Sending Manuscripts

In a frenzy of enthusiasm, you've penned a masterwork you know the world will love. You've researched your markets, chosen the best ones, formatted your manuscript, and you're ready to send it into a cold and indifferent world.

The cardinal rule of manuscript submission is:

Every editor should feel that your story is designed only for his or her magazine. They may know this is not true. But never make it seem like the magazine is just the third on a list of twenty possible markets.

What next? To peddle your wares, follow these guidelines:

• Send your manuscript to one market at a time.
• Send only one manuscript to a market at a time.
• Include a means to return a reply or the manuscript.
• Do not mail your manuscript with anything other than first class mail.
• Track your manuscripts in a spreadsheet or database.

Send your manuscript to one market at a time.

A common beginner's mistake is to send a manuscript to more than one market at a time. In my early writing days, I'd shotgun my stories to five markets at a time, hoping that one (and only one) market would be interested.

I realize now that this reflected my poor confidence in the work.

Few predicaments are as uncomfortable as informing a market that they cannot use your story because it has been accepted by someone else. An editor has wasted his or her time to read your manuscript, set up whatever processes are necessary to publish it, and contacted you with the good news, and you've already been accepted elsewhere.

It certainly sounds pleasant for you to have two markets interested in your work, but I guarantee that whatever market you decline will be less enthusiastic about your stories in the future.

Even if a magazine accepts simultaneous submissions, send your manuscripts to only one magazine at a time. Yes, the wait by the mailbox is agonizingly slow. I suggest you pass the time by writing another story.

Send only one manuscript to a market at a time.

Something I've never attempted because it seemed so needy and pathetic is to send multiple manuscripts in a package to the same address. This cries to an editor, "None of these stories is any good, but maybe compared to each other, one will rise above the others.

One story per market at a time, folks. You don't want editors to get confused between your manuscripts.

Include a means to return a reply or the manuscript.

This is simple courtesy. If you don't include proper postage, your manuscript is going in the trash and you'll never know it.

I'd advise sending a letter-size, self-addressed stamped envelope in which your editor can reply and marking the manuscript itself as disposable. This saves the editor the time of stuffing it in another envelope.

Doesn't it waste paper? I suppose, a little. But the last thing an editor wants is some clue that your manuscript has been everywhere else imaginable and is now at the bottom of the barrel on his or her desk. A coffee stain or dog-eared pages offer a compelling clue that your manuscript has seen some action.

Do not mail your manuscript with anything other than first class mail.

Some beginning writers think that their work is so valuable it must be sent to the publisher via certified mail, overnight express, or armored truck.

I assure you it isn't.

Send your manuscript like you'd send any letter. Since you're not sending your only copy, you have nothing to lose in the unlikely event that it is lost in the mail. And no, the mailman isn't stealing your manuscripts to make it big in Hollywood.

Mailing your work weirdly means that the editor or one of his or her minions is going to have to wait on a line at the post office to pick up your manuscript or sign for it. This annoys the editor, and remember our rule: never annoy the editor.

Track your manuscripts in a spreadsheet or database.

There are few things more embarrassing than sending the same manuscript to the same publisher twice. You might as well include a note that reads, "Hello, I have so little esteem for your magazine that I cannot remember if I mailed my story there or not."

The more stories you have, the more this becomes a problem. With a handful of stories, you can still theoretically just use lists to track your work. My threshold was my twentieth story, and I couldn't track them all by hand anymore.

I developed a Visual Basic application that tracks all of my stories, their current locations, all of the available markets worthwhile to me, and the average response times I've encountered from them. I can produce reports listing the history of each story (or of each market).

This might be a bit elaborate for you. You can do something as simple as creating a table containing your stories, a table containing your markets, and a table containing the cross-reference between the two. Or create a spreadsheet with an entry for each mailing, the market, the time sent, and the time received.

Whatever you choose to do, devise a system.