How to Overcome Your Fear of Submission

Most writers hate submitting their work. It seems strange – after all, most writers want to be published somehow, somewhere, and how do they expect that to happen if no editor ever lays eyes on the work?

The fear of rejection is far more powerful than logic. Here are a few ways to blast through that fear of submission and get on a regular schedule of handing your work over.

Aim Low

This may sound like bad advice, but hear me out. There are the big giants of the literary magazine industry – The Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, Tin House, The New Yorker – and of course we’d all like to see our name emblazoned above our work in one of those great publications.

But the very thing that makes those magazines so appealing is the same thing that keeps many writers from ever submitting to them — they’re nearly impossible to get into. Sure, it’s a mark of prestige if you make it, but if you’re nervous about submitting you’re never going to get over your fear of rejection, when rejection is almost inevitable.

You’ll probably make it worse, in fact.

There are dozens of literary magazines founded every year, though. Many of them badly need good writers in order to establish themselves. These magazines cannot possibly get the attention of the biggest-name writers, so they’re looking for talented unknowns.

They want to establish themselves as places where really good writing is published, and they’re completely open to new people. They are a brilliant place to start submitting.

Now here’s a hard question for you — how many new, small, or relatively unknown literary journals are you even aware of? If the answer is zero, that’s a problem.

So check out the online (and free) literary magazine database and find ten literary journals in your genre that you’ve never heard of before (it’s searchable by every genre and length you can think of). Go read a few back issues and submit to the publishers who would be interested in your style.

Aim High

We’re not talking about where to submit anymore – we’re talking about the sheer number of submissions you should make. One excellent professional writer said that she made a goal to get at least ten rejection letters every month.

That’s right. Her goal was to get rejection letters, not acceptance letters. Why? Because when she made that goal about rejections, they weren’t nearly as disappointing to receive. They were simply a mark of honor for having submitted at all.

Think of your rejection letters as a tangible receipt for your submissions. Stop thinking of them as a terrible thing, and start thinking of them as a perfectly ordinary way to find out your story was indeed received and that you had successfully submitted.

What happens when you don’t get a rejection letter? Why, then, you get an acceptance letter.

Since you weren’t even looking for those acceptances, they’ll come as a nice surprise. You’re trying to receive a certain number of rejections, but you have no goal for acceptances. So when they do come, they will fall in your lap like gifts from above and you’ll be far more thrilled by them than you would have been had you been planning on them.

Getting acceptances might also mean your allotted number of rejections for that month hasn’t been met. Oh well. I guess you’ll have to submit more often to make up for it.

If you have a writer friend who also has trouble submitting, make a small wager with one another that whoever gets the most rejection letters in the space of a month wins a prize furnished by the other. If you get more rejection letters, he buys tickets to your favorite team’s game. If she gets more, you have to buy her a day at the spa. That’ll light a fire under both of you.

Aim at a Friend

Speaking of friends, if you have work that’s ready for submission but you can’t quite bring yourself to send it, enlist a friend’s assistance in exchange for your own. Make an agreement with one another that you will submit each other’s work to an agreed-upon list of publishers.

It’ll work. Most writers take a certain glee in making other writers do things they’re afraid to do themselves.

Make it into a party, hey. Get a bunch of envelopes, stamps, and copies of your manuscripts. Get a list of your publications and a computer for the ones who only accept via email. Break open a bottle of wine, get some good food out and start writing cover letters for one another to approve. It’s far easier to edit your friend’s work than it will be to start a letter from scratch on your own.

Before you know it, you’ll have a submission letter for every manuscript, and every one will be stamped and sent.

Even better? You won’t have had to be the one who pulled the trigger. Completely painless.

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