How to Submit Your Work for Publication

A common-sense guide to some of the most basic and atrocious mistakes writers make.

Photo by Carol Jeng on Unsplash

In my life, I’ve read a lot of queries and submissions. In high school, I ran our newspaper — and our newspaper’s literary journal. I spent half a semester reading submissions for a college literary journal. I ran the Ninja Writer zine before we moved to a Medium publication. I interned for a year and a half as a literary agent’s slush reader.

I’ve read an imperial shit-ton of queries and submissions in my life.

I’ve also submitted a whole bunch. So I know, first hand, that there are a whole bunch of blog posts and articles on the internet that give authors tips and tricks for submitting to agents and editors.

I’m a writer. I drink that shit up when it comes time for me to submit.

So it amazes me that so few of the submissions I’ve read followed that advice. And not only did they fail to follow it, they managed to fail in new and surprising ways that ensured that my forehead was never far from my palm.

So here are a couple of tips, things that might seem fairly obvious to some of it, but clearly aren’t to others.

#1: Include your name in the body of the email.