This is a series of articles on how Louisvillians can begin to publish and market their creative writing. Erin Keane is the author of two collections of poetry, Death-Defying Acts and The Gravity Soundtrack, and she teaches in the National University MFA in Creative Writing program.
Part 1
As long as I’ve been an active part of Louisville’s literary community, I’ve been asked the same questions by other writers who want to see their work in print. Literary publishing isn’t the most transparent industry to break into—I learned the basics in graduate school, as a student in Spalding University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program, which afforded me the benefit of close relationships with seasoned faculty and more experienced peers. What I learned isn’t rocket science, but it was eye-opening to this young writer who didn’t know what fell between the scribbled journal and the mythical six-figure advance.
You don’t have to get an MFA to become a published writer, and let me be very clear on this point—you don’t have to publish a word of your work to be a writer. Writing is an art and a craft. Publishing is an industry, and although you may feel as compelled to write as you are to breathe, there is absolutely no rule that obligates you to share that writing with the public.
For those of you who wish to communicate with a wider audience, I’m here to help. And if, like many fine artists, you are slightly freaked out by entering your art in something as unsavory as an “industry,” it might be comforting to know that the Latin industria means “diligence,” and also “intentional.” If you want to see your work published, tape those words above your desk and recite them like prayer.
Over the next several issues of The Paper, I’ll outline best practices I’ve learned through my own experiences as a writer and a journal editor, in addition to strategies compiled from guest lectures and panel presentations I’ve delivered and insider knowledge gleaned from interviews with Louisville-area experts.
But first—some terms defined. You know what a poem or story is. You have written them and they are good. But how do you send them out in the world? Knowing the terminology is the first step to empowering you to take charge of your literary career.
Just as a musician will record some songs–a writer pens poems or stories. Here are a few literary industry terms as they relate to the career steps of an indie rock band.
A literary journal will publish 1-5 of your poems or one of your stories: this is like a radio station agreeing to play your single.
Every new journal is like a new radio market—distributed in different cities, appealing to different demographics. Though the band will, hopefully, have many stations playing the same song at once, writers give first publication rights for one story or up to several poems to one journal. Every new journal you appear in is an exercise in broadening your literary community—now subscribers, fellow contributors and casual browsers will read your work and (hopefully) become fans.
A story of yours will be included in an anthology: this is like having your single included on a compilation album or soundtrack.
Anthologies are fantastic, because you’ll be published alongside like-minded writers, introducing their readers to become your work and vice versa. Like compilations, casual browsers might buy an interesting themed anthology to scope out lots of different artists before they might buy an individual book. Obviously, the exposure involved is directly related to who’s producing the anthology, how appealing the theme is and how widely-read your fellow artists are, but don’t think too much about that at first. Try to focus on finding a good fit for your writing’s style and theme, and the rest will start to fall in place.
Congratulations, your chapbook will be published!
This is like an indie label agreeing to release your EP.
Shorter than a full-length story or poetry collection, a chapbook is an inexpensive, portable promise of good things to come. Like an EP, it’s a short, low-risk showcase of your work that you can circulate to build an audience for your work. You can also use it to showcase a series of related poems or a single, longer story that doesn’t quite fit into a full-length manuscript. For novelists, a story chapbook is a nice tease to give a taste of the writer’s style before the big project is ready for release.
Your full-length collection will be published:
welcome to the record label.
An editor is like a record producer; a publisher is like a record label executive. Like record labels, publishing imprints vary widely from large conglomerates to boutique houses, and each has its own strengths.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You want to know how to start placing your stories and poems in literary journals first, and we’ll tackle that in the next column. In the meantime, keep writing. In the beginning, the middle and the end, the work— not the product—is what’s important.
Part 2
You don’t have to publish a word of your work to be a writer, but for those who wish to share their work with a community, submitting writing to a literary journal is a great first step. Every time your work appears in a journal, your literary community expands, connecting you and your work to each journal’s editors, subscribers, contributors and casual readers.
Most literary journals operate on tight budgets, and outside of certain well-established markets, payment for your work will likely be in the form of copies of the magazine instead of a check. From a business standpoint, you’re creating an audience for your future books, but really, submitting to journals is about becoming part of the conversation about literature and about building community, one reader at a time.
In other words, this strange thing that you do with words when you’re alone? Ah, but you are not alone.
Typically, you’ll send in one essay, one short story, a batch of three to six poems or one short script for consideration, but every journal has different requirements and every editor will encourage you to follow their submission policies to ensure your submission has the greatest likelihood of being received and read. You can usually find those guidelines in the journal and on its website.
Hopefully, as a reader you’re already familiar with a handful of journals in which you hope to place your writing, but if sorting through the thousands of magazines currently publishing to create a reading and submission list sounds like a daunting task, you could start right here in Louisville.
Louisville native Adam Day, along with Louisville poet Jeff Hipsher and Austin, Texas-based writer and artist Mark P. Hensel, founded the innovative poetry and comics journal Catch-Up this year out of a desire to participate on a deeper level in the wider conversation about literature, comics and the arts. The first issue debuted last month with poems by established poets like D.A. Powell, Donald Revell and Paul Muldoon as well as exciting emerging voices like Wendy Xu and Matt Hart.
In an email conversation with Day, he shared the editorial staff’s combined vision for Catch-Up — a journal that publishes literature next to comics, original work next to translations, the conventional next to the avant-garde, the emerging next to the established.
“Poetry and comics are generally ghettoized and we feel there is a strength in teaming them up, bringing together current, smart and sophisticated work from both worlds,” the editors commented.
The editors of Catch-Up suggest writers and cartoonists submit their work through the online submission system at www.Catch-Up.us, where they read submissions year-round. Catch-Up will publish three issues each year. The staff enjoys hearing from fans of the magazine, and they encourage both writers and readers to reach out through email, Twitter and Facebook.
“People new to writing and publishing may not realize how important both submitting to and purchasing and reading journals is,” they said. “When you submit work, and even more so if the work is published, you’re entering the dialogue about literature (or art, or film, or comics, etc.).
“Your work may be discussed among editors, as well as being viewed and perhaps discussed by ten or 1,000 readers, perhaps enlightening them to something new being done in writing, something they might employ in their own work, or teach, and so on. Literature and art are changed when people encounter something they haven’t seen before being done well.”
It’s always exciting to discover a vibrant new journal like Catch-Up, and when journals thrive for ten years or more, they’re considered established. The Louisville Review, which best-selling novelist Sena Jeter Naslund founded with students at the University of Louisville, has provided a home for excellent literature from writers both local and national since 1976.
“From the first we received wonderful submissions nationwide from students, faculty and non-academic writers and poets; the magazine imported their work to the Louisville scene while exporting the work of Louisvillians to the national and international audience,” said Naslund in a recent email conversation.
The Louisville Review moved to its new home at the Spalding University Master of Fine Arts in Writing program twelve years ago. Program director Naslund still serves as editor, faculty members frequently step in to act as guest editors and graduate students learn the literary publishing ropes by reading submissions and serving as student assistant editors.
Recent issues have included work by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, former Kentucky poet laureate Richard Taylor and National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” award-winning novelist Kirstin Allio.
“I regard it as a sacred mission: to give to writers, young and old, yet another venue with high literary standards for their work,” said Naslund.
The Louisville Review publishes two volumes per year of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry and short plays. Each issue also contains a special section of writing by children. The editorial staff reads submissions year-round. Local writers take note—the winter 2012 issue will be a special Kentucky issue in honor of Maureen Morehead, the current state poet laureate, and submissions for that issue are accepted through November. Complete guidelines and an online submission form can be found at louisvillereview.org.
Naslund encourages writers to read a few issues of The Louisville Review before submitting, and she also likes to see a brief cover letter with submission. If you’re just starting out, that might feel a bit intimidating — if you don’t have a brag sheet of impressive publication credits and awards, what’s the point, right? Try to think of a cover letter as a polite way of introducing yourself to the members of this community, no more and no less. Mention the last issue of the journal you read and a piece that stood out to you. That helps the editorial staff understand why you’re invested in this community and why you want to participate. Be honest and be brief — let the quality of your work speak for itself.
“With TLR it has always been the work itself that counted, not the reputation or lack of it of the author,” said Naslund. “We want work that is compelling because of its stylistic and structural authority and its significant human content.”
If your piece is accepted, send an extra copy or two to a friend. Subscribe to the journals you want to appear in and the ones that publish your work. Help the community grow.
Part 3
Every November, writers across the country who are used to working with words also begin dreaming in numbers. How many words can I write during one lunch hour? And how many words equal one chapter? And — perhaps most importantly — how many words must I write each day to complete a 50,000-word novel manuscript by midnight, November 30?
November is National Novel Writing Month, in which thousands of aspiring and experienced writers take up the challenge to create, from scratch, a finished, full-length novel manuscript in just one month. I love the NaNoWriMo spirit — write because you want to, because you can’t imagine not finishing this one particular story, and worry about whether or not it’s any good after you get it all down on paper.
And it will to take you longer than 30 days to revise that rough pass into a completed book. But that’s not to say that your paranormal romance about single cosmonaut llamas (and one lonely alpaca!) working on the Spitting Distance Space Station is purely an exercise — Erin Morgenstern’s novel “The Night Circus” began as a NaNoWriMo project and is now a best-seller, and there’s no reason why your November novel fling couldn’t grow into a long-term relationship, too.
Whether you’re starting your first book-length project this month or you’ve been working on a story collection, a book of poems, a memoir or a novel for years, seeing your book published is a natural next step after placing work in literary journals. When you publish individual pieces in journals, your community expands, so when a publisher prepares to release your book, you have an audience already hungry for your work.
A book deal can mean big money or a labor of love, depending on the route you take to publication. A novelist might query agents first (see the excellent Query Shark blog at queryshark.blogspot.com for how to make that pitch letter sing), in hopes of acquiring representation. Then the agent reaches out to editors on the book’s behalf to find it a home, and hopefully everyone — author, agent, publishing house — earns a series of big checks in return.
If you’re a poet like me, you probably won’t need an agent (as the old joke goes, “what’s ten percent of nothing?”), so you can submit to publishers who read un-agented manuscripts, which includes most small literary presses. And not all fiction writers have agents when they start out, either — many small presses publish short story collections through open submissions and first-book contests, where you pay a small reading fee that helps pay a judge’s stipend and other associated costs in exchange for a shot at publication, and often some prize money as well.
What’s most important is that your book — be it a memoir, a collection or a novel — land in the hands of editors and publishers who are passionate about your work. They’re going to help you sell it, after all, and your book’s success should mean as much to them as it does to you.
Before you submit your manuscript to a publisher, read some of their recent titles to see if you’ll get along. Read their guidelines thoroughly — if they only accept story collections, don’t think your memoir is so awesome (though I am sure it is that!) that it will definitely change their entire publishing strategy. It will not and your work will be rejected swiftly. Don’t take it personally. Remember, it’s not just about you — you’re building a relationship that will (hopefully) last for years, so look before you leap.
We might be hundreds of miles away from New York’s big publishing houses, but Kentucky does have a thriving small press scene. As an aspiring Kentucky author, consider supporting these presses by buying books and attending events — one more way to build community among your fellow authors and book-lovers.
For 18 years, Louisville’s own Sarabande Books has forged a stellar national reputation as a publisher of fine literary fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. Each year they publish 10-12 books, including one Kentucky author in their Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature and the winners of the annual Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. They accept open fiction and poetry queries during September, and read creative nonfiction queries year-round.
“We look for and publish manuscripts that exhibit urgency of subject matter coupled with fresh, startling language,” said founder and editor-in-chief Sarah Gorham. “Another way to put this might be: innovation in language grounded in feeling and existential questioning from the individual point of view.”
And while Lexington’s Accents Publishing has only been in the game for a couple of years, under the leadership of editor Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, a graduate of the Spalding University MFA in Writing program, the small poetry press has already made a big impact. Accents holds an annual poetry chapbook contest, and they publish several selections in addition to the big winner. The last contest netted seven books total for Accents, and the press also holds periodic open, free reading periods as well.
“The ideal author for Accents Publishing is someone who is excited about his or her work — someone in whose life it will make a difference whether they have a book published by us, someone who will stand behind his or her book and talk about it and work with us as partners to promote it,” said Stoykova-Klemer.
Remember, your small press partners are in this game for the same reasons you are — for the love of the book. Even in this digital day, when many Americans feel more and more removed from the old-fashioned act of cracking open a book at the spine and smelling those fresh pages for the first time, the book — as both object and concept — remains a vital and important artistic enterprise.
“Our mission is to promote brilliant voices in an affordable publication format, and to foster an exchange of literature among different world cultures and languages. In my view, this is the role of a contemporary literary press,” said Stoykova-Klemer, who prices most of Accents’ titles at $5. “The reader of the 21st century has more options for accessing content, so cost becomes a bigger factor than ever.”
And while Gorham admits that it’s “a scary time for publishers and readers alike,” she says Sarabande, which publishes e-books of all new prose titles and is in the process of converting its backlist to a digital format, has seen encouraging growth thanks to changes in technology.
“Independent literary presses publish 98 percent of the poetry, a great majority of new writers, and almost all the works in translation,” said Gorham. “The book, in print or digital form, will always appeal to a portion of our population and it’s our responsibility to grow that audience, introducing people who do not read regularly to the pleasures of literature.”
Part 4
A writer without an audience is a bit like that lonely tree falling in the woods—your work might be phenomenal, but if nobody reads it, does it actually exist? There are arguments on both sides of that discussion, but in this final column on publishing your creative writing, we’ll look at what the author (that’s you!) can do to build an audience once she begins to publish her work.
In a time when audiences are fragmented and have more demands placed on their attention than ever, building relationships (a common theme throughout this series) is vital to the success of your project. You’ve done the work of building relationships with editors, subscribers, and contributors of the magazines and journals in which you publish, and maybe you’ve even established bonds with a small press eager to publish your manuscript. Fantastic! It’s important to remember, however, that successful authors reach beyond the writing and editing community to make friends with unaffiliated readers, too. Of course editors and writers are themselves readers, but they comprise but one circle of your audience Venn diagram.
If you’re tempted to consider your work done after you’ve handed in the final draft of your manuscript (save deciding what to wear to your National Book Award ceremony, of course), that strategy is sadly outdated. In some ways, your work is just beginning. Even
the big publishing houses have seen their marketing budgets dwindle, so amenities like subsidized book tours and massive marketing campaigns have suffered over recent years. Depending on the size of your press and their marketing staff (and some indie presses are truly one-person operations), you’ll be asked to be an active partner in the marketing of your book. Good thing you’ve been thinking about writing and publishing as a community activity all along, because you’ll need to call upon those relationships you’ve built when forming your marketing strategy.
Nothing sells a book to a reader like the chance to meet the author. You can help independent booksellers promote their work and yours by scheduling in-store readings. If you’re a Louisville author, you’ve already noticed the number of author events at Carmichael’s Bookstore, which Publishers Weekly, one of our national industry Bibles, named the 2009 Bookseller of the Year. They host many author events, and you might consider talking to them to schedule one for your book.
But think outside of Louisville as well. Where else do you have a community of support you can draw upon to stage a successful author event? Do a little research on your hometown, your alma mater, and the communities in which the literary journals where you’ve published reside. Are there indie bookstores, book festivals and reading series, or events focused on topics that your book covers? Art galleries or other small businesses willing to host a reading? Consider partnering with a fellow author in another community for a mini-tour. You open for her in her hometown, and she opens for you in Louisville. You both supply a built-in audience for the other, and your fans are exposed to new work. Literary events are another excellent way to tap into an enthusiastic audience. Louisville hosts two monthly literary series aimed at the publishing author—Louisville Literary Arts’ InKY Reading Series and Sarabande Books’ Sarabande Series at 21c Musuem Hotel. You can find information about both online and contact their curators for more information. Once you get your name out there, you might be invited to read at a university reading series as well, which often comes with the opportunity to guest-teach a workshop or master class.
Here’s some homework for writers who aren’t quite at the manuscript stage yet—go read at an open mic or two. InKY always features an open mic before the main event, and there are several other regular opportunities around town. Like any skill, reading your work in front of a live audience takes practice. Better to start practicing (and building those relationships with fellow open mic readers) now than when book sales are on the line.
Once you’ve scheduled readings, you’ll want to let your fans and friends know so they can come out, buy books, and bring friends. Consider setting up a blog or an author website to promote your work. You can also make use of a number of free social networks to spread the word. There’s a lively literary community on Twitter you’ll want to start tapping into for casual conversation with fellow writers and connecting with fans. In addition to your personal Facebook profile, you can set up a fan page for your writing activities, or you can investigate online writing networks like RedRoom and Goodreads. And of course, emailing or good old-fashioned snail mail announcements are useful as well, so start building your mailing list before your book goes to press.
Make sure your brief biographical statement is up to date and available. You might be tempted to write a jokey bio, but if you include funny bits, put them at the end for easy removal. Have a new headshot taken by a decent photographer, and have a high-resolution digital file version in color available for emailing or downloading for press and publicity. It’s a headshot—show your face. Don’t hide behind a hat or your dog. Don’t go for a black and white version, no matter how classic it looks- color printing is cheaper now, and while a color file can be converted to black and white if necessary, the reverse isn’t possible.
Once you’re ready to start giving readings, please practice before you step up to the mic. There is nothing more distracting than an author who fumbles over his own words or loses her place multiple times in a reading. You can even start now, before your tour begins. Practice at some open mic events first, where there’s less pressure and no book sales at stake. Time yourself while you practice, too. If you have been allotted 20 minutes to read from your book (and no matter how brilliant you are, most audiences don’t want to sit still and listen for longer than that), make sure that you’re not really reading for 40. This should go without saying, but I’ve been in this game for a while, so I’ll say it- at
the reading, be courteous, be charming, and express your gratitude. Don’t be drunk, belligerent or lecherous. You’re not Dylan Thomas, so don’t even try it.
Remember you’re building relationships and community here. Make this experience about the audience, not about yourself, and be easy on the organizers so everyone will want to bring you back for more.
–Erin Keane
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As a poet and novelist who is struggling to get published, I found this article extremely useful. Thank you for writing it!