How I Get Published More in One Hour a Week

People often talk about creative luck, when what they mean is “evidence of hard work.”

It’s not lucky that I had a pitch accepted or a story come out in a prestigious outlet. It’s the end result of the invisible work of writing and submitting. Of deciding to show up for myself – to take my career seriously and invest in my professional development daily, weekly, and monthly.

That’s actually so much better than luck: if I created my own dream opportunities by staying accountable to my growth, you can apply similar strategies when working toward your goals. Here’s my strategy to stay consistent with submitting my writing to journals or applying for fellowships and residencies. 

How I Stay Consistent With Sending Out Work

When I create a system for something, I tend to follow through with it more often than not. When I rely on whimsy or “being on the mood,” I’ll only get things done on those occasions when I feel like it.

And inconsistent effort isn’t likely to pay off at the level I need to make meaningful progress in my career. Top-tier magazines accept 1 percent of submissions. Artist residencies accept 3 to 5 percent of applicants. If you’re not putting yourself and your work out there in volume, you’re just not going to get results.

I knew this, but it took me some time to wrap my brain around how to submit at the level I’d need to create my own opportunities. I was pretty informal about submitting work. I’d finish a piece and then send a piece out to a number of journals–maybe five. When a rejection came in, I’d send the piece out again so it was rotating around to five places. And maybe in a year I’d place one piece–unless you’re submitting to The Threepenny Review, you’ll wait months to hear on a piece.

After hearing about poet Christopher Citro’s strategy for submitting to lit mags, I tweaked my approach. Citro spends one hour a week sending out poems, at minimum–which is how he’s placed poems in countless journals. Places you’ve heard of and places you’ve never heard of. Chapbooks, collections, residencies: all the result of one hour a week compounded with time (if Citro’s on a roll with sending out and wants to keep going, he will).

For the last year, I’ve adopted Citro’s strategy of spending one hour a week on submissions. That’s one hour a week on:

•researching submission opportunities
•editing and proofreading work 
•sending out work 
•cataloging submissions in a spreadsheet

It sounds like a lot of work, but a one-hour time frame makes it doable. If you have something ready to go, you identify four to five markets, craft a cover letter, send it out, and log your results.

If you aren’t sure what work you have, spend the hour inventorying your files and creating a log of work that’s submittable, in draft, and published.

If you don’t know where you can submit, spend the hour looking through curated lists (I’m a fan of Clifford Garstang’s lists), looking at the “Best American” series to see where winning stories were published, browsing calls for submission on Entropy, or Submittable Discover, or Poets and Writers.

Read a few recently published pieces to see if work an outlet publishes is similar to yours. If a journal publishes work that seems like a match, they’re a potential place to query. If a journal publishes work that’s not at all in line with yours, then it’s not a great match and your effort is better focused elsewhere. Same goes for contests–if the judge’s tastes aren’t similar to yours, they won’t vibe with your writing.

Always end by keeping track of what you’ve done. When you log your work, you signal to yourself that you take it seriously, and that you investment of time matters. Tracking potential markets also allows you to pick up where you left off, or identify markets that might be a good match for other writing than what you’e currently sending out.

Get the spreadsheet I use to track submissions.

Things I read and loved this month:

NYFA Current: Don’t Miss a Deadline: This post breaks down a similar spreadsheet strategy, but for keeping track of once-a-year deadlines like grants and fellowships. They also recommend a calendar approach to stay to up date with those once-a-year calls for submission!

The Grio: Black Women are Enough and Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt. A thoughtful reflection on the attacks against Kamala Harris and other Black women, and the harm of this and other unpaid emotional labor Black women are asked to perform (saving democracy, among others).

The New Yorker: Has Self Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction? On the spate of self-aware, self-deprecative female MCs of late.

The New York Times: Heat, Smoke, and Covid are Battering the Workers Who Feed America. Farmworking amid 100+ degree heat, wildfire smoke, and Covid–the price farmworkers pay to feed us.

My latest:

Greatist–5 Herbal Iced Teas to Try Before the End of Summer