In which I try to understand manuscript contests

One of the reasons I’m excited to finish my MFA and return to having a job is that even “wins” in the literary world sometimes feel like scams. (We also have lots of obvious scams, like the dude with a handful of publications who runs a company charging $200 to “lightly edit” [run spellcheck, I’m guessing] and submit your fiction to ten literary journals that mostly don’t pay contributors.) Manuscript contests are one of these gray areas for me: they’re widely accepted, especially among poets, are often so poorly run that presses don’t even notify submitters they’ve lost, and offer to their winners the minor reward of $1000 and a book that is sometimes/often only available for purchase on the website of an obscure academic press. (The award should more fairly be noted as $970 to $975, since even winners had to pay the entry fee.)

If I sound embittered and you’re thinking it’s because I’ve lost a lot of manuscript contests in the past year, you’re not wrong! In some ways, it’s been good for me to enter manuscript contests. I unsuccessfully shopped my story collection to agents, and got enough helpful feedback that I revised the collection and sent it off to 19 (holy shit) manuscript contests I had carefully selected based on how much I liked their book covers. My real hope (why?) was to win a fourth-year fellowship at Ohio State that usually only goes to creative writing MFAs if they’ve got a book under contract. The real award of winning a contest, then, was not the $1000 award but the $36,000 fellowship that might follow only its tail; only it turned out that I wasn’t eligible for the fellowship since I already had won two fellowship years, thus embittering the entire competition process. That doubled goal, though, is the only way I can really understand the persistence of manuscript contests. Academics need to publish books to remain academics; so for the writers of unmarketable poetry and story collections who are trying to get the last tenure track job in the nation, it’s worth it to spend hundreds of dollars on contest fees.

For the rest of us, though? I’m not sure these contests are a sign of a healthy literary ecosystem. This isn’t to say I didn’t get some good out of entering them. My collection was shortlisted at four contests, which was a great confirmation that I’d made the right edits to the manuscript. I now know I may have a good but unsellable story collection (see again: no publisher wants story collections). All my contest fees are now supporting, minorly, the work of these small presses, which is probably the healthiest way to think of contest fees; though some sadly ran their contests so badly that I no longer want to support their work in the normal way, by buying their books. Which…seems like the problem with book contests as a whole? It’s the same issue that plagues literary journals as well, where the funding comes from readers, grants, university systems, but also from fees writers pay to submit. These fees often seem fair to me: as someone who’s read and edited for journals with free submissions, I know that most people don’t read any of the journals they submit to. A few bucks to slow the firehose of submissions seems, in that light, not unreasonable, though certain journals take advantage by accepting unsolicited submissions at $3 a pop, which languish for one to nine years in their slush pile while they solicit 90% of the fiction they actually publish. (I don’t think anyone really makes out well in this system except for Submittable, who rake in a percentage of the fees for every submission that goes through their glitchy but generally efficient portal.)

Unlike short story submissions, though, which are usually booted back to the author with a “Thank you for submitting but not the right fit, good luck elsewhere, definitely don’t submit to us again too soon”, manuscript rejections (when they come) almost always include an encouragement to submit again next year. This landscape, in which writers are encouraged to retain our delusions long enough to shell out another $25 for a contest in which we didn’t come close the prior year, does not strike me as a lasting, healthy system; but what comes in its place when so few readers are interested in story collections and major publishers will only take them when they’re slipped into a two-book deal (the dream!)? Manuscript contests are one of those pieces of the literary world that I place in my “definitively not a scam” category, but when I try to explain them to non-writers they look so baffled that I start to wonder if what I’m describing is, in fact, a scam. Not one perpetrated by any individual press (I think publishers generally are good people with good intentions) but by the unbalanced number of people who want to write story collections vs. people who want to read them, which has resulted in this system in which the only people paying for story collections are the same writers who wrote them. (Help us!!!)

Reading! Watching! Eating!

I’m starting off the year with a vague goal to read and watch more stuff that predates my own birth, having spent a lot of 2022 reading mediocre books with massive publicity budgets. (I’m sorry! I will never say which books they were!) I’m also really getting into novel revisions, with the side effect that I’m mostly reading books that are either very short or mysteries, which I find structurally comforting.

 

Reading

I’ve read a decent number of Philip Roth’s work but somehow never made it to his first, Goodbye, Columbus. Sometimes I like to childishly imagine how renowned writers would be received in a writing workshop: why all these tangential conversations?! Why so many phone calls with the aunt?! Etc. Well, I liked it, especially the title novella and the story “Defender of the Faith,” though I am happy to not have been a woman in the 1950s or in Philip Roth’s life. Also delighted to find that the Columbus is Columbus, Ohio: goodbye, Columbus…goodbye! (That will be me in six months.)

I also finally read Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. What a great narrator, how attuned she is to the motions and needs of the convenience store and how content she is with a life that everyone around her seems to find pathetic and worrying.

I’ve gotten really into Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series since moving to Columbus, probably in part because Baltimore feels so distinct and it gives me a way to briefly feel like I’m back on the East Coast. I owe this all to my friend Sophia who recommended I read them based on the fact that I’m obsessed with my rowing machine and Tess is a rower. As the series has gone on there seems to be more time between the novels, and a lot happening in that time that I would have liked to se on the page. (For example, Tess goes from never thinking about having children to, suddenly, pregnant and on bed rest. It also seems like Lippman briefly toyed with the idea of moving Tess into a new relationship, but that thread was abandoned between novels.) Anyway, the last book in the series came out six or seven years ago so I’m guessing it’s finished its run, and this series has now seen me through two Januarys in Columbus and I don’t know what to do now that I’m done.

I reread Patricia MacLachan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall, which barely qualifies for my “preceding birth” goal. I remember this being a Little House-sized book but it’s tiny and took me twenty minutes to read. It reminds me of a short story in its storytelling efficiency and the way its ending is an opening-up rather than a closing-off. Maybe because there’s this one driving desire at the center of the story (to have a mother again!) the characters felt so strongly drawn.

 

Watching

I finally made it to A Few Good Men, which doesn’t quite meet the pre-birth cutoff. I thought people were joking when they said “You can’t handle the truth!” is followed by Jack Nicholson’s character screaming about ripping out Tom Cruise’s eyes and pissing in his skull. But he really does say this! There’s a totally unnecessary suggestion of romance between the Tom Cruise and Demi Moore characters, but I have learned an important lesson from this movie, which is that sometimes you can succeed by placing your most irritating qualities before a person inclined to hate you. Good watch!

Also saw First Cow, not having any idea what to expect from it. It felt like an expansive movie despite the 4:3 aspect ratio and close focus on two characters, really interesting and visually striking. I did some nitpicking because I don’t believe the Toby Jones character would ship a cow all the way from “Saint Francisco” and then leave it to stand alone in a field at night, and also baking soda wasn’t yet in mass production but here we’ve got a guy in the Oregon territory with a store of baking soda. Whatever! A slow and meditative type of movie. You’ll have to watch it to understand what I’m complaining about.

The French Dispatch, which I’d been avoiding out of Wes Anderson exhaustion, but whose structure marries up perfectly with the aesthetic. A good movie for short story lovers and people with a dusty stack of New Yorkers next to the bed or toilet.

Corsage, in the theater. Ever since she poisoned Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread I’ll watch Vicky Krieps in anything. This is beautifully filmed, DID NOT end how I expected. Not totally sure I enjoyed it but I definitely found it interesting. The King has fake sideburns which he puts in a box at the end of the day (nice detail).

The Woman King, which I should have seen in the theater. Not a single Oscar nod???

And last of the month, Women Talking, which also amazingly didn’t get a single Oscar acting nomination. If you can see this in the theater I would; I really think it’s a movie that deserves your unbroken attention. I just started reading the book and now I’ll finish.

 

Eating

Have been going through Smitten Kitchen’s espresso-chocolate shortbread, delicious, easy, soon my body is going to be made of butter. Two different coffee cakes: King Arthur’s recipe using sourdough discard and, uh, King Arthur’s recipe using rye flour and cocoa. I also cooked up my Rancho Gordo black eyed peas, which have been pretty unsuccessful as luck-bringers though I do start getting excited around November to make Marcus Samuelsson’s black-eyed pea coconut stew. I’m frantically cooking through my bean stash, which I like to occasionally build up to unwise levels by ordering in addition to my bean club membership. Lukas Volger’s tiny cookbook Veggie Burgers Every Which Way is sort of a lifesaver in giving me new things to do with the beans, and his recipes tend to be both much shorter and tastier than your average veggie burger recipe off the internet. The sourdough starter is happy though I remain unsure about its future when I’m back in Philly where you can walk a few blocks and buy a great loaf of bread for $7 or $8. This month it’s given me some beautiful boules, sourdough pizza, sourdough biscuits, sourdough crackers, the aforementioned sourdough coffee cake.

Lit mag behind the scenes!

I’m always interested when editors share the behind-the-scenes details of their magazines, so figured I would do a look at The Journal’s fall online issue (with the obvious caveat that I’m Fiction Editor there but not speaking for any other genre, or Fiction Editors past or future). (Also, yes, I am writing to avoid working on my novel.) Even for a magazine that doesn’t pay, like The Journal, our acceptance rate is quite low, which can either make you feel hopeless or is oddly freeing in that, hey, once you’ve done your part in terms of writing the best story you can, and researching your magazines, some luck does play into landing with the right editor on the right day.

We published six stories in issue 46.1. Five of these six stories came in through the slush pile. One story I had solicited for a special issue focused on Ohio writers, and when the guest editor for that issue went in a different direction, I claimed the story (A.A. Balaskovits’s “The Handkerchief”) for this issue. (Worth noting that this is the only story I’ve ever solicited.) Two of the stories were submitted as early as October 2021 (when we were still playing catchup with submissions I’d inherited from the previous Fiction Editor), while one came in as recently as September 2022. One of the stories was sent by a writer we’d previously rejected but encouraged to submit again, and happily he did.

During this period (Oct 2021 through Sept 2022) we received about 1350 fiction submissions at The Journal. I accepted a total of 13 stories (six of which, like I mentioned, wound up in issue 46.1), meaning we have an acceptance rate of just under 1%. This isn’t an unusual acceptance rate for a literary magazine, but it’s worth remembering that at any magazine—and maybe a little more so at one with free submissions, like The Journal—some of these submissions seem to be first drafts that just need more rest and revision, while others are misdirected (hardboiled detective stories, sword and sorcery fantasy, etc.). If you’re sending polished work and carefully targeting your submissions, your odds are better than 1%. Still: it’s harder to get a piece of fiction into The Journal than it is to get into Harvard! This is what I recommend you tell your relatives when they ask how many stories you’ve published.

(Kind of boring detail but maybe useful for anyone who is new to submitting and wondering what actually happens to their story, or does it just enter a black hole: Like most magazines, we have a standard process that involves a few readers. Volunteer MFA students and undergraduates enrolled in a Literary Publishing course are usually our first readers for stories, and especially for the undergraduates this is mostly a chance for them to gain experience in the workings of a lit mag. Once stories have received their first reading, they go on to either our first-year Associate Fiction Editor [who votes, comments on the story, and recommends an action before passing the story on to the second-year Associate Fiction Editor], or directly to the second-year Associate Editor, who decides whether to reject a story or pass it along to me. Because our queue is so large and we aren’t about to demand undergrads read 50 stories a week, I sometimes jump in and act as a first reader myself. This means that any story submitted to us is either (a) passed right along to the top for the sake of not taking 2 years to respond, or (b) being read by 2-4 people before a decision is made.)

University lit mags are unique in that we often change editorial staff yearly. Some university magazines with stable staffing do have a consistent style over time, but editorial preferences at a magazine like The Journal, where a new Fiction Editor rolls through every year (or two years) may change more rapidly, meaning it’s worth your while to pay a little closer attention to the latest issues. With The Journal (I am now offering a mini advertisement to potential submitters, though given my upcoming graduation this advice will go bad in six months) you’ll see that I’m not super, super interested in realism and when we do publish it there’s something unique happening with the voice (as in the fable-like quality Bipin Aurora’s “The Terrorist”), or setting/absurdity/humor (Neal Hammons’s “A Promised Land via the Central Pacific”), just something pushing beyond the boundaries of what I’d call, I don’t know, “MFA realism.” So we end up with those two gorgeous stories, as well as Scott Garson’s “Ybeltrab” (a micro that flips Bartleby in a way that I found especially delightful as I’m worrying about having a job again after the MFA), A.A. Balaskovits’s “The Handkerchief” (a retelling of Beauty and the Beast with a close so shocking that the first time I read it, I spent a week telling everyone I knew about this wild story that ends like --- [will not ruin here]), Jennifer Marie Donahue’s “Bone to Rock” (a woman falls underground while searching for flowers for her dying mother, has conversations with fossils, and…that’s all I say, but this story is so gorgeous and delicately told), and Michelle Ross’s “Crossing Guard” (a micro that uses a brief interaction with a crossing guard as a route into an exploration of a marriage).

We have a couple retellings, yeah, and a couple micros, but really the only thing these stories have in common is that I loved them on first reading, and I kept loving them when I reread them, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them between readings. With so many submissions coming through, there are obviously a lot of strong stories that we end up declining. Sometimes it’s because I recognize right away that the story isn’t a fit for The Journal, though I’m confident it’ll find a good home with another editor who is looking for just that type of story. Other times I read the story, I think it could probably be a good fit for The Journal, but then a week goes by and I couldn’t tell you what happened in the story—there’s no image or moment that was so distinct I could hang onto it. We have our “standard” form rejection and then one that is a little nicer and encourages another submission, and when I send this second one (I would probably send it in the example just mentioned) I always mean it and will keep a closer eye on the queue in hopes the writer does send another story through while their name is still in the front of my brain. (Maybe 1% or 2% of submissions get the “nice” rejection. )

So our job as writers submitting fiction is, I think, to very simply write something that’s going to grab an unpaid editor’s attention when they’re exhausted and have been working for an hour and still have a hundred stories before them, and that they’re going to keep circling back to after they’ve commented on the story and closed their laptop. But even if you research a magazine extensively, you’ve read its latest issue, you know the name of its editor (Ellen!), you can’t say with certainty whether your story will be what they want—so the best thing you can do is to write the story you want to write, revise it, format it properly, do your best with the research, and then let the business take care of itself, knowing that on the other side of things there is an editor who is waiting for a story (maybe your story) that demands their total attention.

(And now, advertising time again: submissions are still open at The Journal through the end of the month. If you read the stories linked here and thought, “my stories would make good neighbors with these stories,” send something in! If you miss our fall submission window no worries, we’ll reopen on Feb. 1 after a couple months off to catch up in our reading. Submissions are free and we’re getting responses out within a few months these days. If you have any questions, things I have somehow failed to address in these 1200 words [no wonder all my stories are 8000 words long], feel free to ask and I’ll try to get back to you!)

How much money can you earn in literary fiction? Not much!

The financials of a literary fiction writer are strange and pretty bad, so in the interest of transparency and just shedding a little more light on how much you have to pay to make money in this space, my 2022 financials. (This is talking just money I’ve spent or earned on my writing; I’m not counting things like classes here.)

Spent: $800.30

Earned: $1711.97

This year I went after a lot of contests, both for a manuscript and individual stories, and that’s what this looks like. (Without contests, I figure I would have spent about $300 and earned $700.) I’m moderately successful in selling short fiction, but I’m still spending a massive amount of money just to have my fiction considered, and came out in the black only because I won second place in Nimrod’s story contest this year. If I’d landed in third place, this would be a sadder accounting.

So what did I get paid for? $120 was for a story published last year in Story, but the check went on a mysterious adventure through the Columbus postal system and didn’t arrive till 2022. Of the five long stories I’ve published this year, I was paid for three. One of those three payments was a little bit of luck: I wasn’t originally contracted to receive any payment, but the magazine then got a grant and was able to offer $200 after I’d already signed my contract for two contributors copies. (They could have easily not paid me at all, I wouldn’t have known, so this was really nice of them.) One payment was from a genre magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, about $350 for an 11,000-word story. Genre magazines are my dream because they usually pay by the word, and don’t charge for submissions. And then there’s the Nimrod story ($1000). I earned $50 on a nonfiction piece for Words and Sports.

I’ve also sold one piece of flash fiction for $100, money that will come in in 2023. Since I’m working on a novel and not submitting much short fiction right now, it’s totally possible that $100 will be my total writing earnings for next year.

(A related but more time-consuming exercise is to break down costs/earnings for an individual story. Sometimes I’ll joke about having spent $3 to “sell” a story for $0, but the truth is that unless I’ve only submitted the story one time, I’ve actually spent much more than $3 trying to place it. For a cheery example we can take the story I sold to Nimrod for $1000. Over its roughly two-year submission lifecycle, I sent this story out 21 times, spending $88. One of the stories I “sold” for contributor’s copies, I had submitted 11 times at a cost of $12 [maybe my ambitions for it were a little lower?].)

This does feel pretty bleak to me because, yeah, I came out having earned money, but it’s so hard to earn any money as a literary fiction writer. As an editor (and as someone who has just talked to lots of other writers), it’s obvious that most writers don’t subscribe to or read the magazines they’re submitting to. In this world, charging $3 for a submission or $20 for a contest entry, or charging nothing but also paying nothing (as we do at The Journal) is pretty much the only way to keep a magazine sort-of-working financially, though it does create this bizarre system where the business is mostly charging writers to have their work read rather than charging readers. It’s probably similar with small press story collections; a lot of my 2022 spending was on submitting my story collection to contests, after a futile year of trying to interest agents in the collection. You have to figure that most of the writers submitting their collections to these contests (I count myself among them) are not also reading the collections published by every press they’re submitting to, and so the contest entry fee is the only financial support they offer to the press. I feel sort of bad for writers, and also sort of bad for the small presses. No one is earning much money, and most writers who are able to get their work out there are able to do so because they have enough money to pay the fees to submit it.

Hello, world

When I started writing seriously again, about six years ago, I was working full-time and hadn’t published in years. I’d mostly avoided short stories because reading magazines I’d always loved, like Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, reminded me that I’d given up on writing these types of stories myself; and when I started reading short fiction again, I felt like my brain couldn’t connect to the stories. They all felt incomplete, and because I understood this feeling wasn’t a fault of the stories so much a fault of my new unfamiliarity with the form, I felt incomplete, reading them. I also realized I had no idea what the world of short fiction looked like anymore. By then it had been about twelve years since I’d regularly submitted fiction (yes, in high school), and I didn’t know how to find magazines (no longer through a massive Writer’s Market book), how to submit (through Submittable, not the mail), or what interesting new writers and journals and presses I should be paying attention to.

 

Most of these things, I figured out through Twitter. I followed writers when I liked one of their stories, and then I followed all the magazines where they’d published. I wrote a lot of flash fiction, because it fit more easily into the short and sometimes distracted spans of time I had for writing, and thanks to Twitter I found a huge community of other flash fiction writers, who shared one another’s work with an enthusiasm that made me want to read and write even more. I found new journals on Twitter (and the relaunch of one of my old favorite journals, Story!), and publishing calls, and new readers, and once I came to OSU and took over as Fiction Editor for The Journal, I used Twitter to put out my own announcements about the types of stories I was interested in seeing. (And those calls do work.) Especially when I was doing most of my writing in the dark, half-asleep, before work, Twitter was valuable not just as a space where I could find answers to my writing questions, but as the single space where I could declare myself a writer.

 

Twitter is also kind of a garbage place, an app that promotes endless time wasting instead of actual writing, and stupid fights over pressing issues like “why do no contemporary writers write significant social novels,” and the more people see your tweets the worse the site is (here’s a random man yelling at you about an inconsequential joke you made a week ago). Under Elon Musk, it’s kind of hard to avoid the thought that we’ve all been pouring our energy into building *content* and community in a place we have no control over; also that all social networks are about equally bad and likely to pull the rug from under you, so maybe this isn’t the time to start building a new community on a different platform that will waste your time in different and unique ways for several years before entering its death spiral. This is just to say that I’m going to pretend it’s 2004 again, like the first time I sat on my bed with a fat copy of Writer’s Market, and relocate my news etc. to this blog, which will offer me zero community but which I at least own. No one can destroy this blog but me!