Monday, April 04, 2005

the secret to publishing

Jack Martin writes, "I'm going to tell you the secret of getting a substantial number of submissions out without too much work: send out two or three submissions a week for a couple months (or longer--the longer you persist, of course, the more substantial the number). Then once they start rolling back in as yesses and nos, all you have to do is pop the orphans back in an envelope again on Saturday."

He goes on to say, "I used to send out submissions in blocks of fifteen or thirty or so. Now I'm trying to do it a little at a time. It's not so hard to get two submissions ready on Saturday and Sunday. Before you know it, you'll have a bunch of your good poems out to good magazines. And in about a year, you'll have a bunch of your good poems published in some of those magazines."

Jack is absolutely right. I've thought of this method. I've even done a version of it -- that is the popping of rejects back into an envelope right away. But maybe confining the marketing biz to a Saturday morning is the trick. The other trick is being able to shrug off the no and move on. I can. But there are those times I can't. And those times I can't have had the tendency in the past to build on each other until I'm shut down.

I had a migraine yesterday. Today I was really worn out from the tension of it so I stayed home and slept half the day. The migraine was different. Mostly nausea. Usually a migraine is so much headache the nausea seems like a mere side effect. This time it was the other way 'round.

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