How Do You Know Where to Send Your Work? Questions About Submissions…

A former MFA student wrote in to ask me advice about how I know which journals to send my poems to. It seems so overwhelming, she said. Well, that’s true for me too! Here’s part of what I wrote back – I hope you guys find it helpful:

What you are experiencing is something every writer experiences! I’m literally going through the same thing doing fall submissions – which journals would be receptive to my work? Which poems should I send to which place? It’s nearly impossible to guess correctly. The best asset I have is that I’ve been sending work out for over ten years, so now I know a few editors who like my work and tend to take it at a higher rate than other places – but mostly, I try to read new journals and send to new places, so I don’t even use my collected wisdom! There are so many journals out there – I use Poet’s Market and mark “likely” markets with little sticky notes – I use Duotrope and see if someone’s open to submissions this week that I haven’t sent to – and I shop around in bookstores and try to get lit mags that I’m not already familiar with. I did lit mag reviews for New Pages for a while, which was a great gig, because I was forced to read and review lit mags I would never have found in whatever corner of the world I was living in at the time. Also, I read lit mag blogs, which can reveal a lot about a journal and its editors – or at least its interns. Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and a bunch of other journals have blogs now, surprisingly. Check Facebook and Twitter too – I got to know my new book publisher by following their Twitter, of all things!
Definitely sign for Duotrope’s Poetry Weekly Wire – I get it and I always find one open market to send to from it, one I might not have thought of on my own.
The other thing to think about is that you want your poetry in a variety of markets – online and print, traditional and experimental, Midwestern, Southern, and East or West Coast – to build up a wider audience. So don’t just worry about prestige – also think of audience size, location, and predilections. Try to be diverse! You might also notice a pattern of certain kinds of magazines liking your work, too. Keep track of where you’re sending and when. I keep a photo album of rejections, in case there are notes or patterns or anything I should be paying attention to. (For instance, do journals in the Northeast like your work better than journals in the South? Do university-based journals or independent journals more consistently publish you?)
The best advice, as the lit mag world is constantly changing editors and formats and everything else, is to keep track of the lit mags you want to be published in in some way – either online, or in a library, or by ordering backcopies or hanging out at something like Minnesota’s Poetry Loft or Seattle’s Hugo House (they keep a huge library of lit mags there.) And, of course, picking them up at a deeply discounted rate (or for free) on the last day of AWP – since you’re going. (PS Tell me all about the hip new journals!)

What other advice do you have? Anything I missed? How do you decide where to send your work?