“Publishing…is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.”

― Margaret Atwood

Rarely will you write something simply for the sake of writing—so that you have something to toss in the rubbish bin.[1] You write so that others can read it (even if the "other" is your future self). Once you've gone through all that pain and pleasure, bouncing between pre-writing, drafting, revising, and editing, you'll have a document that, for better or worse, is complete. But there's still one more step: doing something with that document.

When you hear the word publishing, you probably think of magazines and novels and professional writers and editors. Those certainly are facets of the publishing industry, but when we talk about publishing as a step in the writing process, we're talking about anything you do with your final written product to make it viewable by others: emailing it to your professor, uploading it to your blog, sending it to a newspaper or a magazine, printing it for your family to read, pasting it in your scrapbook, or mailing it to a writing contest.

When talking about emailing your paper to your professor or printing it off for your mom to read, it hardly seems worth mentioning as part of the writing process, but there's actually more to it than you might realize.

Formatting

Very few people will read anything that isn't visually appealing. Huge paragraphs, tiny fonts, and no white space are just about the least-inviting thing a reader can encounter. Formatting is a rather simple task, but it can go a long way in making your writing readable and intriguing.

If you send your writing to a magazine, newspaper, or other professional publishing venue, the first thing you should do is find out what their formatting requirements are. Most of the places don't want you to format your writing to look like what they publish. For example, you wouldn't format your letter to the editor in tiny columns that look like a newspaper. But they will still likely have some formatting requirements before you send it in. Don't just upload your essay as is and send it. Check the website—somewhere on there they will likely tell you how they want it formatted: probably double-spaced with a serif font, like Times New Roman, and so on. Even if they are strict about how they want it formatted, you can still make your writing more visually pleasing by keeping your paragraphs on the small side, by making your images and graphics crisp, clear, and well placed, and by providing subheadings in longer pieces.

If you are self-publishing, such as uploading an essay to your personal website or blog, or emailing a paper to your professor, or printing your journal for your posterity to read, you have a lot more flexibility with formatting.

My first piece of advice: don't simply go with the formatting defaults of your word processor.

Look at writing samples in similar venues that you like and imitate their formatting. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, as they say. If, for example, you are putting your poems together into a chapbook, then Google "poem chapbook" and see what you find. Or, better yet, go to a specialty bookstore, where they often sell locally-produced books, and leaf through the books created by other poets. When I wrote a biography of my father and self-published it (to distribute to the family), the first thing I did was go to the library and look at several other biographies until I found one that was visually appealing. And then I "borrowed" the formatting: the types of font, the size, the spacing, the page set-up—everything down to the way the cover was arranged.

When sending a paper to your professor, it's best to use whatever formatting guidelines they require. If they ask you to format it according to MLA or APA standards, then use one of those stylebooks. They mandate a lot of things, such as font size, spacing, and pagination. Also, if your professor tells you to staple your paper, then staple your paper! Don't waste your time and money buying a fancy folder or having it professionally bound at the student bookstore. Even if you think it looks plain and ugly, it's best to follow your professor's instructions (or your supervisor's or publisher's instructions).

If your professor doesn't care, then format your paper in a way that increases its readability and visual appeal. And, above all, make it something you feel proud to turn in.

Abandoning Your Darlings

Just because you feel proud of your paper doesn't mean you're ready to let it go. Very rarely will you finish writing something and declare it perfect and be ecstatic to share it with the world. More likely, you'll just reach a point where you know any more tinkering won't necessarily make it better, or you'll run up against a deadline, or you'll grow sick of the thing and want to never look at it again. Whatever the case may be, publishing your paper won’t feel much like a celebration.

In graduate school, I was told that there's no such thing as a perfect dissertation, just a done dissertation. Likewise, there's no such thing as a perfect paper, just a done paper.

In similar fashion, my father once told me that you never really finish writing something. You just get to a point where you're ready to abandon it to the world. Do all you can to give it its best hope of survival, and then send it away to fend for itself against professors and editors and readers and fellow students.

Places to Publish

You don't have to wait until someone is willing to pay you gobs of money to publish your work. The following are a few suggestions for putting your work out there for the world to see. Or, at least, a few people (you also don't have to be read by millions to be considered published).

Newspapers

Did you know newspapers still exist? They still print them and deliver them and everything—though not as much as they used to. But even though your neighborhood may not be plagued by teenagers on bicycles throwing newspapers into bushes and puddles (or, as is the case in my neighborhood, my wife in her minivan at five in the morning throwing newspapers onto roofs), newspapers still make the daily rounds to a huge readership. This is done primarily through websites and apps.

Newspapers are often looking for contributing writers. The easiest way to get published in the paper is to submit a letter to the editor. Your letter can be on any topic, though they tend to publish timely and relevant topics. So your essay on why Rug Rats is the must-see TV show of the 90s probably won't get picked up. Look through the paper and see what the current issues are. If something you have written (or want to write) seems like it would fit, send it in.

Similarly, Op-Eds, which are so titled because they are found "opposite" the "editorial" page, are easy to write and publish. They are usually short—two or three hundred words—and they are opinionated and backed by research (though they aren't formatted like a research paper).

Traditionally, newspapers print Op-Eds that express a differing viewpoint or ideology than that of the newspaper. For example, a conservative newspaper will usually print liberal Op-Eds, and vice versa. The point of the Op-Ed section is to broaden the readers' perspective and include voices and opinions that might otherwise be absent in the newspaper. The great thing about Op-Eds is that some newspapers will actually pay you if they print it. If you're interested in writing an Op-Ed—or better yet, converting one of your college papers into an Op-Ed—look at the individual websites of papers for submission guidelines (I recommend starting with small or local papers). Or Google "how to submit an Op-Ed." Lots of great advice will be at your fingertips.

Another great option is the student newspaper. Chances are, your school has one, and they love to print articles, letters to the editor, and Op-Eds from currently-enrolled students.

Academic and Trade Journals

Perhaps as a first or second-year college student you aren't yet thinking about publishing your research, but as you start considering graduate school, internships, and the job market, you might feel compelled to leave your mark on the academic landscape. There are thousands and thousands of academic journals that want to publish your work. Unfortunately, they don't pay. Usually, professors and graduate students use these journals to publish their work to help gain tenure or legitimize themselves in their fields. They are a great place to find out what's going on in any particular field (we'll discuss this more in the chapter on research, as these academic journals are a great source of credible articles). The publishing process can be quite slow. Often, it takes a year or two from the time you submit a paper until it actually appears in a journal, but it’s worth the wait: getting your work published in an academic or trade journal looks dynamite on your resume.

Academic journals use what is called a "peer review" process, which means your manuscript is read by several well-established members of the discipline, such as professors, and then they decide if it deserves a thumbs up or not. It's a great way to ensure only legitimate and worthwhile articles are being published, but it can make it tough to get your article into one. The good news, though, is that there are many student-run journals that target undergraduate and graduate students. I'm not going to list them here since the list seems to change each semester, but a quick search can lead you to a comprehensive list of these journals (try Googling "student-run academic journals" or "academic journals for students").

Literary Magazines & Journals

Literary magazines are usually run by students in graduate programs, though some are private. They are a way for students to learn the art of editing and publishing, and they are a great way for writers of any rank or caliber to get their stuff published. As with academic journals, I recommend you try a few web searches for phrases like, "literary journals" or "literary magazines." You'll find that there are hundreds of them.

Some literary magazines charge a fee for you to submit your work. I don't recommend doing this since there are so many that will read and publish your work for free. In fact, some will even pay you if they publish your writing (usually fifty to a hundred bucks).

Literary magazines tend to come out once or twice a year, and they usually have a short window when they accept new submissions.

Each magazine and journal is different, so look at their website to figure out when and how they want you to send your submission. I recommend you look at a few back issues of their journal before you hit the "send" button, though. Some literary magazines/journals specialize in certain genres, such as poetry, and some have established themes. But I guarantee that no matter what you are trying to publish, there's a literary journal out there that wants it. But they won't find you. You've got to find them.

Websites, Blogs, and Social Media

We live in an unprecedented age of awesomeness where anyone who can get their hands on an electronic device can become a published author. Personal websites, blogs, and social-media apps provide endless venues for putting your work out there.

If you're not sure you have what it takes to be a published writer, I recommend starting with a blog. You can go with Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, or a bunch of others. Post some of your favorite works. Write a few posts on topics that interest you. Invite some friends and family to read your posts. And that's that. You're a writer! And you'll only get better, I promise. The first blog entry I posted, I was terrified that my family, two-thousand miles away, would think I was a total dork. But several people left encouraging comments. So I wrote another, and another. Soon, I had over a hundred people reading my blog—most of whom I didn't know. A hundred may not seem like many, especially when you consider that Kim Kardashian has thirty-eight billion followers on Instagram, but that's a hundred people who chose to read my writing. And they'll choose to read yours.

I've never tried this, but you can actually monetize your blog by allowing advertisements on your page. Every time someone clicks on your blog, you make like one-tenth of a cent. It doesn't seem like much, but it adds up. I choose not to do this simply because I don't want my dad bombarded with advertisements for Victoria's Secret while reading my thoughts on Volvo ownership.

Self-Publishing

Even though blogging and posting your writing to personal websites is a form of self-publishing, I'm talking about printed self-publishing here. This is a great option if you have something you want to share with a few people, or if you have a very limited audience. When I wrote my father's biography, I self-published it because my dad, while a great guy, isn't famous. It would have been impossible to find a mainstream publisher to print the book. Instead, I published it through Lulu Press. Like most other self-publishing companies, it cost me nothing to upload and format my book and cover, and then my dad's friends and family were able to order as many copies as they wanted. It was an amazingly simple process, and within a couple days, for only a few bucks, my dad's biography was sitting on my kitchen table, looking like any other biography from the bookstore.

Self-publishing has its downsides, though. I don't recommend printing a thousand copies of your vampire-from-Mars romance novel hoping you'll be able to sell them for a profit. Instead, keep revising your novel until it sings and then find a mainstream publisher to pick it up and foot the bill. And then you can retire in that mansion way up on the hill (high above the slums where the writers of textbooks live).

Final Thoughts on the Art of Being Rejected

I felt oddly masochistic the first time I printed out a rejection email and pinned it above my desk. But I took giddy delight—not because I had been told that my essay was "not the right fit" for the magazine, but because I had blasted the sucker out to thirty different publishers, and I was sure one of them would bite. The next rejection email didn't quite cheer me up as much. By the fifth one, I stopped printing them. Over the course of the next two months, I would wake up almost daily to find an email that started with, "We regret to inform you," or, "Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately at this time…" I would like to say that after the twenty-ninth rejection, I got that one beautiful email (that's all it takes—right?—just one person to enjoy your writing enough to stick it in their magazine), saying they can't get enough of my work and where can they send the check.

The thirtieth email came. "Mr. Peterson, While our magazine values variety, we don't feel that your essay is a right fit for us."

I still have that essay floating around in my Dropbox. It's called "The Five Year Plan." Someday, perhaps in five years, I'll tinker with it some more and blast it out to thirty more publishers.

The experience was admittedly disheartening—not just because I had spent so much time on the essay and no one wanted it, but because I still feel like it's a phenomenal piece of writing, and I just haven't found that one person in the industry who is willing to read it with the right mindset. I imagine most of them were at the end of their workday, bleary eyed and cranky, when their supervising editor threw it on their desk (or forwarded it to their email), and said, "Here's another." How long did it take them to hit delete and then send me a generic rejection letter?

I'm really not that cynical, because I have actually published several essays and short stories, and right now I'm in the process of trying to get my novel published. In fact, just this morning I received two beautifully written rejection letters. The first says, "Unfortunately, we don't represent sci-fi novels," which was news to me, because that's not what my novel is, and the second simply says, "I'm sorry. This is not for me."

Ouch.

But that's the life of a writer.

Rejection doesn't just come from publishers, however. I felt my first sting of rejection as a junior in college when I turned in an essay that I had spent hours on only to receive a C-. I wasn't the type of student to fret over a low grade, and in any other circumstance, I would have been happy with my C-. I had no intention of going on to grad school, and I doubted any future job prospects would care what grade I received on a literary analysis. But in this case, I really had done a knockout job. I spent hours in the special-collections section of the library, wearing white gloves, studying this one-of-a-kind homemade book. I read it thoroughly—several times—and I even sketched out its dimensions. This was back before cell phones had cameras, and I knew my memory was shaky, so I scribbled every last detail I could think of. I then went home and wrote a beautiful analysis comparing the materiality of the book with the structure of the narrative. I showed how literary symbolism throughout manifested itself in the actual choices the author made in the types of paper to use, the colors, the designs, and the binding. I turned it in, and two days later I got it back. "C-," it said. "Needs more work."

I hate to admit it, but my professor intimidated me, and I was too much of a coward to ask him for an explanation. It’s one of those minor regrets from college I sometimes think about—I wish I had gone to his office and asked him to reconsider my grade. Knowing now what I know about professors and how we read and grade papers, I'm willing to bet he never read beyond the first paragraph. He probably graded the entire stack of papers in a matter of minutes, doling out random grades based on hunch and whimsy. Had I plopped it on his desk and demanded an explanation, he would have probably sighed, wearily slipped on his reading glasses, muttered to himself while he flipped through the pages, and said something like, "Okay. I'll think it over."

And then he would have given me an A just to shut me up.

Ultimately, I passed the class and graduated and got into graduate school, so the C- wasn’t a big deal, but I wish I would have stood up for myself—not because I needed an A, but because my paper was good. It deserved better than his curt dismissal.

The professor died shortly after that experience. It saddened me. Despite everything, I respected him. But some days, I wish he was still alive so that I could find him on Facebook and say, "Really?"

If I’m being honest though, the paper probably wasn’t as good as I thought. I can’t go back to it—as I mentioned elsewhere, I had the nasty habit of tossing or burning all of my papers at the end of each semester, so I’m only left with my biased impression of how great it was. But when I think back to the hours I spent in special collections, it was probably more like ten minutes. And the pages and pages of notes were probably just half a page. And my stellar analysis probably contained phrases like, “this was a really neat book,” and, “I like what he did with the cover.” But since the evidence is gone, as is the primary witness, I will stick with my original tale of woe: that I labored to make something great, and it was rejected.

Not every bad grade will bring you heartache. I had plenty of Ds and Fs over the years that I deserved. My first term paper in college, which I don’t even remember writing, got an F. In big read letters on the front, the professor wrote, “Hitler was not a communist.” Good to know. I deserved that F.

If you find yourself in a position, however, where you really don’t think you deserved your poor grade, seek out your professor and ask them about it. Be nice. You don’t want to sabotage your future grades (while I don’t want to imply professors can be petty, you don’t want to hurt their feelings or make them feel threatened). If you simply ask the professor to clarify why you got the grade, they will usually be happy to explain, and they will often bump you up a grade just for good measure, or offer you a chance to continue working on it. Or they’ll yell at you and point to the door. Either way, it’s worth the risk. Don’t take rejection passively. Own your grade.

[1] This is the first time I have ever said or written the words rubbish bin. But I'm sticking with it.