Where To Submit

So you've finished your literary masterpiece. It's been written, edited, rewritten, re-edited, re-written again, tossed out the window, gathered up again, burnt, reconstituted from the ashes, rewritten a third time, and finally reached a high-enough quality that you can show it to someone without hiding under a rock while they read it. Now you are a success, right? You'll have your own assistants with matching smartphones and tablets, who arrange all your book signings, dates with fancy people, and mountainous piles of money, right?

Sorry. Your assumptions are completely and entirely wrong. If you thought your days of struggling financially were over, you're going to be disappointed. The hard part is not over. It's only just beginning. Because now that the writing's done, you have to convince someone to publish it, turn it into a movie, paste it onto a billboard downtown, or whatever it is you imagined would happen to it. And since your aforementioned lack of cash prevents you from distributing your own work, you're going to have to submit it to someone else. But submitting your work to a distributor really isn't that traumatic if you prepare yourself adequately. So take a deep breath, read some of those inspirational quotes you find everywhere, and read on for some important advice.

The most important preparatory step you can take is to do your research. You're much less likely to be rejected if you carefully select the people you intend to submit your work to, instead of just blanket-bombing the industry. You wouldn't submit a comprehensive factual article on real estate to a sci-fi magazine, and if you did, you would be rejected out of hand. It's not just about the quality of the work. It could be the best real estate article they'd ever seen and they would still turn you down because their magazine only publishes articles that have to do with science or science fiction. A large part of all rejections received by writers cite this circumstance as the reason for it, and it's not because they're trying to let you down easily. It's the most common mistake writers make.

So how do you avoid having your manuscript or story or article or screenplay rejected? Simple. Follow our guidelines on where to submit your work. Thank you to Okteeth.ca for providing website support.