A couple of years ago, I attended a panel of editors of literary journals at AWP. The panel was organized by VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts to discuss the implications of TheVIDA Count— the disparaging ratio of women to men published in literary magazines and journals—and what to do about it. (The VIDA Count shows that many more men than women are published in many literary journals year after year.)
 
During the Q & A, an audience member raised the issue of submissions. Could a difference in the ways that men and women submit their work to magazines account for the discrepancy between the numbers of men published to the number of women published?
 
Panelist Katha Pollitt said something that has stayed with me. She said that in her experience when men received a rejection letter with the encouragement to submit again, they resubmitted right away. But more often than not, when women received the same rejection letter, they did not resubmit.
 
Recently, I stumbled upon an article by Kelli Russell Agodon titled “Submit Like a Man: How Women Writers Can Become More Successful” that addresses this very issue.
 
Agodon, former co-editor-in-chief at the literary journal Crab Creek Review, weighs in on the trends she noticed during her six years as Co-Editor-in-Chief at Crab Creek Review.
 
Because I find this a fascinating topic that can raise our awareness about our mindsets and habits in relationship to our own submission process, I wanted to share this article with you so that you can begin to make deliberate and conscious decisions about when and how often you submit—and resubmit—your work.
 
Read Agodon’s article “Submit Like a Man: How Women Writers Can Become More Successful” here.
 
What’s your submissions process? Any “tweaks” you plan to make to it after reading Agodon’s article? Let us know in the comments below.