I mentioned before that I’m trying to write shorter, magazine-length stories to refine my skills as a writer. If I can’t write and perfect an 800-word story, how will I be able to write and perfect an 80,000-word story?
I’ve been working on several of these short stories, practicing getting that first rough draft carved out and then sanding it down as I go back through and edit. This approach has been very helpful so far: I have a novel-length first draft right now, but I’ve stalled out on the editing phase. It’s difficult to look at the big picture with that many pages and scenes to go through! So I’m learning lessons on editing in miniature through writing stories for magazines.
Despite the publication of my first fiction piece last month, I’ve still been hesitant to actually submit these stories to magazines. I love watching Top Chef, but one of the most incomprehensible things in the world to me is the people who have so much confidence in themselves and their work that they go on reality shows to compete. I watch in disbelief as they talk about how they’re better than everyone else and they have the contest in the bag. I don’t think like that. I’d love to be that confident, though maybe not to the point of being snide and critical of others. (I have had a thought like that every now and then, I guess…the only “beautifully written” vampire book I’ve ever read was The Historian. I have to bite my tongue every time the Jacob/Bella/Edward love triangle comes up. Really?)
So I have a digital stack of stories on my computer, just waiting to be sent out to editors. This week, I pulled out my Magazine Markets for Children’s Writers and began researching the magazines aimed at the audiences I had written for. The great thing about this book is–in addition to all the information you can find in the classic Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market (which I also own)–it lists an estimate of how many unsolicited manuscripts the magazine receives each year, how many articles they publish per year by freelancers, and what percentage of those freelancers are new to that magazine.
Finding out that many of these magazines publish such high percentages of stories by freelancers has really given me a boost of confidence. For example (using the one on the back jacket): The magazine AppleSeeds, a pretty well-known and well-respected magazine for children, gets 80% of their content from non-staff writers and publish around 100 pieces from freelancers each year. Then, they tell you that a third of those pieces come from writers who have never written for the magazine before. It also mentions that AppleSeeds receives about 600 queries each year.
Putting that into a math problem:
If a magazine receives 600 queries and accepts 100 of them, how many of the submissions are accepted? 1 out of every 6 queries.
Wouldn’t you think that in this competitive field, a well-known magazine like AppleSeeds would have a lower acceptance rate? I did. I thought that my odds for being published in this type of magazine would be, at best, 1 in a 100, or 1%. It’s actually closer to 17%. And before that number starts to sound low, keep in mind that you can query more than once per year, increasing your odds of being published.
On the other hand, it’s easy to find out quickly which magazines rarely accept freelance pieces. When you see that Time Magazine for Kids is only 4% written by non-staff writers, you know to keep looking.
There are also over 500 magazines listed in Magazine Markets for Children’s Writers! I found many that I’d never heard of that had significant circulation numbers. Sadly, even big bookstores like Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million carry a paltry amount of children’s magazines. That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, though. And now that I’ve done the math…I’m getting ready to do some more submitting!
(I didn’t receive any kind of compensation for recommending Magazine Markets for Children’s Writers.)
