Publishing Wisely: Advice for New Poets and Writers

Authors tend to want to see their latest books in print, at any cost, and often at the expense of any number of considerations. But I strongly contend that if you're looking to publish at all, that one ought to consider proceeding wisely.

For example--if you're a poet looking to publish a collection of poems, keep in mind that once those poems are published in book form, most of these poems will not be eligible to be published in most of the quality national and international literary magazines. The upside to publishing a book, however, is that in the future your poems will probably be more likely to get in those magazines.

But some will be better served by collecting written endorsements, and laying the networking foundations now for your future publications. If you work on more than one book at a time, that's even better, because you can start planting all sorts of seeds for that book as well. Most authors can expect lead times ranging from 1-5 years from acceptance to publication anyway. One of the most important thing you can do now is to get those endorsements, which will help lead to reviews in the big pre-pub. trade journals, which dramatically increases the likelihood that the book will be reviewed in major daily papers, litmags, and get all kinds of other mass media coverage. Good blurbs can make the difference, then, as to whether your book is exposed to thousands or millions of people.

Also--before you're tempted to start stuffing envelopes with all your lesser poems and stories for what you deem "the lesser magazines": these magazines are likely to sense your condescension; or worse, they'll publish this mediocre work of yours; so there may be thousands of people who only know you by a mediocre poem that even you admit is not as good as the 3-5 you sent to THE NEW YORKER, THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, and THE GEORGIA REVIEW. If any of those readers see your name in ink again, they'll very possibly say something like "Oh yeah--I know that guy--he's the one that wrote that mundane poem in THE LITTLE LITMAG REVIEW that I thought was so forgettable."

Every time you publish something: fair or not, the quality of the writing will most likely come under scrutiny somewhere, and people may judge the corpus of your work from a little excerpt. If it does not represent you at your best, why put it on full display? Of course this isn't fair, but it's real, and bias works in mysterious ways--so why go out of the way to help the biases of others defeat your cause by showing them your least impressive samples?


--Christopher White, Chief Editor