Publishing Field Report 5 - Traction

On sending work out, handling rejection, maintaining process, making contacts, assessing one's goals realistically, and how that's changed over the last decade

After parting ways with my first agent, I started seeking to send Scorch Atlas out on my own. Using both the publisher directory I borrowed from the library and my own growing understanding of independent presses that had put out books I liked, I made a list of places I might fit that allowed unsolicited submissions and followed their guidelines on how and when to send the work. I’d go to the bookstore and comb the aisles searching for newer venues, which helped to a lot to begin to imagine how their books’ designs might apply to me. Many presses still stuck solely to snail mail, which required the expense of printing in addition to packaging and stamps, though several, especially the younger ones, were also beginning to take online submissions—either way, no shortage of options, now that I’d accepted that New York didn’t have to be the only way.

In the beginning, I skipped the presses whose designs didn’t seem my taste, though eventually I’d begin to loosen my grip on even that when after a half dozen rejections I realized that small press didn’t necessarily mean any easier to get into—it just meant supposedly more direct access, with a tighter range of people I’d need to impress in order to be seen. The process was still excruciatingly slow, though, maybe even more so than the agented route; I remembered a poetry professor I’d studied with at Tech who’d told us that one major mistake young authors made was thinking that a long delay in reply time meant the work was being heavily considered, when what it really meant was they hadn’t gotten to it yet. I decided to try to twist that time gap in my favor by continuing to drum up further venues I could try, though the more loosely I interpreted my potential home, the less traction I ended up receiving, both in my mailbox and in my brain. I had what felt like a few hopeful near misses when an editor would request the full manuscript based on my sample, only to eventually reject it several months later, with the same canned response as I’d gotten elsewhere.

What I really needed was someone who actually got what I was doing, and not necessarily because they saw potential to sell it to others, either; but because they believed in it, saw it as worth existing regardless of its market value. Otherwise, there was probably very little advantage to being published by a small house, forever running at a deficit to the major houses in every way except their passion and the inherent grit required to stay afloat.

Throughout all of this, no matter what else was going on, I never stopped writing. In MFA, I’d run into a lot of people who’d finished a book manuscript and tied their entire idea of a career to it—publish their first book or bust, essentially, as if their first attempt would be their only if never rubberstamped by the conceit of industry. And yet the vast majority of those people had little other network besides their school peers and what the big dogs told them from afar, stranded in their own minds without the benefit of finding traction online. For them, the conceit of having peers seemed like solely a competition, wherein anybody else’s accomplishment meant one less slot for you. At best, a scene inscribed with that logic seemed more like a fashion show than a workshop, and so no wonder so many people were feeling fed up to the point of giving up for good when the trying and failing wore thin.

Meanwhile, in the wake of making and sending out short work and running my own magazine, I’d never been so busy, all on my own. I felt obsessed with the process and determined to keep stacking up publications, fueled by writing as much as I could, from the time that I woke up until dinnertime, often outputting between 4k-10k words a day. I wrote tons of very short stories and sent them to micro journals; I wrote longer, ‘traditional length’ stories, which I mostly sent out to print magazines, trying to get into whichever one seemed cool and had good distribution. If it was on the shelves at Borders, I wanted to be in it. Once I blind submitted a 4k word story to Adbusters (I have no idea what it was about anymore) through the email on their website and got it accepted within a week. Holy shit! I thought. That magazine was everywhere, and I would have my shit on a page in it. A few weeks went by when I could hardly stand not to be checking my email or my phone to see when they’d be calling me up to get the story ready to print, telling me how great it was. I realized the editor was never going to get back to me about five emails deep on my end, asking for further information, only to finally be told they weren’t doing fiction anymore, sorry about the delay. I fumed for weeks on that shit, so close and yet so far. But after I got over it, the point remained: There were other ways into the system. The academic world was one place, and the literary world was another, and then there was the whole rest of the world filled up with normal people.

I started writing things for different purposes. I was always writing novels, which I felt were my passion, but between projects to reset I could open up and do anything I wanted. A story you’d write to try to get into Noon (a perennial nut I’d never crack despite getting personal positive rejections, but a fun chase) would be a lot different than one you’d send to McSweeney’s, yes? And again very different from one you’d email to the New Yorker inbox so you can get another auto-email (amazing how they process all that stuff ain’t it?) or the one you’d send to any of the often very nicely designed university magazines that often ended up filling out the bulk of Best American every year (on the off chance you might make it through) or certainly from the one you’d send when someone solicited you for work (which began to happen more and more as I met people and published places, both from friends who ran their own mags and asked me to send them something and finally landing hits at some of the bigger places that I aimed, which would happen more and more as my writing continued to improve and my ambition being given soil in which to wriggle at least before stepping up into some weird batter’s box to pitch my next harebrained plot scheme to someone who has to earn money off that idea? More than ever, writing a book to try to make sales, whether I liked it or not, seemed like searching for a toilet with diarrhea, when all I really wanted was to take a lifelong series of excellent shits on a solid potty.

I found success, too, in writing reviews and doing interviews by pitching magazines. Landing a gig that paid a bit amongst the smaller stuff would go a long way and make it seem like I could keep stacking from there (which came to be true). Even literary magazines received way less submission for nonfiction compared to fiction and poetry, so I started writing micro essays and lyric essays and submitting them with what I discovered to be much higher acceptance rate. I would imagine since then that deficit has shifted the other way a bit, but I do think that what would seem one of the keys to establishing yourself as a writer these days, if you are of that persuasion, would benefit from jumping across mediums and seeing what else comes out given the space.

As arbitrary as it might all seem, learning the lay of the land like this by getting my feet wet turned out to be essential to the soil I’d need to know what I was capable of. It would take an entire lifetime to realize what I was capable of, I know I hoped, and therefore each thing I did each day that furthered that conceit in any way gave it further range to cling to. Either way, I would treat writing like my full time job that didn’t pay except maybe someday way down the road, and in the meantime I would seek better and better opportunities to write for money, which went hand in hand with the idea of writing as a career, essentially daring myself to go for it and not look back, but do it and do it all the way.

Clearly, too, the more I put in to my efforts, the more I got back, even if often in ways I couldn’t or wouldn’t see until much later. In fact, there was a whole world into which one’s ideas enter and intermingle with the others who have for some reason desired to do so, which I began to find true by learning more about the other people behind the works I read online, many of whom would end up becoming lifelong friends. It even began to feel like an actual life that I controlled, not just a hobby or a job that paid my rent, especially as I continued to improve in the work itself as a result of spending so much time on it, but also through making contacts at magazines where I did land work, and through soliciting other writers that I liked for publication on my own site. Suddenly, I “knew people” (most of whom were either grad student writers or long time grinders) and not because I’d secret handshaked my way in or put on a special hat that’d make them like me; more so, such associations were simply the product of showing up and following your nose, earned by dint of being thrilled to do it either way. The most obvious immediate benefit of associating with establishments that ran on passion rather than profit or even esteem was that it didn’t always have to feel so mired in commercial competition, but rather that everyone involved shared the common ground of doing literature for the love of it, because without it life would be less. By approaching writing as a reader first, the heat map for publication looked much different than what you’d glean by peering in through rosy glass.

As for making rent, I was still living leanly, managing a mix of a wide variety of tasks in order to maintain as much time of my own as I could. I got a part time job at a local community art space where I could sit for hours undisturbed and would often do freelance work while on the clock there, writing copy for a revolving door of vendors I found on job posting websites, message boards, and Craigslist. In 2010, there were all kinds of sites seeking writers at a variety of rates, and somehow I always managed to keep swinging from one gig to the next like Tarzan—writing about poker, music, literature, art, health, and porn (most of it under pseudonyms, or used as meta data); as well as adjuncting for online universities where I could teach and still not have to stand in front of a class. Having an MFA helped with the latter, I suppose, though I relied more on my own wits than anything I’d necessarily learned there, and still felt like the work was a drag against the time I might spend writing; but still, very clearly I’d made a trade of potential stability and workplace experience in exchange for the right to spend the vast bulk of my time making shit up.

What I gave up in quality of life, though, I saw as an investment in my potential future as an artist, even if all I had to tell me I should do so is my guts and a couple pats on the head. Trust in the process required a bit of blindness in that fashion, which turned out not to be a bad thing overall, in that there was nobody else around me keeping tabs, and the only way to eventually get anywhere along the road I’d chosen was to keep going, building, trying. Anything that didn’t land as art must be marked up as additional experience, reforming who I was over time as much as manifesting as measurable progress in the work itself. These days, when I hear people say they only write because they can’t do anything else, I understand that both as hyperbole and as the only real law of the land—to exist as if in contradiction with one’s self over such a long time that anybody who felt a glimmer elsewhere would have likely moved on.

I think the primary point that I’m attempting to saddle up to here is: You can’t always know where your path will lead, and trying too hard to force a square peg through a round hole can end up circumventing not only your ideals, but your desire in the first place. The real pursuit of “finding one’s voice” feels less like a shell game where the goal is to show up looking like a winner from the get-go, and more so about accumulation of context. Just as you can’t know where you’re headed, you can’t expect to front run where you hope to end up by doing like the Romans and then expecting that you’ll end up blessed for playing ball. Artistic license cant’ be bestowed upon a person overnight or bought up front—it comes from learning to live in the trenches, being there. 

It's also to say that opportunities arise when you least expect them, and often from soil you hadn’t realized you were tending all along. For me, this manifested in getting offers from two small presses at almost exactly the same time—for two different books, as since I’d finished with the stories in Scorch Atlas, I’d found myself writing a stranger, longer story that eventually turned into the novella that would become Ever, which I would end up publishing first—the collection with a rather young small press (Featherproof) run by two strangers, having been culled out of the slush, and the novella through solicitation, after becoming friends with another writer mostly over email (Calamari), sharing work and kinship as a precursor to eventually working together on a book. In both instances, had I stuck to my guns and insisted on wanting a New York house, or continued trying to write as if that were the only way, I’m not sure I ever would have landed anywhere that could have sustained me this long, until today.

In the end, perhaps sustainability itself is something we spend too little time considering, for fear that if we did the math on paper we’d realize that writing is the worst job in the world. Over a short enough timeline, especially these days, any shot at garnering attention might seem worthy of trading the farm for, if gratification at any cost is the modus operandi of your mind; yet, at the same time, in too narrowly setting the table for what’s apparently possible, you may not realize what you’re giving up until too late, or maybe ever. It would seem easy, from a remove, to not end up becoming one of those one trick ponies who spend the bulk of their time acting like they’re God’s gift instead of doing the work they claim to be the reason the system selected them, not realizing that without authentic essence, they might as well be selling used cars—at least then they’d be properly compensated for their time. Eventually, the real reward here—and for me, the only way to stay afloat spanning the years—begins to look and feel more like a life than a job, in that only later, looking back, will it become clear where you found an outlet amongst the cracks. Magic tricks are always made up of fundamentals, after all, and it is the joy of the magician to know the difference between a feint and a flourish; otherwise, there’d be no show.

I’ll suppose I’ve done enough now with forecasting how process kept me sane throughout the early years of trial and error, searching for faith. In my next two posts, I’m going to shift gears somewhat and talk about the nuts and bolts of working with two quite different indie presses, including what I took away from each and how it continued to inform the path ahead. Thank you for reading.