrative you tell about yourself. Your story could have been rejected because the editor had a tooth infection and went to the slush pile with a terrible, pain-inflicted, grumpy mood one morning. This is magic, not science.
In my heartest of hearts, I know that the fiction I’m writing now isn’t better or worse than what I wrote in 2014-2017—it’s just different. I also now have a different vision of myself as a writer, have a different view of the publishing landscape, and the places I’m sending my stories and poetry to now has changed as well. This is our alchemy.
It’s intimidating to move beyond the one iceberg you grew accustomed to, to begin swimming again in the cold waters. However, we must all go beneath the surface of the water and experience our own trials again and again and again. We must have our endurance tested again before we can show other people the white mountain of ice exposed to the air, those fabulous crags that glitter in the light.
Until next time,
JD