how to publish an essay collection

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How To Publish Personal Essays – From Small Press To Collections

• by Robert Wood
• June 1, 2015
• One Comment

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Though they get less press than novels and short fiction , personal essays actually have one of the most welcoming markets in publishing. Dedicated essayists have a great chance of seeing some form of publication, so long as they’re willing to put the work in and understand the marketplace.

That’s why in this article I’ll be exploring the ins and out of publishing your personal essays, starting with how you can secure publication on the lowest rungs of the industry ladder, and then leading up to the anthology or collection publication of multiple essays. But whether you’re a writer of novels, plays, or personal essays, the first piece of advice will always be the same…

Read, read, read

As with any art form, there are trends in the personal essay market. It’s also the case that most publications will have preferences about things like tone, length, subject, and structure. Because of this, whether you’re writing essays in general or for a particular publication, the first step is reading as many as you can get your hands on.

Your research should be focused, however. Reading the great essays , collections by writers such as George Orwell or Oscar Wilde , is of course a good idea but the bulk of your reading needs to be targeted at the sort of publication you’re writing for.

There are many kinds of small touches, technicalities of rhythm and pace, which can only be learnt by reading good examples, but most publishers won’t just be interested in whether your work is good – they’ll be interested in whether or not your work suits their publication. The key is to study their publications relentlessly, first deliberately striving for the ‘feel’ of the work they publish and then gradually allowing it to become a natural style.

This sounds difficult, and at first it will be, but there are two facts which should make beginner essayists feel better:

• The ability to assume a style is one which gets easier and easier with practice. The more different styles you learn, the easier you’ll find the whole process, and very quickly you’ll have a wardrobe full of styles you can slip into to suit the occasion.
• Generally speaking, the better established the publication the less strict they’ll be about conforming to a set style. The demands on quality go up of course, but publications with existing industry and readership respect will be less concerned with the safety of conformity, and more concerned with showcasing the best of your unique talents.

It will take a while for these facts to come into play, but you should feel reassured that however difficult you find it starting out, that’s as difficult as it gets.

Reading should be a constant through your attempts to gain publication, but what you read should change according to where you are on the essayist’s pyramid.

The pyramid

The essayist’s pyramid is a way of combining the different levels of essay publication with the work it takes to move from one to the next. The pyramid basically consists of four levels. At the base are local and specialist publications, the next level up is regional publications, then national and international publications, then successful collections.

The pyramid doesn’t just represent a hierarchy; it’s a guide to progressing from one level to the next. One of the biggest deciding factors in whether a publication will consider your work is your reputation and publication history. Because of this, it’s necessary to have a lot of local publications under your belt before you contact a regional publication, a lot of regional publications before you try for national, and finally to be a frequently published national essayist before you can expect to be successful with a collection of essays.

Self-publishing gives you the ability to skip any of these steps, releasing your work to the world through blogging or e-books. While these are valid routes they’re unlikely to lead to success on their own unless you have a unique viewpoint or presentation. Instead it’s advisable to view websites as you would any other publication. Yes all websites are available to anyone, but realistically they still fall into a structure so similar to ‘local / regional / national’ that they can be discussed in the same breath. Once you have a few essays on a few minor websites you can try moving up, and keep going until there’s sufficient audience to follow you to your own online venues and digital publications.

So now we’ve looked at the route essayists can take to success, it’s time to discuss how they can get started.

Finding publications

The more local a publication the more likely they’ll be to publish you. This isn’t just a matter of circulation, but it doesn’t hurt. A sense of community + a small pool of potential talent = welcoming publishers. For the same reason specialist magazines, those which deal with a specific realm of subjects, are likely to be similarly well disposed towards your work.

Local publications can be found… well… locally. Eateries, libraries, and healthcare centers are good places to search. Established local publications, especially newspapers, will often have adverts for less well-known magazines.

If you’re working online then it’s just a matter of searching around and gauging which publications will be most appropriate for your work. Either way this approach is one which works all the way to the top of the pyramid. Regional publications will contain adverts for local ones, and national magazines are a good source for regional publications.

Each block of the pyramid stays aware of the block below (everyone wants to know where the talent is coming from), and so the more you work the more recognizable you’ll be to those you need to contact next.

The submission system

As I mentioned in my article on publishing short fiction, if you’re serious about publication then you need to establish a system where you’re always submitting and waiting to hear back about a submission.

Waiting to hear back from one publication before submitting to another is wasted time. Ideally you should have a few articles ready to go ‘out’ when you begin, then spend the time before you hear back writing more.

Every writer experiences more rejection than acceptance (mainly because the same piece can be rejected a hundred times, but only accepted once.) You shouldn’t be disheartened, but equally you shouldn’t let any necessary rejections on your road to success waste time you could spend succeeding.

Reading, writing, and submitting are a constant process. Getting published is a job, and it’s one you have to keep showing up for. Do so, though, and you can reach the achievement every essayist dreams of…

Collections and anthologies of personal  essays

‘Anthologies’ are collections of essays in which your work can be featured, whereas you can publish a ‘collection’ made up entirely of your own work.

To make it into an anthology you need to scour literary magazines for one with a theme you think you’d suit. Here the need to tailor your writing to the publication in question is more important than ever. Hang a list of their guidelines in your writing space and stick to it . Anthologies gather most of their audience based on interest in the overall theme, so deviating from it will get your work quickly dismissed.

If you’ve worked your way up the pyramid those who have already featured your work will likely be thrilled to trumpet your achievements, so if you do make it into an anthology make sure to contact former publishers. They may want to advertise your work, or even have you write something.

This is doubly the case when you publish a collection all your own, as there will be fewer other sources of exposure. Thankfully former publishers will almost always be genuinely happy to acknowledge your success, and it will also help their own prestige to be associated with a successful author. Collections are almost always the exclusive preserve of famous essayists – the kind you see week-to-week in national newspapers – but there is a healthy market for self-published collections by lesser-known but established authors, especially when they deal with specialist topics. Whether you’re a beer brewer, a trout fisher, a doll collector, or really almost any kind of hobbyist, there’s a niche for your work already waiting.

Building the pyramid

As I said before, finding some form of publication is just a matter of hard work. Moving up the pyramid you need to keep experimenting with your style and making sure that the work you’ve done on one level supports what you’re attempting to do on the next. A firm base is vital, and is the greatest tool in what have to be constant efforts to improve both your art and the places it can be found.

Above all, remember these three things:

• Always be reading, writing, and submitting.
• Write with your publication of choice in mind.
• Keep building.

For more advice on the logic behind entering competitions and anthologies try Should you enter a writing competition? Or for how to build an email list, a must for writers who will be moving from publication to publication, check out Why you need to have an email list right now .

Robert Wood

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The Writer’s Journey: Where To Publish Personal Essays

Table of contents:, 1. what is a personal essay , 2. key features of personal essays:, authenticity: , individual perspective: , emotional connection: , 3. how to write a personal essay, choosing a topic: , organizing your thoughts: , adding details: , being honest: , 4. where can you publish personal essays, online literary magazines: , writing communities and blogs: , newspaper and magazine op-ed sections: , literary anthologies and essay collections: , online writing contests: , specialized niche websites: , 5. guidelines for submission:, 6. reading submission guidelines:, word count: , formatting requirements: , theme or topic preferences: , submission method: , rights and originality: , 7. craft an engaging title and introduction:, 8. polishing your essay:, proofreading: , clarity and coherence: , conciseness: , 9. originality and avoiding plagiarism:, 10. adhering to ethics and sensitivity:, 11. submission process and follow-up:, key concepts and profound details, conclusion:.

Just Press Play To Hear The Piece.

While no one can deny the power of personal essays, there are many reasons why you might be looking for a place to publish your own. You may have been asked to submit an essay to a contest or publication and want to know if it meets their standards, or maybe you’re just hoping to get some feedback on your latest writing project.

Whatever your reason is for Essay Publishing, book publishers New York  got you covered! Keep reading for information on where to publish personal essays and what they look like.

Personal essays are a great way for individuals to express their thoughts, experiences, and opinions on a personal topic. Whether a lighthearted tale or a heartfelt reflection, these essays give readers a glimpse into the writer’s mind and emotions.

To ensure that your essay is impactful and engaging, it can be beneficial to seek professional assistance. Ghostwriting services can help you bring your ideas to life and create a well-crafted essay that resonates with your readers. These services enable you to collaborate with an experienced writer who can transform your thoughts into clear and engaging prose.

Moreover, proofreading services can play a crucial role in enhancing the quality of your essay. These services involve meticulously reviewing your essay to identify and correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. Additionally, professional proofreaders can offer valuable feedback on the overall clarity, structure, and coherence of your writing.

It’s important to find your unique voice and share your personal experiences with the reader when it comes to personal essays. However, don’t underestimate professional assistance’s impact on the final result. 

When writing a personal essay, make sure that the following key features are included in it

Personal essays are all about being true to yourself. You can be honest and authentic, sharing your genuine feelings and experiences.

Each personal essay is unique because it comes from your viewpoint. It’s your chance to share what matters and how you see the world.

These essays often aim to connect with readers emotionally. Whether it’s joy, sadness, excitement, or contemplation, personal essays can evoke various emotions in readers.

By understanding and emphasizing the key features of personal essays, writers can craft compelling pitches to attract publishers’ attention. Pitching to publishers opens doors for personal essays to be published, shared, and appreciated by a wider readership, creating opportunities for meaningful connections and impact.

For Essay Publishing, you first need to know how to write it. Here is how you can write a personal essay in a few steps:

Select a topic, akin to finding a book title by its plot, that is meaningful to you…

. It could be a personal story, an idea, or an experience you want to share. 

Plan how you want to present your story. Consider the beginning, middle, and end of your essay. You also need to plan on formatting for publishing according to the requirements of where you want to publish. When you think through all of this, the process of writing an essay further can be easy.

Use descriptive language, as detailed in how a writer can edit a narrative , to paint a vivid picture for your readers. Include sensory details to make your essay more engaging.

Be true to yourself. Don’t be afraid to share your true feelings and experiences, even if they might feel vulnerable.

When it comes to sharing your work with the world, finding the right platform is crucial. Here are various places where you can consider sharing your stories:

These websites are like treasure troves of interesting content. Places such as “The Sun Magazine,” “Tin House,” and “Narratively” love personal essays. 

They’re on the lookout for captivating stories that touch the hearts of their readers. These platforms aim to collect different perspectives and thoughts, making them perfect for your essays.

Websites like “Medium” and “WordPress” offer spaces for writers for Essay Publishing. They provide an excellent opportunity to showcase your work to a broad audience. 

Additionally, Medium has a Partner Program that could reward you based on how much people enjoy reading your essays.

Consider sharing your essays with the opinion sections of well-known newspapers like “The New York Times,” “The Guardian,” or “The Washington Post.”

These places have lots of readers and discussions. Contributing here allows you to be part of important conversations happening in society.

Some organizations create collections of essays on particular themes. Submitting your work to these collections can get your essays published in print or online, giving you exposure to a wider audience.

Writing contests hosted by websites like “Writer’s Digest”  and “The Writer Magazine” are great avenues for getting your essays noticed. 

These contests often have different themes and offer prizes, making them an exciting way to share your stories.

Depending on the topic of your essay, there are websites dedicated to specific interests. Whether about travel, parenting, mental health, or lifestyle, these platforms cater to diverse topics, providing a perfect space for your unique stories.

Submitting your essays to different platforms requires attention to specific publishing contracts , guides and practices. Here’s a comprehensive breakdown to help you ace the submission process:

Before submitting, carefully read and understand the submission guidelines and publisher-author relations of the platform you’re interested in. 

Each platform has its own set of rules, preferences, and expectations for submissions. Pay close attention to details such as:

Ensure your essay meets the specified word count requirements. Some platforms might have a specific range they prefer.

Check for specific formatting guidelines, such as font size, spacing, or file format (e.g., .docx, .pdf).

Some platforms might have themes or topics they’re particularly interested in. Align your essay’s subject matter accordingly.

Note whether submissions are accepted via email, online forms, or submission portals. Follow the specified submission procedure.

Understand the platform’s policies regarding ownership of the content. Ensure your essay is original and not previously published elsewhere.

Capturing the attention of editors or readers starts with an enticing title and introduction. Craft a title, similar to how you’d write a thank you note , that reflects the essence of your essay and compels the reader to delve deeper. 

Your introduction should be engaging, drawing in the audience and setting the tone for the rest of the essay.

Editing and revising your essay are crucial steps before submission. Ensure your writing is clear, concise, and error-free. Here are some tips:

Check for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and punctuation issues. Consider using grammar-checking tools or seeking assistance from a trusted proofreader.

Ensure your ideas flow logically and are presented coherently. Avoid overly complex sentences or jargon that might hinder readability.

Eliminate unnecessary details or repetitive information. Keep your essay focused on its central theme or message.

Maintain the authenticity of your work by ensuring it is entirely original. Avoid plagiarism by attributing sources correctly if using external references or quotes. Plagiarism can severely impact the credibility of your submission.

Be mindful of sensitive topics or personal information shared in your essay. Respect the privacy of the individuals mentioned and adhere to ethical considerations. Ensure your content does not harm or offend any particular group or individual.

Follow the platform’s submission instructions meticulously. Submit your essay within the specified timeframe, if provided. After submission, be patient. Responses may take time. If allowed, follow up politely if you haven’t received a response within the expected timeframe.

The world of personal essays offers a myriad of opportunities for aspiring writers. From online journals to renowned newspapers, the options are vast. Selecting the right platform involves understanding your essay’s theme, audience, and aspirations as a writer. 

Authenticity, clarity, and adherence to submission guidelines are paramount for Essay Publishing. Lastly, embracing your unique voice makes your essays resonate with readers across the globe.

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• 19 Websites and Magazines That Want to Publish Your Personal Essays Compiled by Lisa Rowan, this site provides links to websites and their submission guidelines for personal essays.
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17 Top Publishers of Essay Collections

By Hiten Vyas

Have you written a collection of essays?

Do you now want to publish your work? If so, it makes sense to find a publishing house that has experience in publishing essays.

Continue reading to find out about 17 top publishers of essay collections.

1. Coffee House Press

Coffee House Press is an independent publishing house based in Minneapolis. Founded in 1972, it started out as a small letterpress operation before evolving into an internationally recognized publisher of poetry, essays, and literary fiction. Today, Coffee House Press continues to publish the works of both emerging and established writers, acting as a catalyst between authors and readers.

Coffee House Press has annual reading periods during which they are open for submissions of novels, essay collections, and long-form essays. There is no set length requirement for submissions, but they do not accept single essays, single poems, and chapbooks. Do note that Coffee House Press only accepts 300 submissions per reading period, so make sure you submit as soon as the reading period begins. Visit their Submittable page to learn more about their submission guidelines. For general inquiries, you can reach Coffee House Press here .

2. Red Hen Press

Located in Los Angeles, Red Hen Press was founded by Mark E. Cull and Kate Gale in 1994 out of their desire to keep creative literature alive. And that desire is still the foundation of everything they do—from publishing outstanding literary works, to promoting literacy in local schools. Red Hen Press publishes non-fiction, literary fiction, and poetry—particularly novels, memoirs, essay collections, poetry collections, creative non-fiction, and hybrid works. To get a better idea of the kind of work they usually publish, you can check out their catalog and submission guidelines .

They are currently accepting unsolicited submissions via their Submittable page , and interested authors may submit a completed manuscript or a sample of at least 20 pages. It usually takes them 3 to 6 months to respond to submissions.

3. Two Dollar Radio

Two Dollar Radio is a small, family-run press that has garnered national acclaim since its establishment in 2005. They publish original, creative, and subversive books that defy conventional storytelling. Some of the authors whose work they have published are Hanif Abdurraqib, Barbara Browning, Mark de Silva, Paul Kingsnorth, Janet Livingstone, and more.

They are currently open for submissions through their Submittable page . Submissions must include the full manuscript—no proposals or excerpts. If you are interested in submitting your work, it is important that you familiarize yourself with their previous publications since you will be asked to provide a short statement on why you feel they are the right publisher for your manuscript. You can find more information about their submission guidelines here .

4. Unsolicited Press

Unsolicited Press is a small Oregon-based press that publishes creative non-fiction, literary fiction, and poetry. What sets Unsolicited Press apart from other publishers is that every single person who works there is also a writer, and they consider publishing a partnership between the author and the press. They are always open for submissions, and they are currently actively seeking poetry collections, essay collections, memoirs, novels, and creative non-fiction. They also welcome experimental literature. All submissions must adhere to their submission guidelines , or else they will not be read.

If you are interested in submitting an essay collection, you will need to prepare a query letter and book proposal, along with the first three chapters of your manuscript. Do note that they only accept submissions in Word format. Once you are ready, you can send them your submission via email .

5. Sarabande Books

Sarabande Books is a non-profit press that was founded in 1994. They currently have more than 200 titles in print, and they publish approximately 10 books each year, primarily focusing on fiction, poetry, and essays. They have a dedicated readership and have earned a reputation for publishing innovative books with diverse voices. Authors previously published by Sarabande Books have gone on to win or have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Lambda Literary Awards, National Book Critics Circle Award, and more.

Their annual reading period for essay collections is during the month of September. They are interested in essay collections between 150 and 250 pages. Individual essays in the collection may have already been published in magazines or chapbooks, but the collection as a whole must be previously unpublished. All submissions must follow their guidelines and must be sent through their Submittable page . General inquiries may be sent through Sarabande’s online contact form .

6. Black Lawrence Press

Founded by Colleen Ryor in 2004, Black Lawrence Press is an independent publisher that specializes in fiction, creative non-fiction, and contemporary poetry. The books they publish are distributed to Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and various bookstores and retailers across the country. Black Lawrence Press has open reading periods twice a year—one in June and another in November—during which they accept submissions of novels, novellas, prose chapbooks, lyric essay collections, short story collections, biographies, poetry chapbooks, and creative non-fiction.

Black Lawrence Press is quite strict about formatting, so make sure you adhere to the guidelines stated here . If you are ready to send in your submission, you can do so through their Submittable page .

7. Bauhan Publishing

Bauhan Publishing is an independent publishing house with roots going all the way back to the 1930s. It has gone through several different names since its establishment, but its commitment to craftsmanship remains. Even with the rise of on-demand publishing and new media, Bauhan Publishing believes that their traditional publishing model gives them an edge that newer companies don’t have. In addition to publishing high-quality books, Bauhan also hosts the annual Monadnock Essay Collection Prize for book-length collections of non-fiction essays.

Bauhan Publishing does not currently accept unsolicited submissions, but you can visit their Submittable page to stay updated about their upcoming reading periods and contests. If you have any questions for the Bauhan Publishing team, you can reach them here .

8. C&R Press

Since 2006, C&R Press has been publishing exceptional books—especially those written by progressive, LGBTQ, female, minority, immigrant, and submerged voices. Although C&R Press started out as a poetry publisher, they have since expanded their scope and now also publish short story collections, essay collections, novels, and more.

Publishing at least 12 books each year, C&R Press is always eager to receive submissions of full-length manuscripts in any genre. Short stories, essays, memoirs, and hybrid work are all welcome. Should you be interested in getting published by C&R Press, you can view their submission guidelines and submit your manuscript here . If you have any additional questions or concerns, you can reach C&R Press via email .

9. Manchester University Press

Located in the heart of the most vibrant cities in the UK, Manchester University Press publishes study guides, essay collections, multi-authored collections, monographs, and trade books for general readers. Their areas of interest include modern history, history of art and design, sociology, economics, literature, film, archeology, business, politics, international law, and theater.

If your manuscript falls under any of the aforementioned areas, you can submit a proposal to Manchester University Press by emailing the appropriate editor . But before emailing your proposal, make sure you read their submission guidelines . You can also get in touch with Manchester University Press here .

10. Seren Books

One of the leading independent publishers in Wales, Seren Books has been publishing high-quality fiction, non-fiction, and poetry since 1981. Many of the books they have published over the decades have won major literary awards—not only in the UK but internationally as well. It is recommended that you check out their past publications to learn more about the kinds of books they are interested in publishing, but at the core of everything they publish are stories well told.

Seren Books welcomes unsolicited submissions all year. If you are interested in submitting your work for their consideration, you can visit the submissions page on their website.

11. Vehicule Press

Founded in Quebec in 1973, Vehicule Press began as the publishing arm of Vehicule Art, Inc., one of the first artist-run galleries in Canada. Today, Vehicule Press continues to publish non-fiction, fiction, and poetry from Canada’s most talented writers. Some of their award-winning publications include The Love Monster by Missy Marston, A Place in Mind: The Search for Authenticity by Avi Friedman, Garbage Head by Christopher Willard, and Boxing the Compass by Richard Greene.

Vehicule Press is currently accepting non-fiction submissions. Prospective authors can submit their work by visiting the Vehicule Press submissions page and contacting the appropriate editor . General inquiries can be sent to Vehicule Press via email .

12. Book*hug Press

Formerly BookThug Press, Book*hug is an independent literary press in Ontario, Canada that specializes in literary non-fiction, contemporary fiction, poetry, drama, and translations. Their main goal is to publish books that reflect and contribute to Canadian culture and society. In particular, they are looking for writing that is innovative, bold, and not afraid to take risks. They especially welcome work written by LGBTQ writers, women writers, deaf and disabled writers, indigenous writers, and writers of color. They do not, however, publish children’s books, genre fiction, self-help books, or cookbooks.

Book*hug is always open for submissions. If you would like Book*hug to consider your work, you can check out their submission guidelines for instructions on how and where to submit your manuscript. If you require additional assistance, you can reach the Book*hug team here .

13. Guernica Editions

Established in 1978, Guernica Editions is named after the Spanish city that fell victim to aerial bombs in the 1930s. Guernica’s founders chose the name with the hope that the books they publish will change the world and make it a better place. Guernica publishes Canadian literature, specifically fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. One of Guernica’s most significant contributions to the literary world is their promotion of ethnic minority writers including African-Canadian writers, Italian-Canadian writers, and others.

Guernica accepts manuscript submissions between January and April, and they are interested in poetry collections, essay collections, literary non-fiction, and novels. All queries and manuscripts must be sent as attachments via email . To learn more about their process and policies, check out Guernica’s submission guidelines here .

14. House of Anansi

House of Anansi is a Canadian publisher that was founded by writers David Godfrey and Dennis Lee in 1967. They have published the works of renowned Canadian writers, including Margaret Atwood, Erin Moure, Matt Cohen, and Michael Ondaatje. Today, House of Anansi specializes in publishing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama from both established and emerging writers. They publish around 50 new titles each year.

House of Anansi is currently closed for submissions, but you can keep an eye out for open calls and upcoming reading periods by checking their Submittable page . They only accept submissions from Canadian writers, and all submissions must be done online. If you have any questions or concerns, you can reach the House of Anansi team here .

15. Giramondo Publishing Company

Giramondo Publishing Company was established in 1995 with the aim of publishing adventurous and innovative literature written by Australian writers. Many of the titles they have published have won major literary prizes, such as the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the Nita Kibble Literary Award. They publish non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and short-form books.

Giramondo is always open for submissions, and they welcome both fiction and non-fiction manuscripts, including essay collections. All submissions must be sent through their Submittable page and must include your curriculum vitae, a brief synopsis of your work, and three sample chapters. For more information, you can find Giramondo’s submission guidelines here .

16. Pan MacMillan Australia

Pan MacMillan Australia is the Australian imprint of MacMillan Publishers, one of the largest and most popular publishing houses in the world. Pan MacMillan Australia publishes a range of high-quality books across various genres, including children’s literature, fiction, non-fiction, biographies, memoirs, and more.

Australian authors who wish to get published can participate in Pan MacMillan’s Manuscript Monday initiative. On the first Monday of every month, Pan MacMillan accepts electronic submissions from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm, Australian Eastern Standard Time. At the moment, they are looking for fiction, literary non-fiction, children’s books, young adult literature, and commercial non-fiction. Interested authors can check out Manuscript Monday’s guidelines and submission instructions here . You can also contact Pan MacMillan for general questions and inquiries.

17. Grattan Street Press

Grattan Street Press is a small press located in Melbourne, Australia. An initiative of the University of Melbourne’s Publishing and Communications Program, Grattan Street Press publishes trade non-fiction, contemporary fiction, children’s books, and other culturally significant works. They are especially drawn to writing that is intelligent, engaging, and unique.

They are currently accepting fiction and non-fiction submissions through their Submittable page . Submissions must include your curriculum vitae, a brief summary of your work, and a short excerpt. You can check out their submission guidelines for more details. If you have any questions regarding their submission policies and screening process, you may get in touch with them via email .

Are there any other publishers of essay collection that you know of? Please tell us about them in them in the comments box below!

Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of Writing Tips Oasis .

How to Write an Essay

Use the links below to jump directly to any section of this guide:

Essay Writing Fundamentals

How to prepare to write an essay, how to edit an essay, how to share and publish your essays, how to get essay writing help, how to find essay writing inspiration, resources for teaching essay writing.

Essays, short prose compositions on a particular theme or topic, are the bread and butter of academic life. You write them in class, for homework, and on standardized tests to show what you know. Unlike other kinds of academic writing (like the research paper) and creative writing (like short stories and poems), essays allow you to develop your original thoughts on a prompt or question. Essays come in many varieties: they can be expository (fleshing out an idea or claim), descriptive, (explaining a person, place, or thing), narrative (relating a personal experience), or persuasive (attempting to win over a reader). This guide is a collection of dozens of links about academic essay writing that we have researched, categorized, and annotated in order to help you improve your essay writing. 

Essays are different from other forms of writing; in turn, there are different kinds of essays. This section contains general resources for getting to know the essay and its variants. These resources introduce and define the essay as a genre, and will teach you what to expect from essay-based assessments.

Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab

One of the most trusted academic writing sites, Purdue OWL provides a concise introduction to the four most common types of academic essays.

"The Essay: History and Definition" (ThoughtCo)

This snappy article from ThoughtCo talks about the origins of the essay and different kinds of essays you might be asked to write. 

"What Is An Essay?" Video Lecture (Coursera)

The University of California at Irvine's free video lecture, available on Coursera, tells  you everything you need to know about the essay.

Wikipedia Article on the "Essay"

Wikipedia's article on the essay is comprehensive, providing both English-language and global perspectives on the essay form. Learn about the essay's history, forms, and styles.

"Understanding College and Academic Writing" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This list of common academic writing assignments (including types of essay prompts) will help you know what to expect from essay-based assessments.

Before you start writing your essay, you need to figure out who you're writing for (audience), what you're writing about (topic/theme), and what you're going to say (argument and thesis). This section contains links to handouts, chapters, videos and more to help you prepare to write an essay.

How to Identify Your Audience

"Audience" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This handout provides questions you can ask yourself to determine the audience for an academic writing assignment. It also suggests strategies for fitting your paper to your intended audience.

"Purpose, Audience, Tone, and Content" (Univ. of Minnesota Libraries)

This extensive book chapter from Writing for Success , available online through Minnesota Libraries Publishing, is followed by exercises to try out your new pre-writing skills.

"Determining Audience" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This guide from a community college's writing center shows you how to know your audience, and how to incorporate that knowledge in your thesis statement.

"Know Your Audience" ( Paper Rater Blog)

This short blog post uses examples to show how implied audiences for essays differ. It reminds you to think of your instructor as an observer, who will know only the information you pass along.

How to Choose a Theme or Topic

"Research Tutorial: Developing Your Topic" (YouTube)

Take a look at this short video tutorial from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to understand the basics of developing a writing topic.

"How to Choose a Paper Topic" (WikiHow)

This simple, step-by-step guide (with pictures!) walks you through choosing a paper topic. It starts with a detailed description of brainstorming and ends with strategies to refine your broad topic.

"How to Read an Assignment: Moving From Assignment to Topic" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Did your teacher give you a prompt or other instructions? This guide helps you understand the relationship between an essay assignment and your essay's topic.

"Guidelines for Choosing a Topic" (CliffsNotes)

This study guide from CliffsNotes both discusses how to choose a topic and makes a useful distinction between "topic" and "thesis."

How to Come Up with an Argument

"Argument" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

Not sure what "argument" means in the context of academic writing? This page from the University of North Carolina is a good place to start.

"The Essay Guide: Finding an Argument" (Study Hub)

This handout explains why it's important to have an argument when beginning your essay, and provides tools to help you choose a viable argument.

"Writing a Thesis and Making an Argument" (University of Iowa)

This page from the University of Iowa's Writing Center contains exercises through which you can develop and refine your argument and thesis statement.

"Developing a Thesis" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This page from Harvard's Writing Center collates some helpful dos and don'ts of argumentative writing, from steps in constructing a thesis to avoiding vague and confrontational thesis statements.

"Suggestions for Developing Argumentative Essays" (Berkeley Student Learning Center)

This page offers concrete suggestions for each stage of the essay writing process, from topic selection to drafting and editing. 

How to Outline your Essay

"Outlines" (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill via YouTube)

This short video tutorial from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows how to group your ideas into paragraphs or sections to begin the outlining process.

"Essay Outline" (Univ. of Washington Tacoma)

This two-page handout by a university professor simply defines the parts of an essay and then organizes them into an example outline.

"Types of Outlines and Samples" (Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab)

Purdue OWL gives examples of diverse outline strategies on this page, including the alphanumeric, full sentence, and decimal styles. 

"Outlining" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Once you have an argument, according to this handout, there are only three steps in the outline process: generalizing, ordering, and putting it all together. Then you're ready to write!

"Writing Essays" (Plymouth Univ.)

This packet, part of Plymouth University's Learning Development series, contains descriptions and diagrams relating to the outlining process.

"How to Write A Good Argumentative Essay: Logical Structure" (Criticalthinkingtutorials.com via YouTube)

This longer video tutorial gives an overview of how to structure your essay in order to support your argument or thesis. It is part of a longer course on academic writing hosted on Udemy.

Now that you've chosen and refined your topic and created an outline, use these resources to complete the writing process. Most essays contain introductions (which articulate your thesis statement), body paragraphs, and conclusions. Transitions facilitate the flow from one paragraph to the next so that support for your thesis builds throughout the essay. Sources and citations show where you got the evidence to support your thesis, which ensures that you avoid plagiarism. 

How to Write an Introduction

"Introductions" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page identifies the role of the introduction in any successful paper, suggests strategies for writing introductions, and warns against less effective introductions.

"How to Write A Good Introduction" (Michigan State Writing Center)

Beginning with the most common missteps in writing introductions, this guide condenses the essentials of introduction composition into seven points.

"The Introductory Paragraph" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post from academic advisor and college enrollment counselor Grace Fleming focuses on ways to grab your reader's attention at the beginning of your essay.

"Introductions and Conclusions" (Univ. of Toronto)

This guide from the University of Toronto gives advice that applies to writing both introductions and conclusions, including dos and don'ts.

"How to Write Better Essays: No One Does Introductions Properly" ( The Guardian )

This news article interviews UK professors on student essay writing; they point to introductions as the area that needs the most improvement.

How to Write a Thesis Statement

"Writing an Effective Thesis Statement" (YouTube)

This short, simple video tutorial from a college composition instructor at Tulsa Community College explains what a thesis statement is and what it does. 

"Thesis Statement: Four Steps to a Great Essay" (YouTube)

This fantastic tutorial walks you through drafting a thesis, using an essay prompt on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as an example.

"How to Write a Thesis Statement" (WikiHow)

This step-by-step guide (with pictures!) walks you through coming up with, writing, and editing a thesis statement. It invites you think of your statement as a "working thesis" that can change.

"How to Write a Thesis Statement" (Univ. of Indiana Bloomington)

Ask yourself the questions on this page, part of Indiana Bloomington's Writing Tutorial Services, when you're writing and refining your thesis statement.

"Writing Tips: Thesis Statements" (Univ. of Illinois Center for Writing Studies)

This page gives plentiful examples of good to great thesis statements, and offers questions to ask yourself when formulating a thesis statement.

How to Write Body Paragraphs

"Body Paragraph" (Brightstorm)

This module of a free online course introduces you to the components of a body paragraph. These include the topic sentence, information, evidence, and analysis.

"Strong Body Paragraphs" (Washington Univ.)

This handout from Washington's Writing and Research Center offers in-depth descriptions of the parts of a successful body paragraph.

"Guide to Paragraph Structure" (Deakin Univ.)

This handout is notable for color-coding example body paragraphs to help you identify the functions various sentences perform.

"Writing Body Paragraphs" (Univ. of Minnesota Libraries)

The exercises in this section of Writing for Success  will help you practice writing good body paragraphs. It includes guidance on selecting primary support for your thesis.

"The Writing Process—Body Paragraphs" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

The information and exercises on this page will familiarize you with outlining and writing body paragraphs, and includes links to more information on topic sentences and transitions.

"The Five-Paragraph Essay" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post discusses body paragraphs in the context of one of the most common academic essay types in secondary schools.

How to Use Transitions

"Transitions" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill explains what a transition is, and how to know if you need to improve your transitions.

"Using Transitions Effectively" (Washington Univ.)

This handout defines transitions, offers tips for using them, and contains a useful list of common transitional words and phrases grouped by function.

"Transitions" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This page compares paragraphs without transitions to paragraphs with transitions, and in doing so shows how important these connective words and phrases are.

"Transitions in Academic Essays" (Scribbr)

This page lists four techniques that will help you make sure your reader follows your train of thought, including grouping similar information and using transition words.

"Transitions" (El Paso Community College)

This handout shows example transitions within paragraphs for context, and explains how transitions improve your essay's flow and voice.

"Make Your Paragraphs Flow to Improve Writing" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post, another from academic advisor and college enrollment counselor Grace Fleming, talks about transitions and other strategies to improve your essay's overall flow.

"Transition Words" (smartwords.org)

This handy word bank will help you find transition words when you're feeling stuck. It's grouped by the transition's function, whether that is to show agreement, opposition, condition, or consequence.

How to Write a Conclusion

"Parts of An Essay: Conclusions" (Brightstorm)

This module of a free online course explains how to conclude an academic essay. It suggests thinking about the "3Rs": return to hook, restate your thesis, and relate to the reader.

"Essay Conclusions" (Univ. of Maryland University College)

This overview of the academic essay conclusion contains helpful examples and links to further resources for writing good conclusions.

"How to End An Essay" (WikiHow)

This step-by-step guide (with pictures!) by an English Ph.D. walks you through writing a conclusion, from brainstorming to ending with a flourish.

"Ending the Essay: Conclusions" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This page collates useful strategies for writing an effective conclusion, and reminds you to "close the discussion without closing it off" to further conversation.

How to Include Sources and Citations

"Research and Citation Resources" (Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab)

Purdue OWL streamlines information about the three most common referencing styles (MLA, Chicago, and APA) and provides examples of how to cite different resources in each system.

EasyBib: Free Bibliography Generator

This online tool allows you to input information about your source and automatically generate citations in any style. Be sure to select your resource type before clicking the "cite it" button.

CitationMachine

Like EasyBib, this online tool allows you to input information about your source and automatically generate citations in any style. 

Modern Language Association Handbook (MLA)

Here, you'll find the definitive and up-to-date record of MLA referencing rules. Order through the link above, or check to see if your library has a copy.

Chicago Manual of Style

Here, you'll find the definitive and up-to-date record of Chicago referencing rules. You can take a look at the table of contents, then choose to subscribe or start a free trial.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

"What is Plagiarism?" (plagiarism.org)

This nonprofit website contains numerous resources for identifying and avoiding plagiarism, and reminds you that even common activities like copying images from another website to your own site may constitute plagiarism.

"Plagiarism" (University of Oxford)

This interactive page from the University of Oxford helps you check for plagiarism in your work, making it clear how to avoid citing another person's work without full acknowledgement.

"Avoiding Plagiarism" (MIT Comparative Media Studies)

This quick guide explains what plagiarism is, what its consequences are, and how to avoid it. It starts by defining three words—quotation, paraphrase, and summary—that all constitute citation.

"Harvard Guide to Using Sources" (Harvard Extension School)

This comprehensive website from Harvard brings together articles, videos, and handouts about referencing, citation, and plagiarism. 

Grammarly contains tons of helpful grammar and writing resources, including a free tool to automatically scan your essay to check for close affinities to published work. 

Noplag is another popular online tool that automatically scans your essay to check for signs of plagiarism. Simply copy and paste your essay into the box and click "start checking."

Once you've written your essay, you'll want to edit (improve content), proofread (check for spelling and grammar mistakes), and finalize your work until you're ready to hand it in. This section brings together tips and resources for navigating the editing process. 

"Writing a First Draft" (Academic Help)

This is an introduction to the drafting process from the site Academic Help, with tips for getting your ideas on paper before editing begins.

"Editing and Proofreading" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page provides general strategies for revising your writing. They've intentionally left seven errors in the handout, to give you practice in spotting them.

"How to Proofread Effectively" (ThoughtCo)

This article from ThoughtCo, along with those linked at the bottom, help describe common mistakes to check for when proofreading.

"7 Simple Edits That Make Your Writing 100% More Powerful" (SmartBlogger)

This blog post emphasizes the importance of powerful, concise language, and reminds you that even your personal writing heroes create clunky first drafts.

"Editing Tips for Effective Writing" (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

On this page from Penn's International Relations department, you'll find tips for effective prose, errors to watch out for, and reminders about formatting.

"Editing the Essay" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This article, the first of two parts, gives you applicable strategies for the editing process. It suggests reading your essay aloud, removing any jargon, and being unafraid to remove even "dazzling" sentences that don't belong.

"Guide to Editing and Proofreading" (Oxford Learning Institute)

This handout from Oxford covers the basics of editing and proofreading, and reminds you that neither task should be rushed. 

In addition to plagiarism-checkers, Grammarly has a plug-in for your web browser that checks your writing for common mistakes.

After you've prepared, written, and edited your essay, you might want to share it outside the classroom. This section alerts you to print and web opportunities to share your essays with the wider world, from online writing communities and blogs to published journals geared toward young writers.

Sharing Your Essays Online

Go Teen Writers

Go Teen Writers is an online community for writers aged 13 - 19. It was founded by Stephanie Morrill, an author of contemporary young adult novels. 

Tumblr is a blogging website where you can share your writing and interact with other writers online. It's easy to add photos, links, audio, and video components.

Writersky provides an online platform for publishing and reading other youth writers' work. Its current content is mostly devoted to fiction.

Publishing Your Essays Online

This teen literary journal publishes in print, on the web, and (more frequently), on a blog. It is committed to ensuring that "teens see their authentic experience reflected on its pages."

The Matador Review

This youth writing platform celebrates "alternative," unconventional writing. The link above will take you directly to the site's "submissions" page.

Teen Ink has a website, monthly newsprint magazine, and quarterly poetry magazine promoting the work of young writers.

The largest online reading platform, Wattpad enables you to publish your work and read others' work. Its inline commenting feature allows you to share thoughts as you read along.

Publishing Your Essays in Print

Canvas Teen Literary Journal

This quarterly literary magazine is published for young writers by young writers. They accept many kinds of writing, including essays.

The Claremont Review

This biannual international magazine, first published in 1992, publishes poetry, essays, and short stories from writers aged 13 - 19.

Skipping Stones

This young writers magazine, founded in 1988, celebrates themes relating to ecological and cultural diversity. It publishes poems, photos, articles, and stories.

The Telling Room

This nonprofit writing center based in Maine publishes children's work on their website and in book form. The link above directs you to the site's submissions page.

Essay Contests

Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards

This prestigious international writing contest for students in grades 7 - 12 has been committed to "supporting the future of creativity since 1923."

Society of Professional Journalists High School Essay Contest

An annual essay contest on the theme of journalism and media, the Society of Professional Journalists High School Essay Contest awards scholarships up to $1,000.

National YoungArts Foundation

Here, you'll find information on a government-sponsored writing competition for writers aged 15 - 18. The foundation welcomes submissions of creative nonfiction, novels, scripts, poetry, short story and spoken word.

Signet Classics Student Scholarship Essay Contest

With prompts on a different literary work each year, this competition from Signet Classics awards college scholarships up to $1,000.

"The Ultimate Guide to High School Essay Contests" (CollegeVine)

See this handy guide from CollegeVine for a list of more competitions you can enter with your academic essay, from the National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Awards to the National High School Essay Contest by the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Whether you're struggling to write academic essays or you think you're a pro, there are workshops and online tools that can help you become an even better writer. Even the most seasoned writers encounter writer's block, so be proactive and look through our curated list of resources to combat this common frustration.

Online Essay-writing Classes and Workshops

"Getting Started with Essay Writing" (Coursera)

Coursera offers lots of free, high-quality online classes taught by college professors. Here's one example, taught by instructors from the University of California Irvine.

"Writing and English" (Brightstorm)

Brightstorm's free video lectures are easy to navigate by topic. This unit on the parts of an essay features content on the essay hook, thesis, supporting evidence, and more.

"How to Write an Essay" (EdX)

EdX is another open online university course website with several two- to five-week courses on the essay. This one is geared toward English language learners.

Writer's Digest University

This renowned writers' website offers online workshops and interactive tutorials. The courses offered cover everything from how to get started through how to get published.

Writing.com

Signing up for this online writer's community gives you access to helpful resources as well as an international community of writers.

How to Overcome Writer's Block

"Symptoms and Cures for Writer's Block" (Purdue OWL)

Purdue OWL offers a list of signs you might have writer's block, along with ways to overcome it. Consider trying out some "invention strategies" or ways to curb writing anxiety.

"Overcoming Writer's Block: Three Tips" ( The Guardian )

These tips, geared toward academic writing specifically, are practical and effective. The authors advocate setting realistic goals, creating dedicated writing time, and participating in social writing.

"Writing Tips: Strategies for Overcoming Writer's Block" (Univ. of Illinois)

This page from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Center for Writing Studies acquaints you with strategies that do and do not work to overcome writer's block.

"Writer's Block" (Univ. of Toronto)

Ask yourself the questions on this page; if the answer is "yes," try out some of the article's strategies. Each question is accompanied by at least two possible solutions.

If you have essays to write but are short on ideas, this section's links to prompts, example student essays, and celebrated essays by professional writers might help. You'll find writing prompts from a variety of sources, student essays to inspire you, and a number of essay writing collections.

Essay Writing Prompts

"50 Argumentative Essay Topics" (ThoughtCo)

Take a look at this list and the others ThoughtCo has curated for different kinds of essays. As the author notes, "a number of these topics are controversial and that's the point."

"401 Prompts for Argumentative Writing" ( New York Times )

This list (and the linked lists to persuasive and narrative writing prompts), besides being impressive in length, is put together by actual high school English teachers.

"SAT Sample Essay Prompts" (College Board)

If you're a student in the U.S., your classroom essay prompts are likely modeled on the prompts in U.S. college entrance exams. Take a look at these official examples from the SAT.

"Popular College Application Essay Topics" (Princeton Review)

This page from the Princeton Review dissects recent Common Application essay topics and discusses strategies for answering them.

Example Student Essays

"501 Writing Prompts" (DePaul Univ.)

This nearly 200-page packet, compiled by the LearningExpress Skill Builder in Focus Writing Team, is stuffed with writing prompts, example essays, and commentary.

"Topics in English" (Kibin)

Kibin is a for-pay essay help website, but its example essays (organized by topic) are available for free. You'll find essays on everything from  A Christmas Carol  to perseverance.

"Student Writing Models" (Thoughtful Learning)

Thoughtful Learning, a website that offers a variety of teaching materials, provides sample student essays on various topics and organizes them by grade level.

"Five-Paragraph Essay" (ThoughtCo)

In this blog post by a former professor of English and rhetoric, ThoughtCo brings together examples of five-paragraph essays and commentary on the form.

The Best Essay Writing Collections

The Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates (Amazon)

This collection of American essays spanning the twentieth century was compiled by award winning author and Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates.

The Best American Essays 2017 by Leslie Jamison (Amazon)

Leslie Jamison, the celebrated author of essay collection  The Empathy Exams , collects recent, high-profile essays into a single volume.

The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (Amazon)

Documentary writer Phillip Lopate curates this historical overview of the personal essay's development, from the classical era to the present.

The White Album by Joan Didion (Amazon)

This seminal essay collection was authored by one of the most acclaimed personal essayists of all time, American journalist Joan Didion.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Amazon)

Read this famous essay collection by David Foster Wallace, who is known for his experimentation with the essay form. He pushed the boundaries of personal essay, reportage, and political polemic.

"50 Successful Harvard Application Essays" (Staff of the The Harvard Crimson )

If you're looking for examples of exceptional college application essays, this volume from Harvard's daily student newspaper is one of the best collections on the market.

Are you an instructor looking for the best resources for teaching essay writing? This section contains resources for developing in-class activities and student homework assignments. You'll find content from both well-known university writing centers and online writing labs.

Essay Writing Classroom Activities for Students

"In-class Writing Exercises" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page lists exercises related to brainstorming, organizing, drafting, and revising. It also contains suggestions for how to implement the suggested exercises.

"Teaching with Writing" (Univ. of Minnesota Center for Writing)

Instructions and encouragement for using "freewriting," one-minute papers, logbooks, and other write-to-learn activities in the classroom can be found here.

"Writing Worksheets" (Berkeley Student Learning Center)

Berkeley offers this bank of writing worksheets to use in class. They are nested under headings for "Prewriting," "Revision," "Research Papers" and more.

"Using Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism" (DePaul University)

Use these activities and worksheets from DePaul's Teaching Commons when instructing students on proper academic citation practices.

Essay Writing Homework Activities for Students

"Grammar and Punctuation Exercises" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

These five interactive online activities allow students to practice editing and proofreading. They'll hone their skills in correcting comma splices and run-ons, identifying fragments, using correct pronoun agreement, and comma usage.

"Student Interactives" (Read Write Think)

Read Write Think hosts interactive tools, games, and videos for developing writing skills. They can practice organizing and summarizing, writing poetry, and developing lines of inquiry and analysis.

This free website offers writing and grammar activities for all grade levels. The lessons are designed to be used both for large classes and smaller groups.

"Writing Activities and Lessons for Every Grade" (Education World)

Education World's page on writing activities and lessons links you to more free, online resources for learning how to "W.R.I.T.E.": write, revise, inform, think, and edit.

• PDFs for all 136 Lit Terms we cover
• Downloads of 1927 LitCharts Lit Guides
• Teacher Editions for every Lit Guide
• Explanations and citation info for 40,619 quotes across 1927 books
• Downloadable (PDF) line-by-line translations of every Shakespeare play

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How to Publish an Anthology

There are several reasons why writers and publishers consider anthologies. Writing and publishing an anthology offers numerous benefits to authors, various institutions, and publishing houses alike. Writers enjoy increased visibility and valuable experience, while organizations benefit from heightened awareness and additional funding. Publishers, on the other hand, profit financially and have the chance to discover emerging talent. 

These are just part of the reasons why many emphasize the importance of collaboration in book publishing. But those looking into how to create an anthology should also consider the reduced workload by involving other contributing writers and take advantage of their communities in combined marketing efforts. 

This write-up goes over:

What is an anthology, why are anthologies popular, tips for promoting an anthology, how to promote your anthology with publishdrive , anthology royalty splitting: how does it work.

Before looking into how to write an anthology, anthology publishers, and anthology examples, we should go over the definition of an anthology. 

An anthology is a collection of literary works, such as poems, short stories, or essays, often selected based on a specific genre, theme, or period and compiled into a single volume. There are two main ways on how to write an anthology:

• By writing an anthology collection with your own essays, short stories, or poems.
• By writing a multi-author anthology: writers with similar stories or themes come together to publish an accessible volume for the modern reader.

With the anthology's meaning established, you should also know why they are so popular among authors.

This type of compilation not only celebrates creativity and expression but also serves as a valuable resource for readers and writers.

Short texts fit well into our 21st-century reading habits, where readers get thought-provoking endings fast.

What is the trend in publishing short story collections?

How many stories are in an anthology? It depends entirely on the editor. 

Literary fiction genres like science fiction, mystery fiction, and horror offer the ideal setup for short-story collections. These stories do not necessarily need a long build-up, just a swift ending with a kick. Anthologies within these genres continue to perform well with audiences.

Relatively newcomers to anthologies are Fantasy and Romance collections and their lovechild Paranormal Romance anthologies.

With the time and effort parents and educators put into getting young people to love reading, no wonder YA anthologies are the new up-and-comers. Don't forget them when you are reviewing what's hot. They say that this is because anthologies give opportunities for diverse voices that are not readily available for teenagers in other mainstream reading platforms.

What are the benefits of publishing an anthology?

There are several advantages of publishing an anthology with other writers. Here are some:

• Produce more content with less work : Even though collecting stories from other authors, editing, and formatting them might be a lot of work, authors will be listed as both editors and authors without having to produce a novel on their own. Yes, less word count.
• Combine marketing efforts : Partnering with other authors means they will all promote the collection. This way, authors can tap into each other's audiences without much effort.
• Reach new readers : Reach a target audience that might have yet to find your particular subgenre. As many anthologies center around a broader topic, theme, or genre (like Science Fiction or Fantasy), readers with a specific taste might find your stories and realize they've discovered a new subgenre they love. And then start spreading the word into their respective circles of friends.
• Boost reputation : Popular authors can help lesser-known authors get a great introduction to the world of book publishing . They can start their next networking event by saying: "Oh, I was in a collection with that famous author who penned the saga about the winged wizard," and immediately get some interested listeners for their pitch.

When choosing to publish an anthology, you can go two ways: traditional publishing or self-publishing.

A. Traditional publishing 

When planning to publish an anthology with a traditional publisher, there are several key factors to consider:

• Finding a publisher experienced in producing anthologies will ensure a smooth and successful process, as they can guide you through the necessary steps and help you avoid potential pitfalls. 
• An eye-catching cover design is crucial in attracting readers and setting the right tone for the compilation. A skilled graphic designer will ensure your anthology stands out visually. 
• Understanding how to write an anthology involves carefully selecting and organizing the included works to create a cohesive and engaging narrative. This requires a firm editorial hand and a clear vision of the anthology's theme or purpose. 
• Crafting an evocative and memorable title for the anthology is essential in capturing the attention of potential readers and effectively conveying the essence of the collection. 

Here are some of the publishers you should check out:

1. LMBPN Publishing

LMBPN is a publishing house that started from wanting to see what if an author merged Paranormal and Science Fiction. The first book was released by Michael Anderle, CEO of LMBPN, Death Becomes Her, in 2015. By 2018, this publishing house had over 180 titles published, including Kurtherian , Oriceran , Protected by the Damned, and other fictional universes, attaining bestseller status on multiple occasions in multiple competitive genres. 

2. Scout Press Books

Scout Press is committed to discovering contemporary storytellers. They focus on publishing ambitious, conversation-starting novelists who push the boundaries of modern fiction while creating books that withstand the test of time. As a scout, it is always at the forefront, anticipating what lies ahead and what comes next.

3. Autumn House Press

Autumn House Press focuses on publishing the works of outstanding contemporary authors who have garnered a following among readers but have been overlooked by mainstream publishers. Submissions are open for a series of literary prizes . Participation requires a $30 reading fee.

4. Coffee House Press

Coffee House Press fosters new environments for artists and audiences to engage. It aims to inspire readers and enhance communities by broadening the understanding of what literature encompasses, its potential impact, and the diverse individuals it represents.

5. Four Way Books

Now in its twenty-eighth year, Four Way Books publishes collections of poetry and short fiction by both emerging and established authors. It publishes between 16 and 18 new titles yearly.

6. Two Dollar Radio

Established in 2005, Two Dollar Radio is a family-operated enterprise with the goal of revitalizing the artistic and cultural essence of the publishing sector. They aim to showcase daring works of notable literary value to create a resounding impact through each book.

B. Self-publishing

If you plan to self-publish , here are some tips for self-publishing an anthology. 

• Send out invitations to more writers than you need : An average anthology has around 20 short pieces (if you were wondering how many short stories are in an anthology ). When collecting the names and contacts of fellow writer friends, send word about the collection to at least 60. This way, you are sure to collect around 20 short stories. 
• Explain the selection process : Mention the timeline of submissions and the process of reviewal. Does a group judge the entries, or are judges explicitly invited for this occasion? Are you handling this part directly?
• Draft contracts for the selected authors : Contracts cover the issues of rights, royalties, fees or expenses, marketing, and author copies. Consider the selection of authors is set in stone only once the contracts are signed.
• Make time for delays in the schedule : As you are collaborating with a high number of writers, there are sure to be people who send their work in late. Be safe and give early deadlines to everyone so there is room for a bit of delay. 
• Provide a style guide : Most publishing houses have a style guide to make their books' writing style uniform and easily editable. Your writers may come from different English-writing traditions. So, settle on a style regarding spelling (British or American), capitalization, etc.
• Agree on the length of the stories : If you publish a collection of your own stories, they don't need to have the same length (look at Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors ), though they should be thematically connected. In a multi-author anthology, agreeing on a minimum and maximum length for the stories is ideal.
• Specify expectations of your theme or subgenre : Keeping to the announced theme would be best to avoid negative readers' reviews.
• Leave time for feedback : After you've collected all the stories, don't be afraid to give feedback to your collaborating writers. As the publisher and editor of the anthology, you want to ensure that the readers get a cohesive set of stories. If an account doesn't fit the expectations you've set, feel free to ask your writers for revisions.
• Understand editing takes time : After the initial editing and formatting processes are done, give enough time for all collaborating authors to review the book and provide feedback regarding how the whole volume feels for them. Editing takes place in stages, from text upgrading to catching the last typos before printing or distributing the book. It is essential to prepare review copies after completing the formatting stage and put them to good use. A fresh set of eyes can make a world of difference.
• Have a killer cover design : Your book isn't finished until you have a great cover design . Make one yourself, or ask a professional designer to create one. Since you're working with others, consider sharing the costs. But if you still want to create one for free, there are some tips to consider. Make sure you keep up with the best cover fonts .
• Write an inciting back cover text : The book cover catches the attention, but a good blurb goes a long way. The text may be small, but it carries a lot of significance for readers. And it sells the book. 

Book aggregators such as PublishDrive provide ebook publishing services to support authors during their self-publishing journey. Authors can publish and distribute their books worldwide while using the marketing resources offered by the platform to boost their books' visibility and success. 

Streamlined processes, such as those offered by PublishDrive, mean more time for authors to do their work without worrying about technicalities while maintaining total control over publishing and distribution.

💡Read about how to self-publish a book with PublishDrive in this article .

Smashing texts, killer cover design, and inciting back cover texts are just part of the marketing golden ratio. Keep in mind the target is reaching a wider audience, which is best achieved with a well-rounded marketing approach to maximize visibility and success. Discoverability is, in this stage, the word of the day.

Here's what you can do:

• Begin by identifying your target audience and tailoring promotional efforts accordingly. Collaborate with contributing authors, and leverage their platforms and networks to amplify the anthology's exposure. 
• Use social media and other online channels to create buzz and engage potential readers through teasers, author interviews, and exclusive content previews. There are hundreds of writing groups on different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads, to name a few). Your collaborating authors likely have hundreds of connections in other writing groups. Ensure that everyone gives a shout-out about the book.
• Consider partnering with bookstores, libraries, and literary events for in-person promotions, such as readings, signings, and panel discussions. For this, you will need author copies that you can distribute to brick-and-mortar stores. Additionally, submit the anthology for relevant awards and literary competitions to garner further recognition and credibility. 
• Don't forget to reach out to book bloggers, podcasters, and influencers for reviews and endorsements, as their testimonials can significantly influence potential readers.
• Give away a sample story before releasing the anthology. A few months before releasing the anthology, you can agree on which stories you will make available to generate buzz.
• Send out advance reader copies . Having reviews at the time of the release is the most important tool to drive sales for any book. Fortunately, as many authors have newsletter subscribers and connections, it's a lot easier to collect reviewers for an anthology than most novels. Make sure that every one of the contributing authors sends out free books to their subscribers so you can have tons of reviews on the big day.
• Set up pre-orders as soon as the title is announced. This small detail helps titles reach the bestselling lists directly on launch day.

PublishDrive has partnered with popular stores and other book promotion websites, such as Written Word Media, to offer book promotional opportunities. Besides these, the platform also has several built-in features and tools that create a perfect book network for authors and publishers. This means they can publish, distribute and advertise their books from one single platform.

The first step to tap into this book network is self-publishing your anthology with PublishDrive. Then, head to the platform’s dashboard and look for the Promotions tab. 

You can choose from Paid promotions and Advanced promotions.

Paid promotions

1. Amazon Ads

PublishDrive has an integrated marketing tool that helps authors run Amazon's Sponsored Products ads directly from the platform. This tool uses AI to pinpoint the most suitable products to target and assists in optimizing your ads with the following options:

• Automatic targeting : Amazon matches the ad with relevant keywords and products that are similar to your book.
• Manual keyword targeting: You can choose the keywords you want to target.
• Product targeting : You can target specific products to refine your campaign.
• Negative keywords: You can exclude keywords to prevent irrelevant traffic from driving up costs.

2. Drive Book Sales (partnership with Written Word Media )

Using this book marketing hub, authors can market their books on several book promotion websites, such as:

• Freebooksy , for titles that are always free or for a limited period;
• Bargain Booksy , for titles priced at $3.99 or less;
• Red Feather Romance , for titles that are free of $4.99 and below;
• NewInBooks , for recent titles published less than six months before promotion.

Prices start at $25, depending on the intended audience reach. Once you choose the most appropriate channel for your promotion, you will be redirected to Written Word Media to enter your book information. 

Advanced promotions

1. Price promotions

Lower prices are sought out by readers everywhere. If you want to run a price promotion with major retailers, all you need to do is select the title you want to discount, then provide the start and end date of the promotion and the new price. To make this work, you need to make sure your title is already distributed on the platform where you want to discount it. 

2. Review copies

You can send review copies in Apple Books and Google Play to reviewers using promotional codes. Rest assured that the copies are available for 28 days without the possibility of being forwarded or copied.

3. Featuring

You can submit your book to be featured in popular newsletters by clicking Featuring > Select a Campaign . You just need to make sure your title is already distributed in the store of choice.

4. Store-specific featuring

PublishDrive authors can access store specific featuring based on certain criteria. All you need to do is subscribe to our newsletter and look for emails from our PublishDrive merchandiser, Fruzina Sugar, in your inbox.

5. Social media featuring

PublishDrive is happy to share authors’ success stories with an increasing community of writers and publishers on social media channels.

Success in self-publishing needs keeping up with trends, implementing strong marketing strategies , and frequently releasing new works. Co-authoring offers a solution to meet these demands without experiencing burnout. This is why numerous authors choose to collaborate. 

As a co-author, you can write a book or share a common universe with other writers. The growing popularity of anthologies and box sets has led to an increasing demand for royalty management software tailored for publishers, ensuring smooth and efficient collaboration among authors.

Meet Abacus

Abacus is a cloud-based royalty management tool that allows both indie authors and publishers to manage their publishing royalties and related book-selling finance. Dealing with contributors participating in the book project is no longer a stressful business but a transparent data-sharing collaboration that leaves all parties on the best terms.

Here is how it works:

• Import files : use the drag-and-drop function to import your Prior Months' Royalties Report. Once the import based on sales is ready, select the titles and months you want to include in the royalty report. 
• Add contributors : allocate contributors to the title. To include a new contributor, select the drop-down field labeled Assign contributor to this title . Insert their name, royalty percentage, email address, and role (author, editor, or illustrator).
• Preview relevant details : preview your author royalty report before proceeding to the import summary.
• Review the import summary : in this section, you will see a summary of the data for books sold during a specific timeframe. If all the details appear accurate, click Finish . If adjustments to your royalty report are necessary, click Previous Step. After completing the import process, you can extend invitations to contributors and access reports on the payment division.

💡Read everything about royalty splitting in this article .

Why Abacus? 

Simply put, Abacus is a stress-free, streamlined royalties management system.

• Add any number of team members for each title and calculate co-author royalties for print-on-demand, ebooks, and audiobooks. 
• Calculate and divide royalties earned from all major retailers such as Amazon KDP, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. 
• Produce comprehensive sales reports for all team members. Note that contributors can only view their portion of the royalties. 
• Monitor the payment status of your co-authors or contributors in the Payments section. 
• Maintain open communication using the integrated message board by going to My Shared Titles or Titles Shared With Me > selecting the desired title > clicking See Report and scrolling to the bottom of the page. 
• Update contributor information after the initial import process and add end dates to team contracts.

⚡ See our case study on how Abacus helped bestselling authors with their royalty-splitting process.

So, why wait?

​​Publishing an anthology can be an incredibly rewarding experience that brings together the talents of multiple authors and offers a diverse collection of stories for readers to enjoy. 

Authors can navigate the challenges of creating a successful anthology with careful planning, collaboration, and attention to detail. 

One crucial aspect to consider is managing and splitting royalties among the contributors. Fortunately, there is Abacus, a royalty management system that alleviates this stress, allowing authors to focus on their creative work while ensuring fair compensation for all involved. 

By leveraging these tools and the tips and guidelines mentioned throughout the article, authors can make the most of their anthology-publishing journey and create a memorable and successful collection. 

Try PublishDrive Free

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Publishing a short story collection or a book of essays is a subject that attracts some conflicting advice.

On one hand, there are those who are immediately dismissive, saying many publishers don’t publish short stories at all (true), or short stories don’t sell (often true), or publishers will only buy a collection of stories from a well-known author (not exactly untrue).

On the other hand, there clearly are collections of short stories and books of essays being published and sold every year, and you can name some of them because they’ve been a tremendous success. So, it’s not like they’re imaginary or something.

You’re not being gaslit, it’s just that publishing a collection of short stories or essays is not all that straightforward. It’s not like publishing a full-length book – which is hard, but at least the route is clearer.

Muddying the water is that from time to time there’s an article saying ‘short stories are dead and over, no publisher wants to buy them’ or, alternatively, ‘short stories are enjoying a revival, as proof here are some famous writers who have published successful collections’.

It’s difficult to get a straight answer, because neither article is wrong – not even when they confuse you by listing bestselling collections while explaining how the form makes no money and is near extinction.

Do publishers buy collections of stories or essays?

Most publishers want full-length fiction and non-fiction. They buy collections of short stories or books of essays when, for good reason, they want the author on their list. Such a reason might be the rare occasions that the author or their short story or essay goes viral. For example, ‘Cat Person’ by Kate Roupenian. (You knew I was going to use that as an example, didn’t you, because it’s the only genuinely viral short story, and it went viral twice.)

Famously, Kate Roupenian got a two-book deal for a collection of short stories and a novel. In the US, the advance was seven figures, and in the UK, six figures. However, please note that it’s likely the vast majority of the reported advance, on both sides of the pond, was for the novel.

This is pretty standard when publishers buy a collection of short stories or a book of essays: they’ll buy the collection as part of a deal where the other book(s) are full-length, and only if they know they can sell the collection based on the success of one or more stories/essays already published, or on the author’s name, or their backlist sales.

Do short story collections and books of essays sell?

Books of essays or short stories may do well, but mainly when they’re written by someone with some profile, and therefore an existing audience. For example, it’s common for a columnist for one of the national newspapers to produce a collection of their columns: see Caitlin Moran’s backlist or, if you must, Jeremy Clarkson’s. Or, writers build up an audience elsewhere before publishing a book of essays – this is common among comedians and bloggers, such as Samantha Irby, who broke out as an author with her second book of essays We Are Never Meeting in Real Life .

Sometimes it’s the name and only the name: Tom Hanks’ collection of stories was clearly bought based on his enormous popularity. With the greatest respect to the nicest man in Hollywood, his stories – all featuring a typewriter – were otherwise unlikely to set the publishing world on its heels.

Do I need to be famous before I can sell my collection?

Stephen King is often trotted out as the name to beat when people want to discourage authors from trying to debut with a collection. However, Stephen King wasn’t always famous, and his path is instructive. He was publishing stories in magazines from the mid-60s. Carrie , his first published novel, came out in 1974. Night Shift , his first collection of short stories, wasn’t published until 1978.

Obviously, things have changed since Stephen King was first writing – you can put your work up on the internet and gather an audience that way, and self-publishing is much easier and cheaper now – but, if we’re using him as a model, the point is that he didn’t debut by publishing a collection of stories. He wrote and wrote and eventually placed short stories in magazines, then published a novel, then published a collection. Arguably, this is still the best model to follow in the absence of virality or fame from a place other than writing.

How should I approach publishing a short story collection or book of essays?

If you’re considering publishing your short stories or essays in a collection, have a think first. If you’d like to publish them traditionally, do you have the sort of platform that would interest a publisher? If not, can you build one up?

You could approach indie publishers who work with short stories, but it’s worth noting that if they buy a collection, they are likely to publish in an even shorter print run than a big publisher would, and neither is likely to reprint. If you did manage to sell all 3000 or so copies, the book will basically fall out of print and you should ask for your rights back.

Some people go straight to self-publishing a collection, but that’s an even harder road – all the difficulties of selling a self-published book, plus short stories aren’t a popular genre, so it will be difficult to do even as well as an indie publisher would with your work. Is that what you want? It’s fine if it is! But be aware, you’re almost certainly not going to get much money or recognition just because you jumped straight to a book of short stories rather than taking the longer route.

Get a track record first

If you want to be published traditionally and want a chance of selling a successful collection, then you need to play the long game.

Have you published any stories or essays in a magazine (print or online) or entered them into competitions ? Have you tried to build up a track record of your writing that would show existing interest in your work? Do that first. Literary agents read those magazines.

And apart from anything, if you go the other way around and publish the collection first, you can’t later place them in magazines or enter them in competitions – they’re only open to previously unpublished works. That’s important, because unless you are prolific, like Stephen King (nearly 45 stories in the 15 years before Carrie , 11 collections of stories in the decades since, 200 published stories – that kind of prolific) you may regret having already published your best ones in a collection that didn’t make many sales or get you noticed.

Maybe you’re an outlier. Maybe you can find a different way of doing things. But it’s unlikely.

All I’m really suggesting is you make a plan that builds to publishing a collection of short stories, or a book of essays, rather than putting it first on your list.

And if you want help with that plan, you might benefit from a mini consultation with me.

This post was first published on 15th August 2021.

More from the blog

• A Realistic Audience For Your Book Is Not ‘Everyone!’
• Literary Fiction & Commercial Fiction: What’s the Difference?
• The Pitch Letter & Synopsis: Essential Ingredients For Your Book Submission
• Will a Traditional Publisher Republish my Self-Published Book?
• Interpreting 3 Kinds of Rejection by Agents and Publishers

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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How to Publish Short Stories: 5 Important Steps When You’re Ready to Publish

by Sarah Gribble | 5 comments

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Most writers start out knowing next to nothing about the publishing side of the writing business. They know they want to have a writing career, but don't know where to start. Publishing seems so intimidating that it's easy to just give up and write only for yourself.

But if you're going to be a short story writer, or be any kind of published writer, you're eventually going to have to share your work with the world.

The process of publishing isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be, and you have plenty of options in order to publish your short story (or collection of stories).

In this article, I'll walk you through the process of publishing a short story so that this part of being a writer can be easy and not overwhelm you.

Traditional Publishing

The vast majority of writers have gone through the submission process to short story markets. Stephen King famously had a nail on his office wall where he impaled every rejection letter he received.

This seems daunting to a lot of new writers, but this is actually relatively easy compared to writing the story, and is a great first step in your writing career.

Here are the five steps to getting your short story traditionally published:

Step 1: Look for publications

There's a wide variety of short story markets out there, including ezines, literary magazines and literary journals (yes those still exist), and anthologies out there that take submissions.

The “professional” level of these publications varies widely, as does the pay rate.

Don’t expect to get rich off of short stories. The pay rate is often very low. But don’t ignore smaller publications because of the pay rate, either.

Some of those publications might win awards frequently, even if they don’t pay very well. And it never hurts to have your work in an award-winning publication!

Here are a few sites where you can find publications with active calls for submission:

• horrortree.com
• duotrope.com
• submittable.com
• darkmarkets.com
• letswriteashortstory.com/literary-magazines
• thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com

You can also look directly for publications.

Have a favorite magazine? They probably accept submissions. And don’t forget podcasts! I'd recommend starting with your favorites, but Clarkesworld Magazine , Nightmare Magazine , and Pseudopod (along with all their branch podcasts) are worth a look.

Take the time to investigate before you settle on that particular publication.

If you can afford to buy at least one of their past issues or anthologies, do so. What they’ve previously published are gems that can give great insight into what they like and don’t like.

If you can’t buy an issue, try to do as much research as possible and read their submission guidelines for insight.

You are researching to see if your piece seems to fit with what the story market normally publishes, but also what their acceptance rate is (that's the chances of publication with that market), what their submission periods are, and what their pay rate is.

Don’t focus all your attention on the larger, more well-known magazines. Your chances of acceptance are better elsewhere (to start) and there’s nothing wrong with the little guys. Along those same lines, paid publications are great, but don’t expect to make eight cents a word out of the gate.

Also, be careful with publications that charge submission fees. Most reputable publications will not require a reading fee, and you don't want to spend money when you can submit (or publish) for free elsewhere. 

A quick note on payments:

• Generally, $0.06 to $0.08 per word is considered a professional pay rate.
• $0.01 to $0.05 per word is considered semi-professional.
• Some publications pay a flat rate for the entire story rather than per word and some pay in contributor copies (free copies of the magazine or anthology mailed to you).

1. Start your publication search by checking to see if your  favorite magazines, podcasts, etc. are accepting submissions.

2. Do research on a publication before you decide to submit your short stories to it.

3. Don't ignore small publications because of lower pay rates.

Step 2: Prepare your submission materials.

The following may seem a bit intimidating, but it’s nothing compared to writing the story. You already did the hard part.

The most important thing to remember is this: READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!

Ninety-nine percent of publications will have specific submission guidelines they want you to follow. You need to read them. Twice. Make sure you follow them.

Some publications will reject you without reading your story if you don’t follow the instructions. And you will most definitely get rejected if you submit outside of the market's submission periods.

You’ve got a couple more things to think about before you can send that manuscript:

The Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is pretty much what it sounds like: A one- to two-sentence summary of your story (what you could get out in the time it takes to ride an elevator). You’ll also hear it called a premise , a summary, or a logline.

IMPORTANT: Not every publication or story magazine will want this. In fact, most don’t. If they don’t specifically say they want a premise, short summary, elevator pitch, etc. in the guidelines, do not send them one.

I do recommend you prepare one at this stage, though. It’ll be easier later on when you’ve forgotten the exact point of your story and you need to have a pitch.

It’s also less stressful to have one prepared before submission.

Again, follow the guidelines for the publication you’re submitting to. Some publications will have their own formatting requirements, but most will use standard manuscript format ( Shunn ).

I recommend formatting all your stories in the Shunn format as you write them. Tweak them for any specific needs later on. It’s just easier to already have it ready to go.

Don’t use tab or space to indent your paragraphs! That’s an editor’s nightmare. Use the ruler.

The Cover Letter

Ah, the dreaded cover letter. What is it, how do you write it, and what’s the point, anyway?

Cover letters are not nearly as daunting as they seem. They're not a query letter (a letter you write to agents and publishing houses to pitch books). A cover letter is just a few sentences introducing yourself and your story.

You don’t need to fill a page with several paragraphs. In fact, don’t do that!

Editors don’t want to spend more time reading your cover letter than they do reading your story, and they don’t need to know what made you want to write or how many pets you have.

Here’s what you need in a cover letter:

• Salutation [Dear Editor is normally fine if you can’t find the name of the editor in your research.]
• Story title and word count
• Optional: Elevator Pitch
• Writing credentials/previous publications
• Thanks and sign

Here's an example of one of mine, complete with an elevator pitch:

Dear Editor: [Note: use the editor's name if you know it.] Please consider my 2,300-word, previously unpublished story, “The Legend of Crimson Ivory”, for publication. [Always include the word count. These publications have limited space and that comes into consideration when they're accepting submissions.] Cash finds a legendarily sinister demo at a used record store and decides to play it despite his friends' warnings. [This elevator pitch is not always wanted. Don't include it if the publication doesn't want it.] My writing has appeared in a variety of online and print publications, most recently, UNREALIPOLITIK, Crescendo of Darkness,  and the bestselling  The  Edge: Infinite Darkness anthology. [Note for unpublished writers: just skip this paragraph.] Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely, Sarah Gribble

1. Read the submission instructions and follow them carefully.

2. Follow standard formatting if the publication doesn't have specific guidelines about formatting.

3. Keep cover letters short and simple.

Step 3: Submit!

Most short story publishers take email submissions. Some use other forms of online submissions, like forms on their site, Moksha , Hey Publisher , or Submittable . You’ll find where and how to submit your story in the publication’s guidelines.

Pay special attention to the guidelines. (I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I can’t stress this enough.)

Paste your cover letter in the body of your email. This is the standard way to submit, but make sure that’s how your chosen publication wants it.

Most likely, unless your story is a piece of flash or you’re submitting poems, you will attach your story to the email.

Make sure you take note of what kind of file the publication wants. Some are okay with a simple DOCX format, but some want an RTF. You can change how the file is saved in the SAVE AS menu.

Make sure your story is attached before sending the email! (Seems ridiculous, but I’ve sent emails without attachments several times.)

If the publication requires a “blind read,” make sure you don’t have any identifying information on the document.

Make sure you have the correct email subject line typed. (Guidelines, again.) If you don’t, it might get lost in a spam filter. If there are no specific guidelines regarding the email subject, go with: SUBMISSION — Your Story Title — Your Last Name.

Proofread your email. After you’ve done all that, take a deep breath. It’s time.

1. Make sure to read the guidelines and follow them.

2. Double-check that your manuscript is attached to the email.

Step 4: Wait

After you’ve sent off that email or pushed the submit button in an online form, what do you do?

First, make sure you record your submission somewhere. Whether it be on an online site like The Grinder , a spreadsheet, or a notebook, you need to keep track of where you send.

Now, you will wait and wait. And wait.

It’s not a quick process. Most guidelines will tell you when their expected response time is, so you should have some idea of when they’ll get back to you.

But they’re often late. So be patient. Have some understanding. They’re reading hundreds of submissions from writers and, not only weighing them against each other, but also weighing the amount of space they have in the publication. It’s not an easy job.

Submit your story to another publication if they allow simultaneous submissions. You can do this right away. I often send out the same story to a half dozen publications at once.

Trust me, you don’t want to wait months for a response only to be rejected and have to find another place to submit. You’ll never get published that way.

A quick terminology lesson:

• Simultaneous submissions allowed simply means they allow you to send your story to other places while they’re considering it.
• Multiple submissions allowed means they will take more than one story from you at once.
• Unsolicited submissions means submissions that weren't specifically sought out. Some anthologies don't take submissions from the public, but search out specific authors. If that's the case, they would then say they don't take unsolicited submissions.

The easiest way to ease the agony of waiting is to go write another story. Don’t stop with this one.

1. Send your story to multiple publications at once if they all allow simultaneous submissions.

2. Be patient as you wait for a response from the editor.

Step 5: Rejection or acceptance.

Eventually, you will hear back from the editor. If you have not within a reasonable amount of time, say six months, you can email to check-in.

Do not do this if anywhere in the submission guidelines they say not to. Often, the publication will give an estimated response time plus a time when they deem it reasonable to reach out for a status update.

If you get rejected , you will most likely receive a form letter from the editor. This is completely normal and is not a commentary on your work.

It is very rare to get a rejection letter that says why your story was rejected. Mostly, this is due to time.

Again, these editors have huge slush piles and have to send out hundreds of rejections/acceptances. They simply do not have time to make personal notes on each rejection.

You shouldn't respond to the email for any reason. Just mark it down as rejected on your submissions tracker and move on.

It hurts to be rejected, but don’t give up! Send it out again. Write another story and send that one out. Remember Stephen King's nail and use the rejections as fuel to keep going.

If you're accepted , do a happy dance, and then inform any other publications where you submitted the story that you will need to withdraw. (This is why you need to keep a record of your story submissions.)

Do this immediately. There is nothing more aggravating to an editor to sift through a slush pile for weeks and then end up hearing from an accepted author that the story was accepted elsewhere.

After an acceptance, the publisher will send you a contract informing you of the rights they are buying. Read this thoroughly, but don't take a long time before signing and sending it back.

If you have questions about the contract, you are free to ask the publisher.

Here's what you can expect to find in an average contract and what the publication is requesting to buy:

• First time worldwide digital and/or print rights (a podcast will buy audio rights). This means they're buying the right to print your story for the first time. Most contracts are for worldwide rights now since Amazon and other digital platforms are how these indie publishers are operating.
• An exclusivity clause . This is the amount of time you must wait before sending your story to other publications as a reprint, providing free copies on your website, or any other distribution. The publisher is the only entity that has the right to publish the story for this amount of time. Normally, this clause is for three months to a year.
• A grant to the publisher to use your images and/or biographical information (you provide this) for promotional purposes.
• Author's warranties , which is essentially you saying that you're the owner of the work, it's not plagiarized or libelous, and it's not public domain. This clause is the publisher making sure  they  don't get sued for something  you  did wrong.
• A reversion of rights clause that states in what circumstances the rights revert back to you . This is normally if the publisher doesn't publish the work within a set time period.
• A termination clause , which states under what circumstances the contract can be nullified.

If this sounds intimidating, I get it. Any kind of contract is a bit intimidating.

However, most publisher contracts are fairly standard and you can look up samples online, some from the publishers themselves. Podcastle, for example, has their sample contract right in their guidelines. You can take a look here .

1. You can reach out for a status update on your submission if it's been an appropriate amount of time.

2. Rejections happen. Don't give up!

3. If you're accepted, read the contract thoroughly, ask questions if you have them, but don't procrastinate with sending it back.

Self-Publishing

Self-publishing isn't just for full-length books. Short story writers can get in on the action as well. Personally, I've had short stories accepted in traditional publications and I've self-published. Don't be afraid to do both!

Here's how you should go about self-publishing a short story:

Step 1: Choose how you’re going to publish

These days, it’s fairly easy to get your work out there on your own. You have a few options when it comes to self-publishing.

Publishing is simply sharing your work, and you can choose to do that in a simple way via your blog or email list, or a more public way via Amazon/B&N/Google Play/Apple Books, etc. It’s easiest to use KDP and Draft2Digital to make sure you hit all the online markets.

Step 2: Proofread

Not everyone is a grammar whiz, and you certainly don’t need to be in order to be a writer. But you do need to try your best to make sure your story is as clean as it can be.

There are free tools out there that check for spelling, grammar, and even style issues. You can try Grammarly , ProWritingAid , Hemingway , or even Word’s native spelling and grammar check.

If you feel really in doubt about your skills, there are professional editors out there who will proof your short story.

Just do research on them before you agree to work with them.

Step 3: Design (or pay for) a cover

Normally a short story doesn’t require a professionally designed cover. If you’re really terrible at design and have some cash to burn, you can hire someone to do your cover design. The Write Practice has a preferred list of contractors here .

You can also use a free tool like Canva to design your own cover from scratch or use a pre-designed ebook cover to get you started.

Step 4: Format for publication

This is the part that causes the most frustration for people. Luckily, things have simplified lately and it’s fairly easy to format your manuscript.

First thing: make sure you don't use the tab button (or the space bar) to indent your paragraphs. Use the indent ruler to make your indents.

If you do, editors will probably need to remove those spaces and tabs when they format it in order to make sure the work is formatted properly. Tweet this

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Sarah Gribble

Sarah Gribble is the author of dozens of short stories that explore uncomfortable situations, basic fears, and the general awe and fascination of the unknown. She just released Surviving Death , her first novel, and is currently working on her next book.

Follow her on Instagram or join her email list for free scares.

Work with Sarah Gribble?

Bestselling author with over five years of coaching experience. Sarah Gribble specializes in working with Dark Fantasy, Fantasy, Horror, Speculative Fiction, and Thriller books. Sound like a good fit for you?

Sarah, what a good idea! Thank you for doing this series. First, I love the egg timer. Simple things, right? Second, I chose ‘One Story’ and started brainstorming. Yes, I have written and sold a couple of stories. Mostly, though, I write and keep them, never sending them anywhere. I hope this process will help me break that habit. Thanks again.

Submitting is my least favorite part of the whole writing process, but it’s a necessary evil! I’ve now set aside two hours once a week that is focused on submitting everything I can to wherever I can. I used to do it sporadically but have found keeping it in check like this helps with the frustration. Hope you’ll be inspired by this series to submit, submit, submit! 🙂

Hello Sarah. I have submitted a few, for payment as well as exposure. Have had acceptances both ways. I don’t plan and plot per se, I read the themes multiple times until an idea comes to mind. Then I have to write till the end or it’s gone. Dead. Never to return.

Your way tends to be how I work as well. It’s a method not always conducive to getting things done, but I often find too much planning kills my excitement for the story.

I’m taking a fiction writing class right now and for it I have to write two short stories. So i’m really glad this was posted now because I’m hoping to publish one or both of them after I finish but didn’t really know where to look or how to. Thanks for the great post!

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

• How to Develop Story Ideas Into Amazing Stories - […] Gribble shared a great way to outline fiction in a post earlier this week, but what do you do…
• How to Publish a Short Story: Get Feedback and Edit Your Final Draft - […] along week by week, by now, you have a complete first draft. Just getting started? Look back at part…
• How to Publish a Short Story: Submit Your Story - […] getting started on your journey toward short story publication? Look back at parts one, two, and three to find your…
• How to Write a Great Short Story - […] you want to learn to write and publish short stories, check out Let’s Write a Short Story, an Amazon bestselling…
• 10 Short Story Ideas for 2019 - […] Then, when you’re ready to publish your short story, check out Sarah Gribble’s awesome guide on how to publish a short…
• How to Format a Short Story Manuscript for Submission: a Checklist - […] of standard formatting, get your copy of Let’s Write a Short Story! a guide for writing and submitting short stories to…
• 5 Steps to Write a Short Story - […] over think it. Just do it. It will be hard to let go of your short story, but you…
• Guest Post: How to Submit a Short Story for Publication: The Complete 10-Step Process | The Horror Tree - […] [NOTE: This is a shortened version of an article that appears on The Write Practice’s blog. For the full…
• 10 Writing Jobs You Can Do for a Living - […] by immersing yourself in short stories. Learning to write them will teach you the business and how to interact…
• 10 Writing Jobs You Can Do to Write for a Living – Books, Literature & Writing - […] by immersing yourself in short stories. Learning to write them will teach you the business and how to interact…
• How to Develop Story Ideas Into Amazing Stories – My Blog - […] Gribble shared a great way to outline fiction, but what do you do in the space between “I noticed…
• How to Sell Short Stories for Money and Have More Fun Doing It - […] Not sure how to submit a short story to a literary magazine? Check out our complete guide, from writing…

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Writing a poetry book requires courage, stamina, and a lot of patience with yourself. The poetry book ranks at the top of many poets’ to-do lists, but getting a manuscript in front of poetry book publishers takes years of writing and planning.

This article covers the essentials of getting new poetry books into print, covering both the writing and publishing process for contemporary poets. Let’s get into it: How do you write a poetry book?

How to Write a Poetry Book: Contents

How Many Poems in a Poetry Book?

What is a poetry chapbook, should i publish a chapbook or a full-length poetry collection, do modern poetry books follow a theme, how do you order the poems when writing a poetry book, how should i format my poetry manuscript, i’ve finished writing a poetry book. how do i publish it, what do poetry book publishers look for in manuscripts, checklist: how to publish a poetry book, who are some poetry book publishers i can submit to, do i need an agent to publish my poetry book, what can you tell me about self-publishing a poetry book, a final note on how to publish a poetry book: be patient.

Most poetry book publishers abide by the following definition: a poetry book is any collection of poems longer than 48 pages. There’s no standard for how many poems go into a collection; it’s much more important that the collection feels “finished” to the poet.

Poetry book publishers often define a poetry book as any collection of poems longer than 48 pages.

With that said, feel free to experiment with length and content while writing a poetry book. You could, theoretically, publish a book of 3 16-page poems, or something similarly eccentric!

A poetry chapbook—in contrast to modern poetry books—is a collection of poems under 48 pages in length. Because of this page restraint, poetry chapbooks are often thematic and dwell upon a small group of topics; they are rarely narrative in nature. Everything we discuss about how to write a poetry book applies to chapbooks as well.

A poetry chapbook—in contrast to modern poetry books—is a collection of poems under 48 pages in length.

Often, a poet will publish a chapbook before they publish a full length collection (though they don’t have to). In the publishing world, a chapbook serves as a “sample” of a poet’s potential. If the chapbook is well-received, then that poet is more likely to publish a full-length collection in the future. The poet might also publish poems in the full-length collection that were first featured in their chapbook.

Often, a poet will publish a chapbook before they publish a full length collection.

Instead of writing a poetry book, most modern poets begin their publishing journey with a chapbook. Melissa Lozada-Oliva and Olivia Gatwood both published chapbooks through Button Poetry, which gave both poets an opportunity to tour and sell those books across the U.S. As a result, Gatwood has a new full-length collection , and MLO published a novel in verse .

In other words, how do you approach crafting a poetry manuscript? This is probably the trickiest part about assembling a collection of poetry. Like much of creative writing, there’s no formula for how to write a poetry book.

Many new poetry books do follow a theme . Collections about love, death, grief, and oppression certainly populate the poetry shelves of bookstores. However, a theme is only one way of connecting poems together. A poetry collection doesn’t need to be about something; the poems just need some sort of connecting thread.

A poetry collection doesn’t need to be about something; the poems just need some sort of connecting thread.

For example, a collection can be centered around poetry form . Every poem in Terrance Hayes’ collection American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin is, as you can guess, an American Sonnet. Hayes’ poems range from the political to the romantic, but all of them are united in form and in motive.

Poetry can also tell a story. Anne Carson’s lyrical poems in Autobiography of Red tell the story of Geryon, a monster of Greek myth re-imagined as the protagonist of a queer Bildungsroman. Carson’s poems are haunting, lucid, and wonderfully absurd, pushing the boundaries of what a poetry collection can accomplish. Ilya Kaminsky does something similar in Deaf Republic , a poetry collection about a fictional town under occupation. Kaminsky’s collection is at once a celebration of humankind’s resilience and a stark warning against totalitarianism, with each poem stacked off each other like cards in a deck.

Likewise, Danez Smith’s collection Don’t Call Us Dead centers around the theme of kaleidoscopic identities, and the collection begins in story. The first third of the book consists of poems searching for a “Heaven for black boys”—a space of respite, a land “that loves [its people] back.” After this first section, the rest of the poems examine Smith’s other identities, uncovering the experience of being black, HIV-positive, and genderqueer.

And, yes, many modern poetry books do follow a theme. The poems of a collection are often united by topic. Louise Gluck’s collection Wild Iris dwells on nature, existence, and the cycle of life; Richard Siken’s collection Crush tells heartfelt stories about queer desire and loss. Recently, I read sam sax’s new collection  Pig ,  a collection of poems that are thematically, metaphorically, or quite literally concerned with pigs. (It’s phenomenal.)

Many poets center their collections on identity and personal experience, and through a combination of wit, authenticity, and the building blocks of poetry , your collection will certainly achieve the same.

Most new poetry books don’t follow a linear narrative structure, so ordering the poems in a collection can prove challenging.

When thinking about the composition of a poetry book, remember the Five E’s:

• Enmeshment: Do the poems feel related to each other? Can you explain why one poem follows or precedes another?
• Evenness: Do the poems feel evenly spread out? Or does one part of the manuscript feel “better written” than another part?
• Evolution: Does the subject matter change and grow overtime? Does the speaker come to new revelations? Or do ideas merely repeat themselves in parallel ways?
• Experience: Do these poems offer new experiences for the reader? Will the reader’s understanding of the world be challenged, enriched, or improved?
• Experimentation: Do these poems play with words, forms, and structures? Do they seek new and inventive uses of language?

The order of poems in a modern poetry book should accomplish these five tasks. If you feel that yours does, you’re ready to start formatting and submitting your manuscript! For more on how to write a poetry book, take a look at Caitlin Scarano’s course Putting It All Together . 

If you’ve finished writing a poetry book, this is your next step. Manuscript formatting is an essential part of learning how to write a poetry book. Take a look at our article on poetry manuscript formatting below. Additionally, you can download a pre-edited poetry manuscript at our resources page.

https://writers.com/poetry-manuscript-format

Just like learning how to write a poetry book, we’ll break down learning how to publish a poetry book into a few different facets. First, it’s important to know a bit about the world of poetry book publishers.

You know how people joke about poets not making any money? It stings a little, but it’s true—publishers do not have a whole lot of money for poets. Most new poetry books are published by independent presses, which have a small budget for acquiring new works. Poetry books have a smaller readership than fiction and nonfiction titles, so for a press to accept a poetry manuscript, that manuscript needs to have strong appeal towards the publisher’s readership.

If you’re eyeing an indie press, take a look at the previous titles they’ve published, as this can help gauge their interests in poetry, their diet for experimentation, and what their readership expects from the press.

Poets have two primary methods of publishing their poetry books:

• Contests: Poetry book publishers will often run annual contests. The contest is often helmed by a well-regarded poet who judges the finalists and selects one (sometimes more) collection to be published. The winner of this contest typically wins a small award, rarely more than $1,000. 
• Open reading periods: Publishers routinely have periods where they accept new manuscripts. These periods are judged by the members of the publishing house themselves, and the publishers might accept 1 manuscript, 10, or none at all—it all depends on what they’re looking for. 

Note that most contests, as well as many open reading periods, require the poet to pay a reader’s fee or contest entry fee. These fees are typically between $15-$30. 

Do poets ever get a payday? Of course—just don’t expect six-figure book deals. The only publishers who can afford expensive book titles are the Big 5 (Penguin, MacMillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster). These publishers will only acquire poetry books from well-known poets, so unless you’re the U.S. Poet Laureate or a social media mogul , you won’t have much luck with these companies.

Nonetheless, building an audience for yourself as a poet and working with the right publisher will yield successful book launches, which are a vital part of sustaining your career as an author. But what are publishers looking for?

Indie book publishers don’t have much money to risk, so they’re likely to publish titles that are easy for the company to market. As a result, book publishers tend to carve certain niches in the poetry world.

How do you learn about a publisher’s marketing base? Well, you can’t, really. But you can make inferences based on the titles you read and the book publisher’s digital presence.

For example, Graywolf Press is known for publishing experimental, experiential poetry. Many of its titles are tinged with social activism, and it has the readership to match this interest: its poetic ranks include slam poets, political activists, and educators, as well as plenty of poets with degrees in English. Note the press’ mission statement : to produce “works of literature [that] nourish the spirit” from “underrepresented and diverse voices.” This tells you everything about the quality of work Graywolf expects and the voice they tend to publish; if you think you meet these expectations, you might want to submit to them!

Academic presses, which we’ll include as a subgroup of indie publishers, tend to attract academic poets. Thus, they expect a high level of attention and rigor towards the more scholarly facets of poetry: form, vocabulary, etc. Take a look at some recent publications by Yale University Press . The titles and subject matter of their poetry books tend to be erudite and didactic, and many of the names in their Younger Poets series have become celebrated in the poetry community.

Before you submit your manuscript to poetry book publishers, try to tick all of these boxes:

Here are yes or no questions that help you know if your poetry book is ready to submit to publishers or contests:

• Are you confident in the manuscript? (See: The 5 E’s)
• Have you bought and read at least 1 poetry book from this publisher?
• Some considerations: Subject matter, tone of voice, vocabulary
• Does your manuscript meet the publisher’s expectations? (These are usually included in the contest details).
• Is your manuscript properly formatted? The publisher may reject your work if it’s rife with formatting errors.

One thing we didn’t include on this checklist is the need for a social media following. Most modern poetry book competitions are judged blindly, meaning the manuscript reviewers choose a title without looking at the poet’s name. If you’re considering pitching a poetry book to an agent (which we discuss in a bit), having a following can help support your chances of getting published, since there’s a better chance that your book will be commercially successful.

Rather than pore through the many poetry book publishers currently accepting titles, it will be much easier to send you towards directories that know way more than we do.

Directories for chapbook and manuscript contests:

Poets & Writers

Ardor Lit Mag

Submittable

Directories for publishers seeking manuscripts:

Publishers Archive

Community of Literary Magazines and Presses

TCK Publishing

Directories for poetry agents:

Poets & Writers  

Directory of Literary Agents (requires sign-up)

Miscellaneous :

The John Fox

The short answer is no. Few literary agents represent poets because, again, there’s little money in poetry. As a result, the poet is often their own representative, which is why many poets get their start by submitting to chapbook and manuscript contests.

The short answer is no. In fact, few literary agents represent poets.

Of course, poetry agents do exist. However, like book publishers, agents are wary of signing with new poets, unless that poet can vouch for their future literary success (previous publications, social media following, etc.). If you want to publish with the Big 5, or even with some independent publishers like Graywolf, an agent is often necessary.

Recruiting an agent has its own requirements. Reader’s Digest breaks it down pretty well at this article , but in short, you likely need to submit a query letter to the agent. This is your time to sell yourself as a writer. Lead with your best foot forward, and if an agent is looking to acquire new talent, they may just acquire you.

Self-publishing is an optional route for those learning how to publish a poetry book. Companies like Lulu , Kindle Direct Publishing , and Ingram Spark have carved a niche in the book publishing industry, allowing many poets to circumvent the traditional publishing space and put their own words in print.

Take a look at our article on self-publishing with Amazon below.

https://writers.com/self-publishing-on-amazon-pros-and-cons

In short, self-publishing is a viable option, but if you want it to be fiscally successful, you need a healthy mix of marketing savvy, business acumen, and patience.

To be frank: it is ridiculously hard for poets to get their poetry books published. There are thousands of poets with incredibly well-written manuscripts, and very few publishers able to accept those manuscripts. To give you an example: In 2023, Scribner held an open reading period, where poets could submit their manuscripts for free to the press. Submissions were capped at 300 entries. The submission window closed in under 3 minutes. 

Read that again: 300 poets submitted to Scribner in under 3 minutes. Thousands more were trying to get their manuscripts in when the window closed.  That is how scarce the publishing opportunities are, versus how many poets have collections they’re ready to see in print. 

I recently attended the AWP conference in Kansas City, and I went to a panel on 4 debut poets’ experiences publishing their first collections. These poets, each of whom had celebrated collections and connections to the literary world, struggled for years, if not decades, to get their first collections in print. And these are poets who received their MFAs or Ph.Ds in poetry! 

This isn’t to say that your collection is destined to flounder. Rather, it’s to encourage you to be patient and be enterprising. Submit to as many contests and open reading periods as your time and budget allow; in the meantime, work on publishing your poems in journals , and build an audience for yourself as a poet. Enmesh yourself in the community of poets—you might even find new publication opportunities this way. And, don’t be elitist about where you publish. It is much more important to publish with a press that cares for your work and wants to see it be successful in the world, rather than reserve your book for a publisher that might have a big name attached to it. We’re not in this for the money or the fame, we’re in it for the love of the craft. 

The poetry book is just one marker of many in our careers as poets, and while the journey to publication might be frustrating, it will happen with a mix of diligence, grace, and persistence. You got this!

Learn How to Write a Poetry Book at Writers.com!

Whether you need help writing a poetry book or you’re ready to get it published, Writers.com has the resources to make it happen. Take a look at our upcoming poetry courses , and join our Facebook group for community news and feedback.

Sean Glatch

11 comments.

This seems to be about self-publishing. Is it? Do you cover anything about getting work into print, so that builds into a chapbook or book?

Thank you for writing, Laura! Here’s an article on places to submit individual poems: https://writers.com/best-places-submit-poetry-online . The text above does discuss having a poetry book conventionally published, as well.

Any tips on marketing a self-published Amazon ebook for free apart from social media? I have got my book Embracing Life by Shreya Ghosh published but don’t know how to promote it for free apart from on my social media.

[…] where to start? Here’s a little how-to guide, and some ideas where to submit your manuscript:How to publish a poetry bookWhere to submit the manuscriptContest deadlines – calendar 2021The book […]

So I’m wondering – if you publish your own book, is it acceptable etiquete to publish your poems online and build up a base of readers beforehand? Or does that violate the guidelines of this article, where you should never go public with your work?

Also, if you publish independently, do you have intellectual rights to your work? Do publishers generally retain intellectual rights?

Not only is that acceptable, it’s encouraged! Publishing in literary journals can accomplish two things. 1) It helps you build a reader base, connecting you with other poets and admirers of the form. 2) It gives you a space to promote your book after it’s published. Some literary journals will do interviews with their published poets when a poet has a book come out; even if they don’t do this, you might get journals to tweet about your book.

In short, do everything you can to build a readership, including publishing. Also try to have some form of a social media presence, if you can. And be sure to thank those literary journals in the acknowledgments section!

In general, self-published authors retain intellectual property rights over their work, though be aware that you still forfeit certain rights depending on the publisher. If you self-publish through Amazon, for example, and you get an ISBN for your book, you will not be allowed to remove the book from their marketplace or database, you can only prevent people from buying new copies.

With mainstream publishers, the share of intellectual property rights is determined by the contract you sign with them.

I hope this answers your questions. Best of luck publishing your poetry book!

Warmest, Sean Glatch

I have been writing poetry for a good number of years now, with greater than 99% of them being of a spiritual content. I have a list of about 80 people that I share my poems with, who in turn, have their circle of friends that they share with. I have been encouraged to publish my poems but I must admit, although I have toyed with the idea, figuring out how to do this has become quite overwhelming. Any advice would be appreciated. I have no clue as to what to do!!

Did you ever get a reply?

I forgot to ask; Is it recommended to have other poets critique my work to get a feel as to whether it even merits publishing? Thanks

Get into or form a Writing Group. There is no better criticism than other writers you each respect. However, there must be some rules you all follow. Sincere praise of another’s writing is desired, insincere praise is not. Grammatical correction is desired absolutely if the critic understands grammatical usage. (Hint, use Grammarly: an app that is excellent in its suggestions, but it does not always understand your particular usage. It would be nice for someone to develop a poetical grammar application that understands the nuances of all the poetical forms.)

However, you must belong to and share your writing with sincerity–no matter what form or literary type you or the other members of your group choose. Poetry is an intricate part of our learning experience and therefore has a strong influence on the form your writing will take. For example, do you remember the nursery rhymes you heard as a baby? They helped form your perceptions of the story, format, and insight that is the basis for literature.

What poets need is a Poetry Marketing Group. Successful marketing is very hard for a writer or any other entrepreneur to do for their own work. It is much easier to market other’s work than your own work. I have an MBA in marketing and have been published by a traditional business publisher, a self-publisher, and have been an industrial publisher, but even I feel uncomfortable marketing my own work. I think contracts could be developed so all involved make money (authors and marketers). Your comments?

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Constable has acquired The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheest , a collection of 30 essays by the likes of J K Rowling and SNP MP Joanna Cherry, edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter.

Andreas Campomar, non-fiction publisher, acquired UK & Commonwealth rights from Rory Scarfe at The Blair Partnership. Publication is scheduled for 30th May in hardback and e-book, and 6th June for audiobook.

The publisher says: “Through a collection of over 30 essays and photographs, some of the women involved tell the story of the five-year campaign to protect women’s sex-based rights. Author J K Rowling explains why she used her global reach to stand up for women. Leading SNP MP Joanna Cherry writes of how she risked her political career for her beliefs.

“Ash Regan MSP recounts what it was like to become the first government minister to resign on a question of principle since the SNP came to power in 2007. Former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss charts how changes in prison policy in Scotland led to the controversy over Isla Bryson. Survivors of male violence who MSPs refused to meet are given the voice they were denied at Holyrood.”

Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn said: “This book has been over a year in the making. It is a first draft of the history of five years of women’s campaigning in Scotland to defend sex-based rights, up to the point of Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation in February 2023, told by some of the women who raised their voices. We are especially proud that it includes such a range of contributions, from the grassroots to one of the most famous women in the world. It has also been developed with an eye to discussions we knew would take place this summer around the 25th anniversary of the Scottish Parliament. Recent events only emphasise its relevance."

Campomar said: “It takes self-belief and courage to champion a cause, especially one as divisive as women’s sex-based rights. These women risked their jobs and reputations, not to say their friendships and family ties, to speak out. The contributors in this book show how a climate was created, one in which true political change could occur. These are the women who wouldn’t stay silent.”  

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Availability of Funds and Collection of Checks (Regulation CC) Threshold Adjustments

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Board) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are amending Regulation CC, which implements the Expedited Funds Availability Act (EFA Act), to adjust for inflation dollar amounts relating to availability of funds. In 2019, the Board and the CFPB finalized a rule that formally set a methodology for inflation adjustments which occur every five years.

May 13, 2024

As a result of the 21.8 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers between July 2018 and July 2023, the following thresholds are effective from July 1, 2025 for five years:

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Are We Talking Too Much About Mental Health?

Recent studies cast doubt on whether large-scale mental health interventions are making young people better. Some even suggest they can have a negative effect.

By Ellen Barry

In recent years, mental health has become a central subject in childhood and adolescence. Teenagers narrate their psychiatric diagnosis and treatment on TikTok and Instagram. School systems, alarmed by rising levels of distress and self-harm, are introducing preventive coursework in emotional self-regulation and mindfulness.

Now, some researchers warn that we are in danger of overdoing it. Mental health awareness campaigns, they argue, help some young people identify disorders that badly need treatment — but they have a negative effect on others, leading them to over-interpret their symptoms and see themselves as more troubled than they are.

The researchers point to unexpected results in trials of school-based mental health interventions in the United Kingdom and Australia: Students who underwent training in the basics of mindfulness , cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy did not emerge healthier than peers who did not participate, and some were worse off, at least for a while.

And new research from the United States shows that among young people, “self-labeling” as having depression or anxiety is associated with poor coping skills, like avoidance or rumination.

In a paper published last year , two research psychologists at the University of Oxford, Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews, coined the term “prevalence inflation” — driven by the reporting of mild or transient symptoms as mental health disorders — and suggested that awareness campaigns were contributing to it.

“It’s creating this message that teenagers are vulnerable, they’re likely to have problems, and the solution is to outsource them to a professional,” said Dr. Foulkes, a Prudence Trust Research Fellow in Oxford’s department of experimental psychology, who has written two books on mental health and adolescence.

Until high-quality research has clarified these unexpected negative effects, they argue, school systems should proceed cautiously with large-scale mental health interventions.

“It’s not that we need to go back to square one, but it’s that we need to press pause and reroute potentially,” Dr. Foulkes said. “It’s possible that something very well-intended has overshot a bit and needs to be brought back in.”

This remains a minority view among specialists in adolescent mental health, who mostly agree that the far more urgent problem is lack of access to treatment.

About 60 percent of young Americans with severe depression receive no treatment, according to Mental Health America, a nonprofit research group. In crisis, desperate families fall back on emergency rooms, where teens often remain for days before a psychiatric bed opens up. There is good reason to embrace a preventive approach, teaching schoolchildren basic skills that might forestall crises later, experts say.

Dr. Foulkes said she understood that her argument runs counter to that consensus, and when she began to present it, she braced for a backlash. To her surprise, she said, many educators reached out to express quiet agreement.

“There’s definitely a fear about being the one to say it,” she said.

A deflating result

In the summer of 2022, the results of a landmark study on mindfulness training in British classrooms landed — like a lead balloon.

The trial, My Resilience in Adolescence, or MYRIAD, was ambitious, meticulous and expansive, following about 28,000 teenagers over eight years. It had been launched in a glow of optimism that the practice would pay off, improving the students’ mental health outcomes in later years.

Half of the teenagers were trained by their teachers to direct their attention to the present moment — breathing, physical sensations or everyday activities — in 10 lessons of 30 to 50 minutes apiece.

The results were disappointing . The authors reported “no support for our hypothesis” that mindfulness training would improve students’ mental health. In fact, students at highest risk for mental health problems did somewhat worse after receiving the training, the authors concluded.

But by the end of the eight-year project, “mindfulness is already embedded in a lot of schools, and there are already organizations making money from selling this program to schools,” said Dr. Foulkes, who had assisted on the study as a postdoctoral research associate. “And it’s very difficult to get the scientific message out there.”

Why, one might ask, would a mental health program do harm?

Researchers in the study speculated that the training programs “bring awareness to upsetting thoughts,” encouraging students to sit with darker feelings, but without providing solutions, especially for societal problems like racism or poverty. They also found that the students didn’t enjoy the sessions and didn’t practice at home.

Another explanation is that mindfulness training could encourage “co-rumination,” the kind of long, unresolved group discussion that churns up problems without finding solutions.

As the MYRIAD results were being analyzed, Dr. Andrews led an evaluation of Climate Schools, an Australian intervention based on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, in which students observed cartoon characters navigating mental health concerns and then answered questions about practices to improve mental health.

Here, too, he found negative effects. Students who had taken the course reported higher levels of depression and anxiety symptoms six months and 12 months later.

Co-rumination appears to be higher in girls, who tend to come into the program more distressed, as well as more attuned to their friends, he said. “It might be,” he said, “that they kind of get together and make things a little bit worse for each other.”

Dr. Andrews, a Wellcome Trust research fellow, has since joined an effort to improve Climate Schools by addressing negative effects. And he has concluded that schools should slow down until “we know the evidence base a bit more.” Sometimes, he said, “doing nothing is better than doing something.”

The awareness paradox

One problem with mental health awareness, some research suggests, is that it may not help to put a label to your symptoms.

Isaac Ahuvia, a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University, recently tested this in a study of 1,423 college students . Twenty-two percent “self-labeled” as having depression, telling researchers “I am depressed” or “I have depression,” but 39 percent met the diagnostic criteria for depression.

He found that the students who self-labeled felt that they had less control over depression and were more likely to catastrophize and less likely to respond to distress by putting their difficulties in perspective, compared with peers who had similar depression symptoms.

Jessica L. Schleider, a co-author of the self-labeling study, said this was no surprise. People who self-label “appear to be viewing depression as a biological inevitability,” she said. “People who don’t view emotions as malleable, view them as set and stuck and uncontrollable, tend to cope less well because they don’t see a point to trying.”

But Dr. Schleider, an associate professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University and the director of the university’s Lab for Scalable Mental Health, pushed back on the prevalence inflation hypothesis. She disagreed with the claim that students are overdiagnosing themselves, noting that Mr. Ahuvia’s findings suggest otherwise.

Awareness campaigns are bound to have multiple effects, helping some students and not others. And ultimately, she argued, the priority for public health should be reaching young people in the most distress.

“The urgency of the mental health crisis is so clear,” she said. “In the partnerships that I have, the emphasis is on the kids truly struggling right now who have nothing — we need to help them — more so than a possible risk for a subset of kids who aren’t really struggling.”

Maybe, she said, we need to look beyond the “universal, school-assembly-style approach,” to targeted, light-touch interventions, which research has shown can be effective at decreasing anxiety and conduct disorders, especially in younger children.

“There is a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” Dr. Schleider said. “The response can’t be ‘Forget all of it.’ It should be ‘What about this intervention was unhelpful?’”

Other researchers echoed her concern, pointing to studies that show that on average, students benefit from social and emotional learning courses.

One of the largest, a 2023 meta-analysis of 252 classroom programs in 53 countries, found that students who participated performed better academically, displayed better social skills and had lower levels of emotional distress or behavioral problems. In that context, negative effects in a handful of trials appear modest, the researchers said.

“We clearly have not figured out how to do them yet, but I can’t imagine any population-based intervention that the field got right the first time,” said Dr. Andrew J. Gerber, the president and medical director of Silver Hill Hospital and a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist.

“Really, if you think about almost everything we do in schools, we don’t have great evidence for it working,” he added. “That doesn’t mean we don’t do it. It just means that we’re constantly thinking about ways to improve it.”

‘We want everyone to have it’

These debates are taking place a long way away from classrooms, where mental health curriculums are increasingly commonplace.

Allyson Kangisser, a counselor at Woodsdale Elementary School in Wheeling, W.Va., said the focus in her school is on basic coping skills. In the early grades, students are asked, “What things can you do to take care of yourself when you’re having big feelings?”

Starting in third grade, they take on more complex material, such as watching cartoon characters to distinguish transient stress from chronic conditions like depression. “We’re not trying to have them diagnose themselves,” Ms. Kangisser said. “We are saying, what do you feel — this one? Or this one?”

At the school’s sixth annual mental health fair last month, Woodsdale students walked through a giant inflatable brain, its lobes neatly labeled. They did yoga stretches and talked about regulating their emotions. Ms. Kangisser said the event is valuable precisely because it is universal, so troubled children are not singled out.

“The mental health fair, everybody does it,” she said. “It’s not ‘You need it, and you don’t.’ We want everyone to have it, because you just never know.”

By the time the students reach college, they will have absorbed enormous amounts of information about mental health — from school, but also from social media and from one another.

Dr. Jessica Gold, chief wellness officer for the University of Tennessee system, said the college students she sees are recognizably different — more comfortable speaking about their emotions and more willing to be vulnerable. They also overuse diagnostic terms and have the self-assurance to question a psychiatrist’s judgment.

“It’s sort of a double-edged sword,” she said. “We want people to talk about this more, but we don’t want that to lead to overdiagnosis or incorrect diagnosis or overtreatment. We want it to lead to normalizing of having feelings.”

Lucy Kim, a Yale senior who has lobbied for better mental health support on campus, described the prevalence inflation hypothesis as “disheartening, dismissive and potentially dangerous,” providing another way to discount the experiences of young people.

“As a college student, I see a generation of young people around me impacted by a depth and breadth of loneliness, exhaustion and disillusionment suggestive of a malaise that goes deeper than the general vicissitudes of life,” said Ms. Kim, 23.

Overdiagnosis does happen, she said, and so does glorification of mental health disorders. But stigma and barriers to treatment remain the bigger problem. “I can confidently say I have never heard anyone respond to disclosures of depression with ‘That’s so cool, I wish I had that, too,’” she said.

Ellen Barry is a reporter covering mental health for The Times. More about Ellen Barry

Managing Anxiety and Stress

Stay balanced in the face of stress and anxiety with our collection of tools and advice..

How are you, really? This self-guided check-in will help you take stock of your emotional well-being — and learn how to make changes .

These simple and proven strategies will help you manage stress , support your mental health and find meaning in the new year.

First, bring calm and clarity into your life with these 10 tips . Next, identify what you are dealing with: Is it worry, anxiety or stress ?

Persistent depressive disorder is underdiagnosed, and many who suffer from it have never heard of it. Here is what to know .

New research suggests people tend to be lonelier in young adulthood and late life. But experts say it doesn’t have to be that way .

How much anxiety is too much? Here is how to establish whether you should see a professional about it .

AI may be to blame for our failure to make contact with alien civilisations

Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed at an astounding pace over the last few years. Some scientists are now looking towards the development of artificial superintelligence (ASI) — a form of AI that would not only surpass human intelligence but would not be bound by the learning speeds of humans.

But what if this milestone isn’t just a remarkable achievement? What if it also represents a formidable bottleneck in the development of all civilisations, one so challenging that it thwarts their long-term survival?

This idea is at the heart of a research paper I recently published in Acta Astronautica. Could AI be the universe’s “great filter” – a threshold so hard to overcome that it prevents most life from evolving into space-faring civilisations?

This is a concept that might explain why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti) has yet to detect the signatures of advanced technical civilisations elsewhere in the galaxy.

The great filter hypothesis is ultimately a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox . This questions why, in a universe vast and ancient enough to host billions of potentially habitable planets, we have not detected any signs of alien civilisations. The hypothesis suggests there are insurmountable hurdles in the evolutionary timeline of civilisations that prevent them from developing into space-faring entities.

I believe the emergence of ASI could be such a filter. AI’s rapid advancement, potentially leading to ASI, may intersect with a critical phase in a civilisation’s development – the transition from a single-planet species to a multiplanetary one.

This is where many civilisations could falter, with AI making much more rapid progress than our ability either to control it or sustainably explore and populate our Solar System.

The challenge with AI, and specifically ASI, lies in its autonomous, self-amplifying and improving nature. It possesses the potential to enhance its own capabilities at a speed that outpaces our own evolutionary timelines without AI.

The potential for something to go badly wrong is enormous, leading to the downfall of both biological and AI civilisations before they ever get the chance to become multiplanetary. For example, if nations increasingly rely on and cede power to autonomous AI systems that compete against each other, military capabilities could be used to kill and destroy on an unprecedented scale. This could potentially lead to the destruction of our entire civilisation, including the AI systems themselves.

In this scenario, I estimate the typical longevity of a technological civilisation might be less than 100 years. That’s roughly the time between being able to receive and broadcast signals between the stars (1960), and the estimated emergence of ASI (2040) on Earth. This is alarmingly short when set against the cosmic timescale of billions of years.

This estimate, when plugged into optimistic versions of the Drake equation – which attempts to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilisations in the Milky Way – suggests that, at any given time, there are only a handful of intelligent civilisations out there. Moreover, like us, their relatively modest technological activities could make them quite challenging to detect.

Wake-up call

This research is not simply a cautionary tale of potential doom. It serves as a wake-up call for humanity to establish robust regulatory frameworks to guide the development of AI, including military systems.

This is not just about preventing the malevolent use of AI on Earth; it’s also about ensuring the evolution of AI aligns with the long-term survival of our species. It suggests we need to put more resources into becoming a multiplanetary society as soon as possible – a goal that has lain dormant since the heady days of the Apollo project , but has lately been reignited by advances made by private companies.

As the historian Yuval Noah Harari noted , nothing in history has prepared us for the impact of introducing non-conscious, super-intelligent entities to our planet. Recently, the implications of autonomous AI decision-making have led to calls from prominent leaders in the field for a moratorium on the development of AI, until a responsible form of control and regulation can be introduced.

But even if every country agreed to abide by strict rules and regulation , rogue organisations will be difficult to rein in.

The integration of autonomous AI in military defence systems has to be an area of particular concern. There is already evidence that humans will voluntarily relinquish significant power to increasingly capable systems, because they can carry out useful tasks much more rapidly and effectively without human intervention. Governments are therefore reluctant to regulate in this area given the strategic advantages AI offers , as has been recently and devastatingly demonstrated in Gaza .

This means we already edge dangerously close to a precipice where autonomous weapons operate beyond ethical boundaries and sidestep international law. In such a world, surrendering power to AI systems in order to gain a tactical advantage could inadvertently set off a chain of rapidly escalating, highly destructive events. In the blink of an eye, the collective intelligence of our planet could be obliterated.

Humanity is at a crucial point in its technological trajectory. Our actions now could determine whether we become an enduring interstellar civilisation, or succumb to the challenges posed by our own creations.

Using Seti as a lens through which we can examine our future development adds a new dimension to the discussion on the future of AI. It is up to all of us to ensure that when we reach for the stars, we do so not as a cautionary tale for other civilisations, but as a beacon of hope – a species that learned to thrive alongside AI.

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In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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