John Woodington The official site for the author.

Writing for the Money (or not)Posted by John Woodington on March 11th, 2010

I get a daily email newsletter called Publishers Lunch that lists the new book deals that have been signed and gives a rough estimate of what sort of advance the authors get on said deals.  I used it in the past to generate a list of agents to query, but now I just use it for entertainment, as well as honing my email deletion skills.  Reading through Publishers Lunch today, I came across this deal, which surprised me:

Gordon Lish’s GORDON LISH: COLLECTED FICTIONS, the first complete collection of the short work of the celebrated and controversial writer, editor and teacher dubbed “Captain Fiction,” in a nice deal, to John Oakes of OR Books, by the author (world).
john.oakes@orbooks.com

Now, Gordon Lish is a guy I only know because of his connection to Raymond Carver, a favorite author of mine, whom Lish edited (and in many cases edited quite substantially).  I knew he was a writer and did his own stories, and taught creative writing at the university level, so a collection of his short fiction isn’t unexpected.  What surprises me about this particular deal is that amount of money he got for the deal.  Publishers Lunch calls this a “Nice Deal”, which they categorize as a deal in the range of $1 – $49,000.

Now, the high end of that range is nothing to sniff at, but as you can guess, this is the lowest range Publishers Lunch gives for book deals (the high end is categorized as a “Major Deal” at $500,000 and up).  I’m surprised that a collection by someone as literarily (not a real word) accomplished as Lish would be in the lowest category for advances.  You’d think that after a lifetime of work, he’d be able to command higher paychecks.  What this tells me is that critical success doesn’t always translate into dollars.  No surprise there.  How many times do we see novels that are critically slammed sell millions of copies?

In light of this realization, I shall change my writing habits and style to generate less critically-popular work, in the hopes that inferior writing will lead to a brighter career.

Just kidding.

Dealing With and Avoiding Literary RejectionPosted by John Woodington on December 9th, 2009

Maybe we should have a little talk about rejection.  Every author goes through rejection at every stage in their career.  Rejections from small, online literary magazines, rejections from big literary magazines, rejections from The New Yorker (of course), rejections from literary agents, rejections from publishers, rejections from cooler people in high school and college.  Rejections galore.  It’s a part of the writer’s life and should be embraced (except for those rejections by cooler people in high school and college–those you should weep over and console yourself with Ben & Jerry’s and Meg Ryan movies).  How to deal with rejections in the literary world?  That should be relatively easy; it’s all about venue.

I would recommend dealing with literary rejections the same way you might deal with romantic rejection: by taking those rejections and posting them all over the Internet for the world to see.  Just kidding.  Don’t do that.  Seriously, don’t.  You’ve got better things to do with your time.  No, what you should do is take that rejection as a learning opportunity, and then move on.

Unlike romantic rejection, literary rejection is not meant to be a personal attack against you.  It is simply a way for editors to say that your story (or poem or article or novel) is not right for their publication, and that you should try placing it elsewhere.  If you are serious about writing, you will come to learn that everyone likes different things, including editors, and they will accept or reject a piece solely because they think it is not a fit for their particular publication, not because it does not have literary merit.

One thing I am assuming here is that you are submitting work that should or could be published somewhere, in some venue.  I do believe there are stories that don’t deserve to be published, like your ten volume fantasy epic about a bodice-ripping paladin, or the last six books in the Sword of Truth series.  That said, there are a few things you can do to avoid instant rejection.  Like I said, rejection is fine, as long as it’s based on the publication to which you are submitting.  The New Yorker is rejecting your short story because it isn’t a right fit for them (and because they hate you a little), but not because your story is “bad.”  There are, however, things that will get you rejected without an editor even reading your story to the end.  And these things should be avoided at all costs.

1) Poor grammar/spelling – This is basic stuff.  Don’t misspell any words, and use proper grammar (unless, of course, you can break the rules of grammar to wonderful effect).  Poor grammar and misspellings are the sign of an amateur writer, and are sure to get you rejected without any sort of basis on the literary merit of your story or poem.

2) Failing to adhere to submission guidelines – Again, very basic.  If The New Yorker says “email submissions only,” don’t send them your poem packet via snail mail.  If they say “paste your story into the body of the email,” don’t send it as a Word attachment.  There is one caveat to this rule, and it is a submission guideline to which you should never adhere: many places prohibit simultaneous submissions.  They want you to submit your story to them and them alone, and not to anyone else at the same time.  This is straight up BS, and you should ignore it.  I have yet to find a publication that has a way of telling whether you have submitted your story simultaneously or not, and you don’t really want to sit around and wait for six months while Granta works on your three-line rejection slip.  Send out to multiple places at all times, regardless of what the guidelines say.  You will benefit in the long run.

3) Boring/unengaging work – You’d think this would be obvious as well, but surprisingly it is not, especially to the writer of a given story/poem.  Often we writers are too invested in our own material to judge it critically, and we can miss basic things (like engaging plot and character depth).  If you send in a ten-page story, and it doesn’t get going until page three, you’re going to get rejected every time.  You’ve got to hook your reader, even in literary fiction, which carries an unwarranted reputation for stuffiness, overintellectualization, and density.  I know, I know, you’re thinking, “But those stories in The New Yorker are boring from beginning to end and yet they get published!”  Yes, yes they do, because they are good stories, and while they’re not formulaic Dan Brown page-turning pulp, they do often work on multiple levels of consciousness that your bodice-ripping-paladin-fantasy-epic does not.

Finding the right venue for your particular work is probably the best way to accelerate the process of publishing.  I’ve written stories that have been rejected 50+ times because I’ve sent them to the wrong venues (*cough cough* The New Yorker *cough cough*), and I’ve also had stories accepted on the very first submission, because I knew the story was a perfect fit for that particular venue.  So don’t be discouraged when you get that rejection slip in the mail/email.  Stick it in a folder somewhere as a memento and send your work out again to a proper venue.  It will greatly increase your chances of publication.

Note: The New Yorker is rarely a “proper venue.”

Getting Published in The New Yorker is not Impossible (mathematically)Posted by John Woodington on December 4th, 2009

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my reference to getting published in The New Yorker magazine (or, more accurately, not getting published in The New Yorker).  It seems a lot of people want to know what the odds are of this particular magazine actually accepting a short story or poem for publication from a writer who can not be recognized just by their last name (i.e. Wolff, Updike, etc.)  So I thought I’d do some digging.

On the wonderful Duotrope’s Digest website, they have a robust list of various statistics on every imaginable literary publication, and The New Yorker is, of course, one of them.  Various stats include genres accepted, length, payscale, response time, and the types of responses (acceptions, rejections, non-responses).  Since we’re interested in the acceptance rate, we’ll skip to that.

As of today, Duotrope has 289 responses in the last year from people who have submitted to The New Yorker.  Here’s the data (courtesy, of course, of Duotrope’s):

Responses: (80.97 %)
Acceptances: 0.00 % (No publication has a 0% acceptance rate. This data is based on response reports sent to Duotrope’s Digest, and we have not received reports of any acceptances yet. If one acceptance were reported, the acceptance rate would be 0.34 %.)
Rejections: 80.62 % (65.8 avg. days per rejection) | 14.59 % personal, 66.09 % form, 19.31 % unspecified
Rewrite Requests: 0.35 % (50 avg. days per rewrite request)
Non-Responses (19.03 %)
Lost / Never Responded: 15.22 % (287.9 avg. days before reporting submissions as lost or never responded)
Author Withdrawals: 3.81 % (125.1 avg. days per withdrawal by author)

I know, I know.  It doesn’t look good.  A 0.00% acceptance rate sure gives the impression that getting a short story or poem accepted by The New Yorker is literally impossible.  We know, however, that this is not the case, since they publish over fifty short stories a year, and even more poems.  It is worth noting that Duotrope’s lists The New Yorker as both an “Extremely Challenging Fiction Market” and an “Extremely Challenging Poetry Market.”  But I’m sure we could’ve guessed that, right?

So where does The New Yorker get it’s fiction and poetry from to fill its fifty plus issues a year?  Ginny Wiehardt over at the Fiction Writing section of About.com writes, “The New Yorker publishes only one story per issue (devoting one issue per year to new fiction), and it’s safe to say that pretty much every ambitious American writer tries them at some point or other. And while The New Yorker does take chances on new writers, it tends to draw from a stable of established writers, like Munro and Murakami.”

So being an established writer helps.  From personal experience, I have an author friend who, after having a story published in Glimmer Train, was able to land a literary agent, who in turn said that they would push to get one of this author’s stories published in The New Yorker in order to help promote a new short story collection by this author.  So having an agent might help (though in this case, in fact,  it did not help, since they were unable to get a story published in The New Yorker, despite the fighting powers of the agent).

Over at The Stranger, they have an interview with Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker, in which she talks about the review process that the fiction staff at The New Yorker follows when deciding which stories to publish.  Also, she talks about why they select the stories they do.  She admits that people complain that The New Yorker publishes a lot of stories by the same writers (Munro, Murakami, Saunders), but she also makes a good point, that those writers are really good writers, and they are writing at the top of their powers.

Then, there’s an interesting an funny online diary of how one merry band of poets was able to get something published in The New Yorker, though it involved infiltrating the magazine’s actual New York office….

So basically you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle with this one.  I think the key to getting published in The New Yorker is the same as the key to getting published anywhere.  They want established writers, so make yourself established.  You don’t have to win the World Series the first time you pick up a bat.  Just be glad to bat .301 in little league, and you’re on your way.  Work your way up by starting with smaller, lesser known publications, and give it time.  You don’t need to be in The New Yorker today, or this year, or even in the next ten years.  It might take longer than that, and you need to be patient.

It’s also worth noting that The New Yorker is looking for literary fiction.  Your awesome short story or poem about a bodice-ripping druid is likely not going to be accepted (no matter how good it is) due to the subject matter.

Follow the guidelines I put forth in a previous post, and use those to get yourself some publishing credits.  Maybe someday in the future, The New Yorker will give you a call and offer you a bajillion dollars for your non-bodice-ripping-druid story.  Well, maybe more like $3000.00, but still.

KarmaPosted by John Woodington on November 30th, 2009

My last post was to announce that I’d received notification that a short story of mine has been accepted for publication. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I received three rejections for three different stories. That’s okay. I figure it’s a form of writer karma. You know, something great happens (publication) and then something not as great happens (rejections) to balance out the greatness of the great thing that happened.  As it happens, all of the rejections were very nice, especially the one I received from Narrative magazine, in which they declined to offer me fame and fortune for a short story of mine, which I had submitted to their “30 Below” competition.

Dear John Woodington,

Thank you for entering “Memorial” in the Narrative 30 Below Contest. Your work was carefully read and considered by several of our editors in a field of compelling entries from all around the world. Many of the entries deserved repeated readings and, like yours, received close attention from our editors.

In the end, however, we could choose only three winners and ten finalists, and hard choices had to be made. We regret that your entry was not one of our winners or finalists this time. We’re grateful that you gave us the opportunity to read your work, and we hope you will keep Narrative in mind for your work in the future.

An announcement of the winning stories will soon go out to the magazine’s readership.

Again, thank you for your entry, and please accept our kind wishes.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Now wasn’t that nice?  A form letter, yes, but at least it’s longer than one sentence, and at least it takes up a full page of an email.  It’s a little disheartening when I receive a rejection letter in the mail that is smaller than a postcard, and is obviously cut from a page of many rejection slips that are sent out to many authors.  I use those slips as bookmarks sometimes, so I guess they do serve a useful purpose.

In other news, I did not go out shopping early on Black Friday, but instead decided to make my purchase online around noon.  I bought a netbook (a Dell mini 10v), and now I am terribly excited for it to arrive at my house.  I’ll post a review of said netbook once I’ve used it enough to review it intelligently.

In still other news, I have been accepted to write and post at Fictionaut, which is putting out some really great writing by really great writers.  I have found it extremely refreshing to see writing of the caliber that is being published at Fictionaut, so I say thank you to them.

Thank you also to my alma mater, who put a blurb about me in their alumni newsletter.  Go Blugolds!

The Horrible RealizationPosted by John Woodington on October 5th, 2009

I’m beginning the initial edits on my new short story, “Lawnmower Boy,” and so far so good.  I’ve done a read-through, and realized the story is about Making a Fool of Yourself, Owning Up to Consequences, and The Horrible Realization that Your Parents Might Still be Having Sex.

Can you guess which one is the most difficult to deal with?

After I get a good mental grasp of the story, I’ll try to trim it down, and then get it into the hands of my trusty reviewers.  Hopefully they can give me some added insights that will bring this story to publication.

One final thing.  Now that Banned Books Week is over, we can truly focus on what is important these days, and that is Halloween decorations, and Halloween candy, and Halloween costumes.  Here is a scary picture of a cluster of ghosts talking about the upcoming Packers/Vikings football game, or some other Minnesotan thing.  The only thing that would make those ghosts more Minnesotan is if they were each holding a Michelob Golden Light in their ephemeral hands.