I had a workshop instructor in college who said, “Life’s too short not to simultaneously submit.”
I half-heartedly agree. On the one hand, I like following the rules. It means that you are trustworthy and respectful and not “out to get over.” Publishers ask that you not simultaneously submit – from here forward I’ll call it “double submit” – because if they like your work then they want to be the first to publish it and they don’t want you later to come back and say, “I’m sorry, I promised so-and-so they could publish it.” In all, such a situation puts everyone in a bind.
On the other hand, there is so much competition among poets to get published that you could send out manuscript after manuscript year after year and never get published. Let’s say you spend six months writing, rewriting, revising, and sweating over a single poem. You then send that poem out to Publisher A. Publisher A responds within four months and in that fourth month you get your poem back unpublished and with no single reason why – not a solitary sentence of feedback. You send it out immediately to Publisher B, who takes three months to respond. Again, it is returned and not published. This could go on indefinitely. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that ten publishers later, each taking three or four months to respond – and none of them reading during the summer months – you still have not published that single poem. It is now three years later and your poem has not been published. Damn the luck!
Double Submitting Dangers
What would happen if you had double submitted your poem to each of those publishers at the same time? In four months you would know that your poem has not been published and that none of the publishers you were interested in were interested in you or your poem. That’s far less time spent hoping against all hope that you might get published.
Many poets spend dozens of years going through this process to finally get a poem published. Eventually, if they continue double submitting, they will cross a publisher with a notice that says, “I’m sorry, but I’ve promised this poem to another publisher.” You will likely never get published in that journal for as long as you continue writing poetry. But what have you lost? Another twelve years of rejections?
Either way you look at it, it’s a gamble. But I think the safer gamble is to double submit. To hell with what publishers think of you.
No related posts.
