The Short Of It

From Short Stories To Novels: How The Submission Process Changes

Let me count the ways

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In my beginning days on Medium, I wrote many articles about publishing short stories in literary magazines, include all the steps of the submission process. Now I’m querying my first manuscript to literary agents, and it turns out this is an entirely different game.

First impressions

The biggest difference in the process might be the most obvious: the query letter. The document where you have to pitch your project. It is a document made up of many parts, and must be refined to the best version of itself to hopefully intrigue agents into reading your manuscript and representing it.

[embed]Query Letter Checklist All the things you need to pitch a literary agentmargerybayne.medium.com

There is no such equivalent for short stories. In fact, editors at literary magazines want nothing of the sort. In the body of an email, they want a bare-bones list of information: your name, your story title, your story word count, and maybe relevant publishing history.

When thinking about the two forms, it makes sense. Literary agents can’t read every pitched novel sent their way; they need the quick and dirty to see if the general idea is the right fit before moving to the next screening test. Short stories are short. They can be read and judged on their own merits easier.

Formatting it out the window

If you’ve been in the trenches of submitting short stories, you know how meticulous literary magazine editors can be about the formatting of the stories you submit. Single space versus double space. Font choices. Indents. Page numbers. Doc versus pdf versus rtf. Include your name, or exclude your name for a blind submission. I basically had to reformat my short stories for each magazine I submitted them to.

So, of course, in finalizing my editing for my novel manuscript, I was meticulous with the editing. The idents were all correct. No random extra spaces after periods and whatnot. It’s what a good self-copyedit does.

Turns out, it doesn’t really matter with querying. Well, obviously, it does matter because you want it to be readable. But literary agents don’t have a bunch of specific parameters… because they don’t want you sending a Word document as an attachment to them at all. Rather, you copy and paste your text into a software called QueryTracker or into the body of an email… and with both of those, you lose some of the finesse of formatting.

Who well do you know yourself

Both short story submissions and query letters ask for an author bio of sorts. Short story submissions pretty much always ask for a third-person bio. (I gave a brief guide on how to write those here: The Formula For Writing The Perfect Author Bio.) Basically, the lit mag editors want it not to get to know you, but to have it on hand for potential publication.

So when part of the QueryTracker form asked me for an author bio with no further instructions, it left me scratching my head. Should it be the third person standard as per short stories, or should it have been in the more casual first person that was in my query letter itself?

(Spoiler: It’s the latter.)

The bios are not just written in different voices, but serve different purposes. Both are self-marketing in a way. But the 3rd person bio for short stories is more for the final readers. The bio for literary agents is to pitch yourself to the literary agent with things like your specialized experience that reflect on the story, writing awards or accomplishments, and any marketable platform you may have.

While similar, they are not a copy-and-paste scenario.

The short of it

While some of the soft skills of short story submissions can cross over to novel querying — such as professionalism, handling rejection, and organizing your submission records — they are vastly different processes. The specifics you are going to be to relearn (or even learn for the first time.)

Happy writing.

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