How do I publish my poems?
So you’ve started scribbling and you have some poems - wonderful news! Now, what to do next? I get asked this a lot so in this blog are my top tips for getting your poetry published.
First, you need to build a track record with magazines and journals. This is where you send off your poems and they publish individual ones alongside other poets. You can’t get a book published without a track record, so this is your first place to start. I’ll give you some top tips for this process:
1) Be patient, expect it to take a while. When you send off your poems, it can take 3-6 months for an editor to get back to you. This is because there are many great poets out there, and not very much money to pay the editors. Lots of them are doing it voluntarily or on very small arts budgets, so the timelines are slow. Be patient, this is a long game not a quick win.
2) Read the magazines and journals you want to submit to. You can find examples in the National Poetry Library in London, but there are tons of great ones online that you can discover via social media. If you’re not sure where to start, look up the biography of a poet you like reading. There’s often a list of places they’ve been published in their bio, which you can then look them up and see which ones you like. You need to read past issues to understand if your style or subject will match the magazine/journal you’re interested in.
3) Read their submission guidelines carefully and follow them. Each magazine or journal will have a page on their website, often titled ‘submit’ which explains how to do it. It might have naming conventions for the document or subject line of the email you need to send. They might explain how many poems you can send or when their submission windows are. A submission window is a length of time when you can send them your poems eg. 1st-31st March. Sometimes you send an email, sometimes an online form with Dropbox, or a portal like Submittable. Read the guidelines and follow them, ‘cause if you don’t, your poems might not get read.
4) Keep track of where you send your poems. I have a hefty spreadsheet. Some people use a paper notebook. I recommend the patented Jo Bell method. You need to keep track so when the editors says, ‘congrats, you’re in’, you know which poem they’re talking about and that you didn’t send it anywhere else. This is because lots of places don’t accept ‘simultaneous submissions’ ie. sending the same poem to different places. You also don’t want to send in 6 poems, get rejected and then a few months later accidentally send the same 6 poems to the same journal. So keep a log.
5) A note on simultaneous submissions. Some places ask you not to send a poem to multiple magazines. This is because if they accept your poem, and then find out it’s accepted elsewhere, it messes up the issue they’ve curated. I don’t do this. The poetry world is small, I’m a bit of a people pleaser and I dread letting down an editor and then bumping into them at a book launch or party. But, there are many different views on this and some people definitely do it. I think it depends on your appetite for risk, so read up and work out where you stand.
6) Be compassionate and generous to your editors. The poetry world is full of wonderful people who give up their time and energy to put poems out into the world by editing magazines. None of them are making bank by doing this. Most of them are stretched by reading the many, many submissions they receive whilst trying to hold down jobs, have families and friends, and generally get by in this world. Do not send them rude emails. Do not be offended when they don’t reply. If you don’t hear from a journal beyond their reply window (sometimes they say, ‘we’ll get back to you within 4 months’ in the submissions guidance), or if it’s been more than 6 months, you can assume it’s a no. Accept this no, and move on.
7) Learn to love rejections. This is a tough one. When you start this process, it might feel daunting and scary. You send out your fragile poems like little origami sculptures into the world. Then you get a rejection. Then another. Then another. And this process starts to feel very unpleasant. You might think, ‘how can I put so much care and thought into these precious poems, and then editors don’t want them?’ The thing is, lots of other people are also putting care and thought into their poems. They might have been doing it for longer than you, have a particularly interesting subject, or maybe the editor thought their poem fit with the issue theme better. Either way, this is how it goes.
Rejection is part of this process. I’ve been doing this for 8 years and I once spent an entire year sending out poems and not getting any acceptances. But eventually, when you get a rejection, you think, ‘ooh where could I send those poems now?’ It becomes part of how you work. I often take a rejection as a chance to tweak the title (all your poems need good titles) and refresh it. Or I just sent it out again.
8) This sounds hard. Can’t I just self publish? Yes, you definitely can. There’s some great Instagram poets out there I admire and there’s plenty of ways to get your poetry out there, on Substack or other platforms. Just remember that if you put a poem online, that technically means you have published it. So you can’t take it down and then send it to a magazine. It’s a one-way street, so be sure before you click the button.
9) Be persistent, keep going! The ideal way is to pick a day each month and use it as your submission day. Review what you’ve had sent back, send them out again. Send out fresh poems. I don’t quite work monthly, because, you know, life. But I try and keep a regular rhythm, mainly because submission windows are shorter these days and it’s easier to miss them. The important thing is to keep having a go. Try smaller journals as well as the big ones. Hold onto that belief that sooner or later, you’ll get an acceptance, and see your poem in print and it’s going to feel amazing. Trust me, it does.
Keep scribbling, keep the faith. Good luck!