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Not sure how to go about getting your work out there? Whether you’re submitting your writing to a competition, magazine, or journal, or pitching a book-length project to an agent or editor, here’s a primer on submitting your work. Much of it applies as you pull together an application for a creative writing program or arts grant as well.
The starting place is this big question:
When should I submit?
We write that project and then we rewrite it again and again. When do we know it's really finished? Writers ask me that question a lot, and you know, I just don’t have an easy answer.
But I will say that most writers who come to me for a developmental edit feel their work is further along than it actually is. We often feel we have a finished draft when, in reality, it’s still in the discovery draft stage.
You would think that with experience, and as we master craft, we just “know” when the time is right to send our project out there. But that’s not the case. Even after thirty years of writing, editing, and teaching other writers how to write, I’ve handed projects over to my editor and agent too soon, and they’ve told me so. The fact is, we become blind to our work.So, I’ll start with the best piece of advice I ever got from my own mentor Jack Hodgins: the number one mistake apprentice writers make is to publish too soon, so don't jump into publication.
Especially in the current (and changing) publishing climate, this is a piece of advice worth listening to. Apprentice writers are quick to publish their work online, before they have the skills down or before the work is fully developed and polished. And then it’s out there.
If you publish a project too soon, you may lose your chance to make it something great.
If you publish too soon, your project simply won’t find an audience.
So, even though it’s a big investment, consider hiring an editor to help you shape and refine your project. We offer a developmental editing service on this site that includes teaching notes you can apply to future projects. Professional development grants from national and provincial arts councils can often be applied to working with an editor.
There are publishers out there who will publish a story or book before it's fully developed. But if a book doesn’t get attention and the sales figures reflect that, it’s that much harder for an author to get the next book out there. This is true for the established writer as much as the newbie.
And, of course, if you send a book project to an agent or acquiring editor before it’s really ready, you likely won’t get another shot with them. They are unlikely to take another look at it when it is ready.
