Jason M. Jones

I’m going to try resisting the urge to go into sour grapes mode here. But my confidence is at low ebb, and I’m going to take a moment to talk about what I find to be one of the most, if not the most, frustrating thing about publishing. Notice I say publishing. There comes a time when you’ve been writing long enough where you learn the two things, writing and publishing, are separate even though they’re linked. Each comes with commensurate frustrations. Naturally, what’s frustrating about publishing is subjective to each writer, but the part about publishing I find most frustrating is this: even as the quality of my work grows better, publishing’s just as hard as it was years ago when I started to place my work. It should seem obvious why. I’m still in the slush pile. I’m shooting for top tier journal publication. I have a few impressive credits to my name, but I’m still unknown (and please don’t bore me with that “we read everyone equally and names don’t matter crap” because in every walk of life who you are and what you’ve done previously matters).

When I first started, I had assumed publishing would be hard. I might have gone about it the wrong way because when I started sending out my work, I sent it everywhere with little thought to the quality of the magazine. Soon after I got my first few publication credits, a woman was hired at my office who knew literary magazines and had published in a few quality places, and she looked at my work and told me I was more talented than the venues where I was placing work and should aim hire. Of course, back then I still had a lot to learn about writing (and still do, that part never really changes), but I started aiming higher. I met with some success, though it could often take anywhere from 20-40 submissions before I placed a story.

From what I hear, this is common for most writers: having to submit upwards of 20 times before finding a venue. There have been a few times where it’s taken less than 10 submissions. The Pinch, for example, which took my story “Man with the Sliding Pins” and later nominated it for a Pushcart, accepted it after six other places passed. But on the opposite side of the coin, The Southeast Review, which also nominated my piece “A Nervous Tic Motion” for a Pushcart took that story after around 38 other magazines had passed. Of course, personal rejections spur me on in most cases. But after a while it just becomes exhausting. You get to a point where you’ve been working on your craft seriously for a decade and even if you think, this story is my finest work yet and it turns out to be true, it still takes exorbitant effort to place a piece.

I don’t necessarily mean to complain because by and large I’m grateful anyone wants to publish what I’ve written at all. And as a writer I have that same scattered all over the place personality when it comes to my work that I think a lot of us have. You know, you write a first draft and think it’s amazing, wait a while to look again and find it’s not so amazing, edit and think it’s amazing, submit and get rejected and think you suck, do a little more editing and submit again and get rejected again, and yell at the magazine in your head that they don’t know what they’re talking about and maybe edit some more and then have your piece picked up and get that dopamine rush of happiness and get your proof and look at it and hate everything on it and wonder why they ever wanted to publish you in the first place and then read it in the magazine and say, actually that’s not too bad but I can do better and then try to write something else and forget about that last published story until you start to think, maybe I have enough good stuff for a collection? Are you with me? Anybody else go through that cycle on a regular basis?

When a friend who’s a writer gets discouraged, my advice is to just focus on the quality of your work. It’s the only thing over which you have any control. I also tell them, remember the odds. There are hundres of people submitting and very few places in the top tier for work. You’re looking at a 1-2% acceptance ratio. And all of this is really true. But as more and more venues implement submission fees, my disenchantment grows. When I send out work I think is good, I’m also usually aware of reasons it could be rejected. Maybe I’m playing with convention, and even if I’ve done so successfully, a lazy reader could miss it and read it as convention. An example of this is the story in The Southeast Review where I talk about science and religious faith in ways I knew could strike some as polemical but in ways that an astute reader might notice doesn’t endorse either. Because I knew this possibility, I was patient. But I can’t pay for 20-40 submissions at $3.00 a pop, especially when the magazines aren’t paying me in return.

Not only does the submission fee discourage people without the funds from submitting, it discourages people who recognize the odds. A magazine charging a fee, I would assume, sees writers less willing to take risks, more work that fits the zeitgeist but maybe I’m wrong. I read on some sites, “Contact us if this fee presents a hardship. No one should be prevented from submitting their work for lack of funds” and I think, the poor have pride. Who’s really going to contact you to say they want to submit but can’t afford to? Does it happen often? I sit and look at those fees and this disclaimer and think, “I have a 30-year mortgage and two kids in daycare. Do I qualify to by pass your ridiculous request?” Or “It’s not much more than that price of paper, stamps and an envelope.” Um, yes it is. It costs forty seven cents for a stamp I believe. It costs about a dollar fifty to send a story with the envelop inside. Paper is a bit harder to calculate, but let me flip the script for a second and put it this way. For that price, the post office is offering me an quantifiable service. I know exactly what I’ve paid for and they deliver on the agreement. When I pay to submit, what am I getting from you? How much of my story did you bother reading? Who read it? An actual editor or a volunteer reader? When I haven’t paid to submit, all these points are moot. I don’t care how much you read or who read it. When I didn’t pay, you can do whatever you want with it on the other end. As soon as money enters the equation, I start to feel I’m owed more than, “Dear Writer….We’ll Pass.” But that’s all we end up getting when our stories are rejected from magazines with fees.

So that’s where I am now. I’m tired. I go through this every once in a while. I tell myself I’m going to stop submitting to magazines, and I start to let my submissions die off. And then, one of those last stories will get accepted somewhere, and I’ll get that rush again and it pulls me back in. I mentioned sour grapes in the beginning, and aside from the increasing introduction of submission fees, I’m not particularly bitter. It’s just that you put in all this work, invest yourself, and at the end of the day, how many people are reading your story even if it’s published? Is there another way? It’s not as if I’ll ever stop writing. I just can’t help wondering if there’s a better way to get work out there in a respectable fashion. My first publication was in 2008, so I’ve been doing this eight years. When I place work, I’m proud of it, and I’m thankful to the editors who selected me. But if I’m not repeating myself too much hear, I’m worn out.