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ОглавлениеThere is a huge difference between writing, and writing to be read. Attempting to get your work published necessitates strategic thinking (where would this piece fit well?), honesty (is the work actually ready yet?), and some seriously thick skin (what does “We have to pass on this” even mean?! It’s not a dish of broccoli, for goodness’ sake!). These considerations intensify when you start to query agents, and just when you feel you have mastered the revise, submit, and wait game, you’ll go through the same process when you and your agent send your manuscript to editors.
So what are the best practices for submitting and for pitching? Are there any residences or fellowships available for writers in the early stages of their careers? It’s been twenty-four hours since you submitted a short story to The Famous Magazine. Will the editors think you’re pushy if you follow up today? (The answer to this last question, dear and hopeful writer, is a resounding yes.)
The logline and the project summary as (potential) writing tools
A logline summarizes your project in a sentence. It comes in handy when someone has the indecency to inquire what you write about. Here’s an example of a solid logline:
Kim Kardashian’s Selfish is a coffee table book filled with intimate, never-before-seen selfies from one of the most recognizable celebrities in the world.
Depending on whether you’re Team Kim or not, this description might not make you want to read this book, but it’s pretty clear what it’s about.
Another helpful tool is the project summary: This is a rundown of your book’s major characters and themes, and the writing of one will force you to acknowledge the places where your manuscript needs work. If you have a great setting but no plot, the summary will shake its head at you; if there’s nothing at stake for your characters, the summary will point at a character whose motivations need finessing; if your story lacks a climax, the summary will sigh.
For fun (or at least for the good of your manuscript), try writing a pitch letter for your project well before it’s done. If you can summarize, in three sentences or less, what the main themes, conundrums, and character arcs are, stop reading this and get to finishing that book because it’s going to be great. If your pitch letter is seven pages long and splattered with disclaimers, defensiveness, and tears, your manuscript needs you to stop writing it and start thinking more strategically about its wants and needs.
Why you should keep submitting work, regardless of rejection
Publishing is an industry that is powered by rejection: regardless of the level that you are playing at, you are going to hear “no” more often than “yes” throughout most of your career.
Accordingly, you must make friends with rejection in order to survive a professional writing life. Rejection is going to be your zany roommate who never does her dishes, has really loud, obnoxious sex, gets drunk and eats your leftovers, and uses strong perfume. Except for that one delightful year that she studied abroad in Cartagena, she’s always going to be living with you in one way or another, so make peace with that chick, now.
In addition to conditioning you to the rebuffs coming down the pipeline, submissions start to get your name in front of editors whose support and advice will be so necessary when you have a project to promote. Even if these editors are rejecting you, they’re getting to know your work and your aesthetic, they recognize your name in their inbox. And eventually—as long as you aren’t writing offensive query letters or disparaging their form rejection emails—from sheer pity alone, they might start to offer you specific feedback. I have a long relationship with the editor of a popular humor magazine that has never published my work. As I kept on sending pieces, it was perversely gratifying to see the rejections move from the standard bouncer fare of “This just isn’t right for us” to the validating and/or specific: “This one is actually funny, but we ran a LinkedIn spoof two weeks ago. Glad to see something from you for the third time this week, though!”
Taking part in the submission game is good for your writing: if you’re submitting, chances are that you are generating new work and learning how to revise. I have a friend who puts seven dollars in a jar for every piece she submits to a magazine. Every two months, she buys herself something special with the money in the jar, effectively rewarding herself for keeping her skin in the game.
And finally, writing, revising, and trying to publish new work will help train you for the larger, longer process of putting a book out into the world. Regardless of whether you are receiving rejections or acceptances, if you are submitting, you are entering a world where editors and readers matter, you are thinking about the way your work is going to be received, you are considering how it will fit alongside the work of your contemporaries. Submissions are a signal to publishing professionals that you’re thinking like a writer.
The best thing you can do presubmission is get yourself into an independent bookstore and look through the literary magazines they have to see what they’re publishing. Purchase the ones that publish content similar to what you yourself are writing. (A PSA here: if you’re freaked out about the price of literary magazines, remember that successful writers put money into the organizations they hope will one day love them back, and also: book and magazine purchases qualify for many writers as a tax-deductible business expense.)
If you live somewhere without a quality bookstore, take to your computer. Duotrope is a solid resource for finding out which magazines are publishing what, when. They list pretty much every online and print magazine in the universe, and you can sort your target magazines by genre, pay, and submission deadlines. Duotrope is five dollars a month, or fifty dollars a year, and it is absolutely worth it. (Save the receipt for this subscription as a business expense, too.)
Almost every magazine asks that you “familiarize yourself with the work they publish” before submitting anything yourself. And guess what: they mean it. Submissions that are off-tone or don’t adhere to the magazine’s guidelines will earn your submission a hard pass, plus you will have wasted a potentially helpful editor’s time.
Every magazine has submission guidelines: do not disregard them. A lot of magazines these days don’t accept attachments, and your work won’t even be considered if you send it the wrong way. Use a standard twelve-point typeface, insert page numbers, spell-check. And do not include a copyright page with your submission. In the United States, the minute your work is written in a tangible form (i.e., a submitted manuscript), you and your submission are fully protected by copyright law, so submitting a copyright register is an amateur move that will make editors consider your work with less seriousness than they might have.
Most editors will ask for a cover letter, or a query. These statements should be short, respectful, and look more or less like this:
Dear [Insert name of editor. You know the name of the editor because you have taken the time to read through the magazine and acquaint yourself with its masthead. And you know you spelled this editor’s name right because you checked before you hit SEND.],
Three sentences max: [Insert a compliment about the magazine. Cite one or two of the pieces that you admired recently, and why this work made you feel like the editor might consider your piece about [insert ultrashort summary of what the piece is about]. If you have met the editor previously, and the interaction was a positive one, remind them of this illustrious time.]
One sentence: [Insert some biographical information: where you live, if you are in or have completed an MFA program, what you do for a living if the MFA bit isn’t applicable.]
One sentence: [Thank the editor for his/her/their time.]
[Insert salutation],
[Insert your name]
Can I send multiple submissions?
Can you hear the crickets? This is a tricky question because many journals will tell you that they don’t accept multiple submissions, but these same journals might sit on your piece for eight months before rejecting it with a hard pass. The multiple-submissions thing really comes down to careful, methodical submission tracking. Once you receive an acceptance from somewhere, you must quickly inform the other places where you submitted the piece that it’s no longer available for consideration because it’s being published somewhere else. Note that you don’t need to notify editors who have already rejected it, just the ones that haven’t yet replied. Note also that you shouldn’t get high-horsey in your communication. Sharing the news that a “superior” magazine woke up to your true worth is not the proper way to take your piece out of consideration, unless you don’t ever want to publish in any other magazine again.
The aforementioned Duotrope can help you track submissions, but many journals use Submittable, which starts tracking your submission the minute you press SEND. Some writers prefer to create their own spreadsheets to accommodate personalized criteria and miscellanea. The author and editor Matt Bell has created a free submission-tracker template on Google Docs for such writers, which can be found at his website, mattbell.com.
Most magazines will include an average response time in their submission guidelines. The window of response time varies, but prepare for cold air drafts. As a general rule, agented submissions are responded to faster than nonagented submissions, online magazines are quicker than print magazines, and nonfiction submissions—due to the potential timeliness of their content—are handled faster than fiction.
If you receive a rejection, do not contest it. Never. You may not. The only reason following up to a rejection is ever, ever acceptable (and even then, it isn’t), is if the editor is a friend, and you need more feedback than “It just doesn’t fit our needs right now” in order to survive.
In all other circumstances, the appropriate response to a rejection is to take the time it takes to write something new, to revise it a hundred times, to spell-check the hell out of it, and to submit this new and sparkling thing to the same magazine again. This is known as the “fail better” approach. Following up a rejection with a “You’re all a bunch of losers, anyway” email is subpar human behavior that will get you blacklisted from a lot of magazines.
Once you know what the outlet’s average response time is, you can politely follow up once that time period has passed. If it’s been a long time (like, the year you submitted it isn’t the same year that it is now), the answer is probably no, but there are parallel universes in which your submission was lost or erroneously deleted, so it’s worth a try.
The process for submitting to contests is much the same as submitting to literary magazines, but contest submissions usually charge a submission fee in the ten- to twenty-five-dollar range, another example of a receipt that should be put directly into your tax accountant’s happy hands. (We’ll learn why it’s worth engaging a professional tax accountant in part three.)
There are all kind of contests: contests for an individual piece of work, for manuscripts in progress, for chapbooks, for collections, for book-length manuscripts. Lots of contests come with publication in the literary magazine in question and prize money: some contests, like the Dzanc Books Prize, award the winner a ten-thousand-dollar advance and book publication.
If you start to win or place in contests (which means you are a finalist or a runner-up), you can mention these achievements in your query letters. Duotrope, Poets & Writers, The Writer magazine, and The Writer’s Chronicle are all great places to keep on top of contests, and if you don’t place, make sure to read the winning entries to see what made them shine. Turn your letdown into a learning opportunity.
Applying for awards and fellowships as an emerging writer
So many writers are focused on graduating from their MFA programs and securing a book deal that it becomes easy to overlook the awards that support you before you have an agent, before you have a book deal, before you even know what your potential first book’s about. While the United States is certainly not known for its zealous support of writers, research grants, prizes, residencies, and fellowships do exist to help you through the various stages of your career—including the beginning. So how do you find out about these newbie grants?
If you attended an undergraduate or MFA program, these institutions can provide you with fellowship information, both in and outside of the university or college itself. Websites such as ProFellow and GoGrad can help you customize a database of grants and prizes, the Alliance of Artists Communities has a great selection of residencies, Poets & Writers has a solid list of first-book awards, and the magazine The Writer’s Chronicle has a rotating list of fellowships, awards, and residencies at the back of every issue. For assistance keeping track of deadlines and submissions, Submittable is great—plus they have a customizable database of opportunities in everything from screenwriting to film.
It’s worth noting that most fellowship, grant, and residency applications require a nonrefundable application fee of some kind. Sometimes, the organization will throw in a free subscription to a magazine or newsletter if they have one, but usually it’s a straight-up payment with no fun swag attached. The more prestigious the opportunity, the higher the price tag can get for the application. The common range is twenty-five dollars to something conspicuously shy of fifty dollars, such as forty-seven dollars.
Most literary magazines have at least two tiers of form rejection letters: “hard” and “soft.” You’ll know if you received a hard pass because it leaves no room for hope. You’ll hear, most likely, that your submission “didn’t fit the magazine’s needs” or that they “have to pass,” which has always sounded vaguely gastroenterological to me. Soft rejections include encouraging sentences like, “We really liked your writing,” or, “We’d like to see something else from you in the future.” There’s a third tier, of course, in which you get a personalized note from one of the editors that says how much they liked your work, with an opaque explanation of why they couldn’t use it.
If you are starting to receive soft or personalized rejections, this is cause for celebration: your work is attracting attention, and you are getting close. “Rejection is not only a rite of passage, it’s an active, enthusiastic component of your relationship with writing,” says author Wayétu Moore, who now sees rejection as a healthy part of her writing process. “Making friends with the word ‘no’ will diminish the chances that you eventually become resentful of writing and of the literary industry in which it exists. When I became okay with rejection, and stopped taking ‘no’ so seriously, my writing suddenly felt like it belonged to me again.”
Book reviewing and author interviews
If you’re chomping at the bit to get some bylines and your magazine pitches aren’t landing, reviewing books and conducting author interviews is a nice way to get your foot in the publishing world’s door. Magazines, newspapers, and literary journals (both online and in print) have more books that need reviewing than they do reviewers, and publicists are always desperate to have their authors interviewed. The problem is, they need the interviewer to have read their client’s book. Reading takes time, and nobody has time, hence the dearth of book reviewers and interviewers doing this good work.
The perks of book reviewing and author interviews are many: there are the free books, of course, and the opportunity to engage with accomplished authors, forge relationships with editors, and see your name in print. The writer Yvonne Conza even credits book reviewing with helping her surmount insecurities around not having an MFA. “Book reviewing teaches you how to read a book,” Yvonne says. “Eyeing language more closely, examining structure, seeing what works or doesn’t . . . in doing all this my writing has improved.”
Unfortunately, most writers can’t survive on the pay for these assignments. Especially when you are just starting out, it’s going to be difficult to pull in anything over fifty dollars for an interview or a book review, and that’s actually a best-case scenario: you’re more likely to see a thank-you email with a smiley face than a check. Even when you start playing in the big leagues (glossy magazines, international newspapers), you’ll probably experience what a friend of mine calls a “behind-the-curtain-at-Oz moment” when you hear what you’re going to be paid. This friend, who I’m not going to name because she would like to write for this particular outlet again, was offered eight hundred dollars to review four books in a thousand-word review for a major newspaper. On paper, that might seem like a good deal: it’s eighty cents a word. But what isn’t reflected in this writing rate is the fact that the writer had to read four entire books quickly with care and consideration, and then find a way to pack each of their themes, strengths, and weaknesses into a pithy and accessible thousand-word review. And this had to be done while the writer was working on her own book, providing blurbs for others, mothering her child, advocating for political causes, and teaching undergrads, plus it meant that she had to put down whatever else she had been reading for actual pleasure. Once you cut off the percentage that goes to taxes and factor in the amount of time such an assignment takes, the per-word rate is more like fifteen cents. Book reviewing can net you bylines in prestigious outlets and it’s a good deed for the community, but it’s a lot of work.
If you do decide to book review and the pay is paltry, don’t agree to review any old thing just because you were asked. In a Facebook group dedicated to questions about writing and money, the author and book reviewer Charles Finch suggested that newbies should be proactive about their preferences, especially if they’re writing the review for free. “Ask to write about something relevant to your career interests,” Charles says. “Not the first thing that they ask you to review.”
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines pitch as “a black or dark viscous substance obtained as a residue in the distillation of organic materials,” which is pretty much what happens when you ready your personal thoughts and experiences for an editor’s inbox.
A pitch is you trying to convince an editor to let you write something for their outlet on a specific topic with a specific angle, and in time, as you start to build up your portfolio, they will become easier, and real, live humans will respond. These pitches usually take place in a succinct and professionally written email—they should never involve you cold-calling an editor unless you enjoy making people incredibly uncomfortable and not getting what you want.
To write a good pitch, follow a simple checklist: Are you sober? Is it the middle of the night? Are you on a sleeping pill? No? Good. Move on to another checklist: Are you familiar with the publication you’re pitching to? For successful pitchers, “familiarity” will mean that they read the outlet regularly (or better yet, subscribe), are aware of the content and word counts being published there, and have done their due diligence to understand the different sections in the outlet as well as which editor runs what.
Pitches should go out to the editor of the section (or genre) you are pitching to. Do not write an email that starts “To Whom It May Concern,” because it won’t concern anyone. Spell the editor’s name correctly, identify who you are and where you live, and pitch: Share your story idea and angle on this particular topic, then add why this story is timely and important. Include three relevant bylines with links, as well as an author site if you have one, and thank the editor for their time. Then wait. If you Google “how to pitch” and you come upon a Guardian article from 2014 that tells you to call the editor an hour after you’ve sent your pitch to verify their receipt of it, please do not do that. This was unsound advice in 2014, and it’s still suspect now. I think that article might have been hacked.
What makes a good pitch? In short, a good story. But here are some things to consider when you’re readying to pitch:
Have you avoided the duh factor?
When he was senior editor at GQ, Kevin Nguyen received a lot of pitches from people who wanted to interview Rihanna. “I’d like to interview Rihanna,” says Kevin. “This is a relatable desire. This is not a pitch.”
One way to get around the duh factor is to think niche, not big. We know which books to read before the apocalypse, but do we know which authors secretly believe in the apocalypse? Hmmm . . .
Does it pass the so-what test?
Building off of the above, a lot of people would like to interview a celebrity, review a new hotel, critique a hot new book. But “Because I want to” is not the answer to why you should write a piece. Since she joined Electric Literature as an editor in 2017, Jess Zimmerman attests that pitches usually fail because the only urgency writers convey about the piece is their desire to write it.
Accordingly, Jess uses exigence to judge pitches: “a rhetorical concept that basically means ‘the thing that makes this feel urgent and immediately important.’ ” Says Jess, “Exigence is of crucial importance in a pitch, and yet I get so many that fail to establish it! Don’t just tell me what you want to write—tell me why I want to publish it, and why people want to read it, and more to the point why we urgently need to.”
When asked for examples of a nonurgent pitch, Jess was rich in precedents: “Anything that’s just like ‘Here’s my personal journey or experience’ with no indication of how it might connect to a broader audience,” she says. “We get ‘Here are the books I read in order to write my book’ pitches surprisingly often, which only flies if you’re megafamous (built-in exigence there!). And people love to pitch me some variation on ‘I’d like to examine how x influences y,’ to which I always respond, ‘Okay, well, how does x influence y?’ In short, it’s not enough to have a subject; you also need to have a point.”
Are you considering the reader’s pleasure?
With so much content migrating online, the reader’s reading experience has started to matter just as much as the story itself. For nearly twenty years in her position as the beauty director at W Magazine, Jane Larkworthy was the person being pitched. Now she’s the pitcher: in addition to having columns for The Cut and Covoteur, Jane writes frequently for other high-profile outlets in the food and lifestyle space. “After a while, it’s about crying wolf,” Jane says. “You know, ‘This project will change your life,’ or, ‘You’ll never need to read another interview again.’ When I’m thinking about my profiles, I consider what would be a great intro to write, who would make for a funny conversation that would give answers that would make people laugh out loud,” she says. “It’s less now, for me, about having the hot new intel as it is about providing the reader with a good experience.”
Do you sound human in your pitch?
Your pitch should sound professional, but it shouldn’t sound like it’s coming from a bot. “I get a lot of pitches that are very formal,” remembers Kevin Nguyen from his time at GQ. “ ‘Dear Sir,’ ‘Dear Madame.’ If we’re going to have a rapport, I want to know that you can write! The pitch is your opportunity to set a scene, set the stakes, say why the story matters, and all this in a way that proves your writing chops.”
On the flip side, a pitch that is too casual or familiar can come off as offensive. On the Minorities in Publishing podcast, the writer and editor Morgan Jerkins admitted that she gets a lot of pitches from white women using “colloquial black-woman speak and African American slang” in their communications to her. For a hundred reasons: no. Write as if you know the publication you are pitching to, not the editor.
Can you be vouched for?
“There’s this idea of the perfect pitch making the story,” continues Kevin. “I don’t buy into that. Fifty percent of it is a great pitch that a writer has thought through, and 50 percent is a working relationship. I have to be able to trust you. Like everyone else, editors are resource-strapped—if you fuck up your reporting or plagiarize, if you don’t file on time, if I send someone out and they are really weird to a talent or celebrity, this all reflects badly on me and the magazine.”
Although he recognizes that all writers need to start somewhere, Kevin doesn’t think a renowned magazine like GQ is the place to start pitching when you don’t have publications under your belt. “If you’ve got clips from somewhere I know the editor and the standard is very high, that’s a signal for me. I need a certain level of professionalism,” Kevin says. “If you file late and you don’t let me know ahead of time, I’ll never work with you again.”
Editors are more likely to give your pitch consideration if they know you, so find a way for them to know you. Lots of magazines host readings and lectures, their editors attend panels, their editors attend AWP. I’m not saying to stalk people (please don’t), but if you’re in a geographical situation that allows it, it’s worth forging cordial relationships with editors before pitching. It’s a small world, and people will ask around about you when you start to pitch them. If you’ve got an editor who can say, “I haven’t had the opportunity to work with them, but we had a nice chat at a reading the other day and they’re not a megalomaniac,” this can convince someone to give your pitch a second look.
What to expect when you’re not expecting virality
For writers, “going viral” means that you have a piece of writing (most likely something that was either initially published online, or at least accessible there) that has been rampantly shared in a short amount of time.
If you’re expecting an exact number of views that delineates the border between “viral” and “nonviral,” we must disappoint you. Virality is relative to different platforms and publications: it means you got a lot of reads. If that happens, you will know. The retweets and shares will start a-piling, the comment section will grow. You’ll receive both wanted and unwanted comments through your email and various social media platforms. Your article, essay, or op-ed could become a trending topic on Twitter, and part of the cultural conversation at large. In a world in which you go super viral, the literary elite will discuss your publication with insidery succinctness: they’ll talk of “Cat Person,” “That Op-Ed,” your work will be a meme.
Knowing that your writing has been read and shared by thousands of people is exciting, but even more important is the fact that your work has hit a nerve. For Electric Literature’s executive director, Halimah Marcus, “virality means a piece of writing has crossed a threshold of readership well beyond our regular audience. One person shares, then two, four, sixteen, etc. Sometimes it’s because a piece has struck a chord in the zeitgeist, sometimes it’s because Iron Maiden shared our list of the ‘Eleven Best Metal Songs about Literature’ on their Facebook page. Viral pieces on Electric Literature have been everything from feminist essays, to Twitter roundups, to book lists. It’s always fun to watch those numbers climb, but it’s much more satisfying when a substantial essay with challenging ideas catches on, like ‘What I Don’t Tell My Students About “The Husband Stitch,” ’ rather than our more playful content.”
“Virality has to be taken as its own high point,” says the writer Haley Mlotek, former editor of The Hairpin and style editor of MTV News. “We don’t write in a void. Having proof of a connection to readers in the immediate aftermath of publishing is really valuable. That being said, it’s a different commitment on the part of a reader to retweet an essay than it is to buy a book. What happens online matters, but it’s hard to know how fair or realistically virality can predict success in publishing.”
For writers who encounter the knighthood of virality, it’s assumed that a book deal can’t be far behind. The article-to-book-deal scenario makes commercial sense: when an author proves that they have a story that is resonating with readers, savvy agents and editors want the writer to keep singing the same song.
Book deals do happen after an article goes viral—in 2017, The New York Times’s Modern Love column editor Daniel Jones estimated that sixty book deals had been inked since the column’s founding in 2004. But sometimes an article or essay is really popular and absolutely nothing happens. The writer Andrea Jarrell was inspired to pen a Literary Hub article called “Can The New York Times’ Modern Love Column Change a Writer’s Life?” when a colleague asked her about the impact of her publication in this iconic column. “I knew what she was asking,” Andrea writes in that essay. “Had agents and publishers beaten down my door after the essay appeared?”
If Andrea’s essay didn’t win her a book deal off the bat, it did give her the confidence to write an actual book. “Having such a committed and discerning editor take an interest in my work at the start of my career made me believe that I had promise and encouraged me to keep going,” Andrea writes.
This confidence boost was also experienced by Bethanne Patrick, whose article about her struggles with depression went viral on Elle magazine’s website. Bethanne received hundreds of comments to her article, virtually all of them positive, and the piece went on to be syndicated in other magazines. Bethanne attests that seeing such a positive response galvanized her as a writer. “The viral component can be really great in supporting you in whatever you’re doing,” she explains. In Bethanne’s case, the thing that she was doing was putting together a book proposal at her agent’s request: he was confident about their ability to pitch a memoir because her elle.com piece had been so widely shared. Referring to herself as “the world’s slowest emerging writer,” Bethanne admits that she wishes the process could have moved quicker—the proposal alone took her six months. (“It’s so much work!” she sobs laughs.)
Virality usually comes because of something you yourself have written, but once in a while, writers go viral by association. The author Jess Row received extra attention for his novel Your Face in Mine, about a man who undergoes racial reassignment surgery to appropriate the appearance of an African American, when the news story broke about Rachel Dolezal, a Caucasian activist falsely claiming to be black, igniting conversations around the country about cultural appropriation. Although Jess didn’t necessarily see an uptick in book sales, the link between this current-events story and his novel did garner more coverage for his book. Jess started publishing more pieces and was frequently interviewed. “As for outcomes,” he says, “my book is now definitely associated with Rachel Dolezal, for better or worse.”
Dealing with trolls and negative comments
The great thing about publishing online is that your work can be easily shared. If someone likes what they read (or was moved enough to forward it), it’s easy for them to bring it to the attention of other readers, which increases your clicks, likes, and page views. But the more attention your work receives online, the more vulnerable you are to public commentary about it. Not all of these comments are going to be pleasant.
Everyone has a different way of engaging (or not engaging) with negative commenters. Personally, I find ignorance works like a charm here, so I don’t read the comments section of anything I publish online. But some writers will feel obliged to follow up with readers, perhaps because their piece positions them as an advice-giver or an expert on a topic, or simply because their work now exists in a public space, and as their piece’s parent, it’s up to them to come to its defense.
Some writers might decide to disable comments: this was the case with Bethanne Patrick, whose essay about depression went viral on elle.com. Others enlist their friends as editors and buffers. The writer Anna Goldfarb has friends scan her comments sections to let her know if there is anything meaningful that requires her attention, while Patty Chang Anker asked friends to come to her defense when her anti-tiger-momming article went viral and attracted the wrath of one particular man who raged on and on about her “lazy” parenting. “They replied to his comments and supported my position,” Patty explains about her friends’ enlistment. “This was one of my first experiences having my writing read widely, and I was particularly sensitive to what people thought of me and my family. It definitely helped me feel less vulnerable and braver about putting myself out there. Friends are inoculations—you might still get attacked but you feel less pain!”
Over at The Millions, staff writer Michael Bourne says he regularly gets called “an idiot or worse” about his published pieces, a line of argument he doesn’t pursue unless he “can clear up some obvious misconception that seems to be driving the discussion in a stupid way.” This being said, Michael has female colleagues who have felt legitimately threatened by their online trolls. When commentary crosses the line into harassment, Michael suggests asking your editor to either block the commenter or have that same editor reach out privately to the commenter to de-escalate the situation. “Even though comment exchanges are by their nature public,” says Michael, “they can feel private to the people involved in them. If you pierce that privacy by sending them a personal message, it sort of helps them see what they’re doing—if they’re not actually insane, that is.”
Some writers fight their trolls with humor—it’s worth noting that most people in our fight-back camp are men. When a commenter using the social media handle “NCAA CLACK! Stan” accused author Michael A. Ferro on Twitter of “being a fucking Yankee from Ann Arbor” who knows “nothing” about biscuits in response to satirical commentary about . . . baseball, actually, Michael tweeted back, “Sir, my father worked in the Ann Arbor Biscuit Mines for thirty years. His father founded Ann Arbor with just a divining rod and handful of biscuits. My ancestors came to this country on a giant floating biscuit. I think I know a thing or two about biscuits.” According to Michael, these literary flourishes proved too much for NCAA CLACK! Stan, who disappeared into oblivion shortly after this tweet.
In another example of good humor fighting bad, the author Tom Zoellner engaged so vibrantly with a critic of his book about the history of train travel that he got the naysayer to take him out for a steak dinner while he was in Virginia. “Dinner never tasted so good,” Tom writes.
Women, and other marginalized writers, aren’t often in a position where such humor works, nor would many of them feel safe dining with a troll. Author Kristi Coulter was so bullied by misogynist online commenters after her personal essay about sobriety went viral that she set up a Gmail filter that autodeletes emails with gender-specific slurs (she provided “feminazi” as an example), complete with combine-keyword searches known as Boolean strings. “ ‘Hope and raped,’ ” wrote Kristi, when asked for an example of such a linked search term, “because an email using ONE of those words could be just fine, but an email using BOTH was likely to be wishing rape on ME, and I only needed to see a couple of those to want them out of my inbox.”
Misery loves company, and writers who receive bad reviews deserve companionship. Accordingly, you might enjoy the interview series Thick Skin, in which authors discuss their most negative reviews from critics and strangers alike.
In the age of DIY everything and life as a branded experience, the concept of self-publishing as a last resort for desperate writers is outdated and naïve. For writers who are open-eyed to the complexities of traditional publishing and the ever-tightening market, the decision to self-publish can be an empowering and deeply satisfactory move.
In an interview with The Guardian, author Maggie Nelson discusses the alternative MFA she earned by moving to New York to participate in a punk-poetry scene catalyzed by the poet and activist Eileen Myles. “I wasn’t the kind of writer who was saying, ‘Oh if only The New Yorker would publish me,’ ” Maggie remembers in that article. “Self-publishing wasn’t what you did because you were rejected by HarperCollins; it was what you did because it was fun to make zines and run around with them.”
Speed and affordability are benefits of on-demand publishing, but looking back, a lot of self-published authors fear they clicked PUBLISH far too fast. “One thing I regret is not using an outside editor for content and grammar,” says the writer Tony Thompson, who self-published his first memoir Love, Fate and Afghanistan with the now-defunct publishing platform CreateSpace. “Some things in the book could have been expanded on, some things could have been shorter, and I see now how an editor could have helped me with these things.”
Another frustration Tony had was the amount of energy he put into promoting his books versus the return on his investments. On the advice of a CreateSpace employee, Tony advertised on Facebook, Amazon, and on the listserve of his college graduating class. He created an author website, and he occasionally attended book fairs where he would sell two or three books per fair. “Honestly, I’ve had more sales come about from taking my own email list and writing people about my book than I have through advertising,” Tony says. Disenchanted with the lack of success from the promotional tools he was spending money on, Tony left Facebook and let his author website lapse. With the disappearance of the publishing platform he was used to, Tony doesn’t think that he’ll self-publish a book again.
There are success stories in self-publishing, and Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet is one of them. Jarett suspected that his brutish diatribe about the Silicon Valley start-up scene was going to be a tough sell for commercial publishers, and after a bunch of failed submissions, he decided he was right. But he also knew the book had a potential that the editors weren’t seeing. Along with two friends, Jarett founded the indie press We Heard You Like Books in part to publish his own debut, and also—as he describes in a profile at Publishers Weekly—“to make the world safer for its freaks.”
An Instagram-friendly book title, a shiny blurb from Jonathan Lethem, and the fact that Jarett had the resources to work with an outside publicist helped get his novel into some important hands. Within three weeks of its publication, the book had taken off: Dwight Garner reviewed it in The New York Times, Bret Easton Ellis shared a photograph of him reading the book in bed, foreign rights started to sell, and Jarett was being interviewed by international publications like The Guardian and The Irish Times.
The way that you feel about your self-publishing experience will largely have to do with the reasons you self-published in the first place. If you are hoping to make money, you are going to be disappointed regardless of how you get your book out. (To put things in perspective, in December of 2018, BookScan showed that I Hate the Internet had sold 5,839 copies in its American print edition since its publication in 2016. I imagine that a great deal of this book’s sales were made up of ebooks, a format that BookScan doesn’t include, but still, this isn’t a lot of copies for a book considered as a sleeper hit.) If your decision to self-publish is motivated by your desire to share your work with others, you might end up having a positive experience. Sure, there are people who are going to look down at you for self-publishing, but most readers—and especially people who aren’t writers—don’t care how you publish something; they’re amazed you managed to sit down and write a book at all.
If you do think that your project has commercial value, however, you’re better off revising it than publishing it yourself. Most publishers won’t offer on manuscripts that have already been published in other forms.
